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Irene Miguel-Aliaga - Sex differences, diversity and equality

Although some scientists believe that nurture overrides biologically determined sex differences, the distinction between nature and nurture is not clear.
About Irene Miguel-Aliaga
"I am Professor of Genetics and Physiology at Imperial College London. I study how our internal organs change and affect us.
I am a geneticist and I run the Miguel-Aliaga Laboratory at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial. My team and I research organ plasticity: how and why organs that we commonly regard as fully-developed change in size or function, in response to environmental or internal challenges, mainly focusing on intestines and their neurons."
Sex differences are widespread
Wherever we look in animals – and these may be insects, or mammals, or humans – there are widespread sex differences that extend beyond what we may initially consider. In mammals, most of the research on sex differences has concerned reproductive systems, anatomical differences and, to some extent, differences in the brain. This is very controversial research, when people look at human male and female brains. Looking beyond those places, we find evidence for sex differences pretty much everywhere on multiple levels. For example, the kind of genes a cell expresses: whether it’s the cells in our intestinal lining, liver cells or nerve cells, they will all express different genes in males and females.
Key Points
• Sex differences include the genes a cell expresses; there are male guts and female guts.• Although some scientists believe that nurture overrides biologically determined sex differences, the distinction between nature and nurture is not clear.• Diversity in traits is usually desirable because different traits are useful in different environments.

Durba Mitra - Sexual violence and the fight for political change

Feminists have long theorised about how to consider evidence and women’s testimony as factual. The question of evidence in cases of sexual violence has been critical to feminist organising for the last 50 years.
About Durba Mitra
"I’m the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.
I am a scholar of the history of sexuality and epistemology in South Asia and the comparative colonial and post-colonial world."
Questions of evidence and testimonyFeminists have long theorised about how to consider evidence and women’s testimony as factual. In South Asia, the question of evidence in cases of sexual violence has been critical to feminist organising for the last 50 years. The rape law was passed under colonialism as part of the Indian penal code in the 1860s, and medical evidence takes precedence over a woman’s own testimony about what happened. Particularly in the context of colonial India and post-colonial South Asia, including Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, we see the rise of the question of evidence of women’s virginity in sexual violence cases, where a woman’s virginity becomes critical for the determination of whether a woman has been raped or not.
Feminists have been organising around these issues for decades. In the 1970s, the case of an extraordinarily violent gang rape goes all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court. In this case, the Mathura rape case, a girl is gang-raped by the police. The Indian Supreme Court determines that she had been so-called “habituated” to sexual intercourse. In other words, she was accustomed to sex and therefore had not, in fact, been gang-raped. From that moment, we see the galvanising of an extraordinary feminist movement which tries to transform the concept of evidence itself.
Key Points
• The history of collecting medical evidence in rape cases reveals how ideas about women’s sexual propriety are linked to ideas about sexual violence.• One of the biggest challenges of feminist mobilisation is translating critique into structural change.• Feminism offers the tools to re-imagine a more just future.

Devorah Baum - Sexual jokes and the misogynistic discourse

Many female comics are undermining misogynistic discourse simply by echoing its lines, using humour to reveal the unfunny side of sexist jokes.
About Devorah Baum
"I'm an Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton.
I research literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and religion, and I've laid a particular emphasis in recent years on feelings and their role in our lives, and on jokes. And I'm currently writing a book on marriage."
Expressing our smuttier thoughts
One of the liberating thrills of stand-up is watching someone uninhibited by social mores, because comics love nothing better than speaking about rude or censored things like shit, sex and obscenity. For Freud, the reason we joke is partly because we need somewhere to express our smuttier thoughts. We crave places where the lewd ideas we’re walking around with, consciously or not, can come out. This need, Freud believed, was as vital to us as the need for sexual discharge itself, which is an extraordinary, remarkable idea when you think about it.
In his book on jokes, Freud divides jokes into two main varieties, the innocent and the tendentious. Tendentious jokes always have a victim, and sexual jokes are of this variety. Freud defined smut as the intentional bringing into prominence of sexual acts and relations made by speech. What motivates the comedian is the desire to see what is sexual as not hidden, but exposed. For that to happen, three people are required: the teller of the joke, the object of the joke’s sexual aggressiveness and the hearer of the joke, in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.
Key Points
• According to Freud, we joke because we need to express our smuttier thoughts. Jokes are either innocent or tendentious; the latter always have a victim.• Freud says that a man who laughs at smut is laughing as though he’s the spectator of an act of sexual aggression. Similarly, a politician who denounces political correctness and makes lewd jokes, for example, appears to offer supporters a kind of libidinal• Many female comics are undermining misogynistic discourse simply by echoing its lines, using humour to reveal the unfunny side of sexist jokes.

