is it sexist if it's based on a scientific study?

[QuestionMark99]

Hello all,

I'm doing some research on sexism/feminism and I came up with a kind of philosophical question (I'm a cis gendered male, btw, new here):

Let's say (hypothetically) that a scientific study was done on the difference in intelligence between men and women. Let's say the results showed that men are, on average, more intelligent than women. Would it then be sexist to make the claim "men are, on average, more intelligent than women" if it's based solely on this study? Would the scientists who conducted the study, in publishing the results, be sexist for publishing them?

I've always thought of sexism as an attitudea derogatory oneand not just a belief in certain differences between men and women if it's meant in or based on a scientific/objective context.

My personal opinion is that if the hypothetical study above was conducted and published and someone who had read it brought it up in a conversation (because it was relevant to the discussion), he/she would still have an obligation to be sensitive about it. It's still not an excuse to go around spouting out unflattering information just because it happen to be proved in a scientific journal. It's not a free license to say things like "men are, on average, more intelligent than women" without any concern for how that affects the listener emotionally. That's not to say I think it's sexist to bring a point like this up, just that it would be appropriate to say it in the right manner, something like:

"Now, I don't say this to be sexist, or to offend anybody, but it happens to be a proven fact that men are, on average, more intelligent than women. I only say this because it's relevant to the discussion and it's important for my point."

What do you think? Is it acceptable to bring up scientifically proven facts about certain differences between men and women (where one ends up seeming "superior" in some way to the other) if done in a respectful and polite manner?

here's the books thread

mad0nna, sounds like you were about right there. i don't claim to know much about castenada, but i have a friend who seems to follow his stuff, is he a shaman spiritualist type? she seems to post a lot of "motivational" stuff...

Thanks a million! I'll have a look at that.
A spiritualist. Oh well that'd make sense. When I met this guy I thought he was a spiritual Buddist. But later I realised he was interested in spirituality, interested in buddism.... interested in feminism. He never quite made it anywhere. too much weed but not the worst bf i ever had

OP
You dont seem to understand what sexism is -discrimination or deprivation of rights based on gender.
Stating that males are x and women are y is not sexism -discriminating against the individual based on those characteristics is.
Schoolboy error

When you say 'engagements' with feminists, do you mean arguing with feminists about why their life experiences are wrong, armed with scientific studies that say men are superior to women? Because that's never going to go well grin. <

I know. :) That's not my intention.

"future engagements" makes you sound as though you're after ammunition to go into battle with feminists, is that the case? <

I'm not after ammunition, but I am worried about being misunderstood or inadvertently offending. I'm trying to better understand what will offend and what won't.

Most responders here seem to be focused on whether such studies actually exist or what the motives behind such a study would be, which is fair, and I'm inclined to agree that such studies would be scarce and if they did exist, would probably have questionable motives behind them. The reason I'm focusing on hypotheticals is because I'm just an abstract thinker, more than most people I find, and I tend to give more weight to what seems possible "in principle" (i.e. is it possible, in principle, that a study could be conducted with thorough meticulousness and objectivity, and if so, how would I talk about it if the subject ever came up?). I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing (it tends to be a bad thing when people misunderstand what I'm trying to imply). I actually have no particular study in mind, and I'm not going to use this to go look up studies that I can use as ammo. I just tend to focus more on these abstract, "in principle", scenarios more than others. It's just the way I think.

Cisgender! I had to google that. That means you were born a man and you're fine with that. <

From what I understand, it means identifying your gender as equal to your sex. Whether you're fine with it or not, I don't know.

You dont seem to understand what sexism is -discrimination or deprivation of rights based on gender.
Stating that males are x and women are y is not sexism -discriminating against the individual based on those characteristics is. <

I always assumed sexism was an attitudesomething "inner"but from my research on feminism (which is still in its infancy) I'm getting that sexism is typically defined in terms of discriminatory effectssomething "outer"which of course can be caused by attitudes, beliefs, values, etc. but not necessarily limited to that. Which makes sense out of MyEmpireOfDirt's comment about not being a 'bad' racist.

it's easy for you to focus on hypotheticals, and theories, and principles, when in practice you aren't the one who is going to be on the receiving end of the real life experiences of prejudice and misogyny

question - but this isn't abstract thought, any more than it is philosophy.

