Introduction

For a good century and a half, scientists, social scientists and politicians have appealed to biological difference to explain social inequality between men and women, people of African descent and Caucasians, members of different economic classes and people of different religions. In turn, a wide variety of scholars writing over a long period of time have critiqued these scientific claims, these writers claimed that women are naturally better mothers, while men are genetically predisposed to be aggressive, hasty and fickle. They may rape to pass on their genes. Women's lack of aggressive drive and native ability ensures that they will always earn less, thus guaranteeing equal pay discriminates against men.

Discussion In the 1970s, feminist social scientists proposed a theory that created two categories: sex, the supposed biological essence that underlay gender and gender the social overlay that produced two different categories of being men and women, through an ill-defined process of socialization. This theoretical approach had many virtues. It permitted the examination of differential treatment of boys and girls in school and men and women in the workplace. It opened the door to a virtual growth industry of cultural analysis examining the construction of gender ideology in the media and on the streets. But it also had a big drawback. Leaving 'sex' in the realm of scientifically verifiable fact left the feminism vulnerable to new tide of biological difference. Indeed, that new tide is very much with us (Andersen, 12-30).

For some, sex encroaches deep into the territory of social difference, while for others it is a minimal entity. If there is something that could be called 'naked sex' which is left when all gender is stripped away, to argue about for how much of gender difference it can account. If naked sex is left to biologists and biologically oriented social scientists, it would be found that the territory allotted to it is growing apace while the explanatory power of socially produced gender shrinks in proportion. In the sex versus gender model, biological sex is opposed to social sex. Nature is opposed to culture, the body becomes the recipient of culture, and gender becomes the content of culture. Worst of all, for those interested in social change, naked sex is often albeit incorrectly seen as immutable, while gender, and is often, albeit incorrectly, seen as malleable. To the extent that the sex/gender analysis of social difference reinforces our view of the material body as a natural given, our feminist debate influences the structure of other struggles. Indeed, the biological debates about race and about sex have intersected and mutually constructed one another for a good two centuries (Cobb, 1075-1080).

An alleged sex difference in the structure of a part of the brain called the corpus callosum. Scientists have argued about whether or not there is a sex difference in the corpus callosum for a more than 100 years. Some think that the (real) difference might explain sex/gender spatial ability and that the knowledge of such difference should be used to shape ...