Kate Kirkpatrick - Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

The Second Sex was written in 18 months, an incredibly short period of time, and the story of its genesis is the stuff of legend.
About Kate Kirkpatrick
"I’m the Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford.
My research focuses primarily on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and I've written a few books on Sartre and Beauvoir and Existentialism more generally."
The genesis of The Second Sex
The Second Sex was written in 18 months, an incredibly short period of time, and the story of its genesis is the stuff of legend. In one of her memoirs, she claims that she was having a conversation with Sartre; they were discussing what she should write about next, and the question of what it had meant to her to be a woman came up. One sometimes reads in the literature about Existentialism that Sartre gave Beauvoir the idea for The Second Sex, but this is far too simplistic.
In French literary studies, Existentialism is sometimes defined as a literary period rather than a philosophical one, and it includes works like Michel Leiris’ Manhood. Beauvoir read that book and thought that she’d like to write a similar one about what it means to become a woman. So, the conversation with Sartre was certainly part of the story of the genesis of The Second Sex, but Beauvoir’s wider reading was also extremely important. I like to think of The Second Sex as a work which was polygenetic, that had many different sources of inspiration, including Beauvoir’s reading, her conversations with her contemporaries, her experiences as a woman and the experiences of her friends. If we look at it in this way, it emerges as a much more complicated work.
Key Points
• The Second Sex is thought to have had many different sources of inspiration, including Beauvoir’s reading, her conversations with her contemporaries, her experiences as a woman and the experiences of her friends.• The Second Sex was published in two volumes. In the first volume, she’s interested in the questions ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘What does it mean to be feminine?’• The second volume caused a scandal. She makes the claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.

Stuart Elden - "The History of Sexuality"

The History of Sexuality was a major undertaking that Michel Foucault began, in the most obvious way, in the mid-1970s.
About Stuart Elden
"I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick.
I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory. Over the past several years, I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault."
The History of Sexuality
One of the major contributions that Foucault makes in his career is to work on the question of sexuality. Foucault was a gay man, who struggled with the question of his own sexuality at the beginning of his life, but later became much more reconciled to it and much more public about these kinds of questions.
The History of Sexuality was a major undertaking that Foucault began, in the most obvious way, in the mid-1970s. You can see elements of this in his lectures in the 1960s, but in the mid-1970s, in his Collège de France lecture courses and in some of his visiting lectures elsewhere, he says that he’s taken on a kind of project that’s like a sequel to his History of Madness, and this is The History of Sexuality.
Key Points
• The `History of Sexuality` was a major undertaking that Foucault began in the mid-1970s.• Foucault thinks that the Christian notion of the flesh shapes the beginning of the current era.• We need to take into account medicine, biology, psychology and theology if we are to understand how sexuality is organised, ordered, controlled and regulated.