You are actually engaging in the opposite of abstract thought, when you are incapable of grasping ideas without having to imagine a real-life situation where such a scientific test could exist.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - we all have to start somewhere - but I think you probably need to be more theoretical, not less. Try looking into the terminology we use, for starters. It'll help.

Feminism does value personal experience and thinking about real people's interactions, but it is also a political ideology.

feminism 101 - listen to women

tons of women have put time and effort here into explaining why your OP is misguided at best. you acknowledge that you know little about feminism. there are women here who know SHITLOADS about feminism (far more than i do) who are telling you about it, explaining what is important here, guiding you towards resources that will help inform your developing understanding of feminism

and you come back and say "no, you're not focusing on what i want to focus on. i don't know very much about feminism but i want to talk about THIS, because this is what is important to me". do you know how dismissive that is? do you know how much that betrays your underlying sexism? read, absorb, listen and understand why the women here are not engaging with you as you are trying to insist that they do

Yy.

OP, there's plenty of real life sexism going on - did you read the thread I linked re the sickness in pregnancy article? We don't have to hypothesise.

Also - it's simply impossible for any study like your hypothetical one to isolate itself from socialisation. Are women worse at computer skills because of some brain structure? Or because, in the uk, the social message is that messing about with computers is for boys - maybe rationalised by a "boys prefer things, girls prefer people" trope. But in some other countries, women are in the majority in IT; no doubt the social rationalisation trope for that is something about being detail-oriented...

I may be way off base here.

This:

"If you want something more general, I'm trying to understand, among feminists, what is considered sexist and what isn't. "

So, for example,

If a man shouts "get your tits out" to a girl in school uniform on the high street, that is sexist, I think we can all agree on that. We don't need a scientific study to tell us that.

Most women and girls who are feminists, are feminists because of things that they have experienced in their own lives and/or looking around the world and seeing things that other women and girls are experiencing and thinking, well that's shit I'm going to be a feminist.

Certainly there is research around the "differences" between male and female brains and many on the thread have asked the question as to why that research is just so terribly important and interesting, especially to the media.

Meanwhile there is a wealth of information out there which is much more uncomplicatedly factual - hard statistics around the position and situation for people of different sexes around the world (and races and ages and all sorts of things).

While so much of the human brain is so poorly understood, surely the starting point for people interested in sex equality issues is the research and statistics on how things actually are right now (and there is plenty to discuss around many of those stats and reports as well).

In summary. I don't really understand why you are asking this. It feels like a strange set of hypotheticals. The other posters have expressed extremely well how they, as feminists would react to your hypothetical scenarios.

Does that help at all.

Oh and PS. Most women and girls hear sexist things all the time, including feminists. Having e.g. a work colleague say "so I read in the paper that studies show men are cleverer than women" is a scenario that is easy to imagine and women and girls get statements made like that to them, albeit usually more subtly, all the time, from when they're tiny.

Everyone,

When I say that I'm an abstract thinker, I'm saying this is where I'm going wrong (at least in this discussion). I'm not asking anyone to cater to me.

OK, fair enough, so what are you going to do now?

But you don't see to be an abstract thinker?

An abstract thinker is not someone who has to imagine everything as concrete reality in order to understand it - and that's what you're doing. That's why you're struggling here, because you're hypothesising a situation that 1) doesn't exist and 2) is much less interesting to feminists than our lived experiences. At the same time, you're under the impression that an imagined reality is the same thing as a philosophical speculation, which it isn't, really. Philosophers/abstract thinkers use imagination to help them construct arguments - they don't use imagination to construct any old picture of the world and then stop there.

If this helps - an example of abstract thought (to my mind) would be to imagine patriarchy.

Concrete realities - or lived experiences - tell us how what we call patriarchy manifests itself. A big part of feminism is to learn to recognize this.

The theoretical, or abstract part, is to understand how patriarchy as a power structure functions - that is the idea that allows us to express why we think these lived experiences happen, and have the power they have.

You are not referring to facts MyEmpire
You are referring to assumptions based on gender bias.

Really?!

Shit.

D'you think anyone has invented a device such that you could search for such books?

Fuck this, I give up.

Go ahead put whatever words you want into my mouth.

Would you like help getting up onto that cross there?

people not responding to you in the way you want is difficult isn't it?

The OP referred to scientific facts not assumptions based on gender.
Maybe the Op is mistaking shite studies for scientific fact -oh wait …