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What are the roles of biology and social factors in the development of psychological differences between girls and boys, women and men? What is the best way to understand those differences from a scientific standpoint? On September 30 and October 1, 2023, a group of leading scholars will gather at the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico to address this crucial topic from a wide range of different, sometimes clashing perspectives. The goal is to raise and answer questions of all kinds, to further in-depth dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, and to facilitate progress on all sides of the issue. Following are the participants in Sex/Gender Differences: The Big Conversation.
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"If you study the science of sex differences, social events always have a whiff of testosterone."
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"In both [Australian and Denmark], gender essentialism was associated with anti-egalitarian gender attitudes and beliefs, independently of political orientation and general acceptance of social hierarchy. In other words, gender essentialists don’t oppose gender equality simply because they are conservative or generically anti-egalitarian." (With Nick Haslam, on Skewes, Fine & Haslam, 2018, PLOS One).
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"The latest neuroscience study of sex differences to hit the popular press has inspired some familiar headlines." The Independent, for example, proclaims that: The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are 'better at map reading' (And why women are 'better at remembering a conversation')."
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"When it comes to politically loaded scientific debates, the Australian philosopher Russell Blackford got it right: ‘We need to focus on evidence and arguments, and on ordinary fairness and compassion to others, even when we disagree.’"
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"Within a week of the Queen's speech setting out British government plans for new laws to protect freedom of speech at universities, British newspapers ran a story of a 'Student investigated after saying women must have vaginas and men are stronger', as one headline put it."
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"Despite more than 25 years of anti-discrimination legislation, it remains the case that the higher up any organisational ladder you look, the fewer women you see."
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What shifting notions of sex and gender mean for affirmative action in the workplace.
"The primary problem ... is the set of social practices – economic, political, cultural, organisational, interpersonal and individual – that organises relations between people on the basis of their sex, in ways that perpetuate inequalities in material resources, power and status." |
"Right from the start, perhaps reassured by the neoliberal promise that a competitive market provides all the regulation and mechanically induced ethics that a society requires, the rhetoric of diversity management 'began to ignore civil-rights/social justice arguments … and took an economic turn', note management academics Cliff Oswick and Mike Noon."
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"Commissioner Kenneth Hayne and assisting senior counsel have pulled back the thick curtain of management-speak to reveal a disturbing culture."
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"The subject of BBC investigative journalist Hannah Barnes’s book is the Tavistock and Portman Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London. GIDS is slated for closure this year, following a tactfully damning interim report for NHS England by the distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. At the core of the clinic’s collapse is the construction of institutional ignorance."
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"Rebecca L. Davis’s magisterial new book, Fierce Desires: A new history of sex and sexuality in America, concludes with a 2023 decision by a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, to outlaw the distribution by mail of the abortion drug mifepristone....."
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What are the roles of biology and social factors in the development of psychological differences between girls and boys, women and men? What is the best way to understand those differences from a scientific standpoint? On September 30 and October 1, 2023, a group of leading scholars will gather at the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico to address this crucial topic from a wide range of different, sometimes clashing perspectives. The goal is to raise and answer questions of all kinds, to further in-depth dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, and to facilitate progress on all sides of the issue. Following are the participants in Sex/Gender Differences: The Big Conversation.
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Working Fathers, is a podcast about dads, families and work. It looks at the many different roles fathers play in contemporary Australian families and society and how policy can better recognise, value and support.
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