Laura Kipnis - Sexual paranoia and the rise of governance feminism

University students are changing how they regard sexual culture. Many feel conflicted about sexual experiences, which they see as potentially traumatising.
About Laura Kipnis
"I’m Professor emerita at Northwestern University, where I taught film.
I would call myself a cultural critic. I mostly write about cultural politics, sexual politics, aesthetics. I’m very interested in norms and their violation, transgression, people who get in trouble. I’m also interested in taboos and people who smash norms. So I like troublemakers, I guess."
A lighthearted essay
I was asked to write an essay about campus sexual politics, and I had no idea what a minefield I was entering. I wrote this ironic, lighthearted article. The article covered the policy prohibiting professor and student romantic relationships that was enacted on my own campus.
This policy came out of the blue. I compared it to my college experience where many students slept with their teachers, and nobody seemed to suffer too much. In this light, I wrote this essay, and it became incredibly controversial in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
Key Points
• University students are changing how they regard sexual culture. Many feel conflicted about sexual experiences, which they see as potentially traumatising.• Changing attitudes and incidents surrounding alcohol are leading to “sexual paranoia” on campuses. The growing bureaucracy surrounding Title IX may also incentivise accusations and prosecutions.• This culture is due to the rise of governance feminism, which originated from the anti-pornography movement. Governance feminism is largely paternalistic.

Simon Goldhill - What the Ancient Greeks tell us about sexuality

In antiquity, the sexual object is rarely a defining characteristic: how you sleep with someone is as important as who you sleep with.
About Simon Goldhill
"I'm Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Cambridge.
My research areas are in Greek literature and culture of all periods and also in Victorian Britain, the history of sexuality and the history of culture."
Sexual interaction in Greek culture
One of the most remarkable elements in Greek culture, for so many people over the centuries, has been the picture of particularly 5th century BCE classical Athens, where the dynamics of sexual interaction between genders was simply radically other from what modern Western society and its deep roots in both Christianity and Judaism have come to expect. This concern, this surprise, is focused, in particular, on male desire for men. Consequently, Greece has become one of the ways in which Western society conceptualises its own relation to what we will now call homosexuality. I say “we will now call homosexuality” because that’s a word that’s only been around since the latter half of the 19th century and was only really in popular culture from the 1920s onwards.
It’s really important to remember that one of the fundamental distinctions that we learn by looking at other cultures is that the idea of having a sexuality – that is to say, a pathology, something that defines you according to your sexual object – is a very modern and quite culturally bound idea. One of the things we might learn from Greece is simply that. We could learn it from other places, too – and I’ll come back to why Greece is important – but we can learn from looking at other cultures that what we take to be natural or inevitable is profoundly cultural and therefore open to change.
Key Points
• Studying ancient Greece helps us rethink our understanding of desire, the body and gender.• In antiquity, the sexual object is rarely a defining characteristic: how you sleep with someone is as important as who you sleep with.• Many feminist thinkers have used Ancient Greece to explore gender.

Durba Mitra - Women's leadership, political movements and minority rights

Women’s leadership and feminist political organising have been critical to all kinds of political movements. This is particularly true in relation to minority rights.
About Durba Mitra
"I’m the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.
I am a scholar of the history of sexuality and epistemology in South Asia and the comparative colonial and post-colonial world."
Feminist political organising and minority rights
Women’s leadership and feminist political organising have been critical to all kinds of political movements. This is particularly true in relation to minority rights. In the United States, with the contemporary Movement for Black Lives, Black feminists have been essential to the way feminists have organised and the way the political movement has re-emerged with strength in 2020. Black feminists were the origins of that political movement. We can also think of the #MeToo movement and women like Tarana Burke, a Black feminist organiser and activist scholar who has done extensive work around Black women and girls and the problem of endemic sexual violence in Black communities.
In South Asia, we can see this in political movements that help us articulate a politics of citizenship for our contemporary world in the face of a rising authoritarianism. This context has emerged as a result of the rise of the BJP, a Hindu right-wing political party that has been in power since 2014 and has led to the persecution and massive amounts of violence against Muslim minorities and other minority subjects in India today. We see the rise of this extraordinary fascist imagination, of the exclusion and the extermination of many kinds of people in the South Asian landscape.
In the space of this rise of authoritarianism, feminist thinking has helped us consider how we can organise for minority rights. In contemporary India, states have created the possibility of the minoritisation and the extermination of certain kinds of people. It’s the rise of anti-Muslimness, which has become more virulent and more violent than ever, especially in the last few years.
Key Points
• Women’s leadership has been critical to political movements, particularly in relation to minority rights.• The Shaheen Bagh protests are an example of women reclaiming public space and leading a broad political movement, beyond women’s issues.• Environmentalism is tied to the rise of feminist thought.

Judy Wajcman - Gender bias in data and technology

Judy Wajcman, Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, talks to us about tackling bias in data and technology.
About Judy Wajcman
"I am the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.
My work has broadly been within the area of the sociology of technology, work and employment, and I’ve been particularly interested in how gender relations are embedded in these fields."
Programmed to think that tech is a male preserve
I’ve been working on gender and technology for many, many decades. I was originally interested in why the workforce is very gendered, why some kinds of work are seen as appropriate for women and some kinds of work are seen as appropriate for men. When I started doing this work, it was very clear that women were trained much more to be nurses and teachers, and men were trained to do technical work, engineering work, industrial work. This notion of masculinity being associated with scientific, technical, industrial work had a long history. This was transposed in the computer era so that computer programming, quite early on, became a male preserve.
By doing some historical work, I realised that this hadn’t always been the case for the early computers – those huge computers that take up a whole room that you see just after the Second World War. There were lots of women programmers in there, but they had somehow been hidden from history. Somehow, the contemporary notion was that physics, maths and computing were very much a male preserve.
I remember reading Sherry Turkle’s early work on MIT hackers, as she called them – a culture of engineers who were guys who worked all night and ordered pizza at 3am and who were very hooked on their machines. In more recent years, I’ve been interested in how it is that if you look at conferences of roboticists, people who work in artificial intelligence, and now machine learning, we find that these areas are very male-dominated.
Key Points
• In the era of early computers, just after World War Two, lots of programmers were women, but they were hidden from history.• The data that is going into a lot of the latest technologies is embedded with all kinds of bias – such as the algorithms used in recruitment.• Facial recognition technologies identify white male faces much more easily than dark-skinned female faces, because they’re trained on white faces. If the training data is biased, then the outcomes will be biased.• The notion that all social problems have a technological solution is the central idea of the Silicon Valley companies. It’s very important that we resist that kind of technological determinism.

Susan Himmelweit - Feminist economics and the true cost of gender bias

Feminist economics looks at the economy from the point of view of women's lives as much as men's lives, and it differs from mainstream economics, which tends to take men's lives as the norm.
About Susan Himmelweit 
"I'm Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Open University and the coordinator of the Policy Advisory Group of the Women's Budget Group.
I'm a feminist economist, and this means that my research is on the boundaries between the economy and the family, which is where most gender issues in economics arise."
Economics from different perspectives
Feminist economics looks at the economy from the point of view of women's lives as much as men's lives, and it differs from mainstream economics, which tends to take men's lives as the norm: if it looks at gender differences, it looks at women in the ways they are different from men. Feminist economics sort of reverses that and says both sorts of lives are equally valid ways of looking at the economy. In doing so, it’s saying that gender is a structural part of economics, that gender differences are part of the way our economy runs. Therefore, in exploring any economic issue, we have to look at where gender differences arise.
How might men and women react differently? How are they differently positioned in the economy? What, for example, does that mean for economic policy? Economic policy may arrive at the wrong results, different from what was intended, if it ignores those differences; if it just thinks about what the effect on people living a typical man's life might be; if it doesn't think about what the effect of that policy is on women or people living the sorts of lives that women lead.
Key Points
• Feminist economics asserts that both women’s and men’s viewpoints and ways of living are equally valid ways of looking at the economy and that it’s important to note where issues springing from gender differences arise.• Everybody needs to be cared for at various points in their lives, but women tend to be more conscious of the fact, and feminist economics is more conscious of it than mainstream economics.• The pandemic unduly affected women’s employment compared to men’s, because women were overwhelmingly the ones who, when state services were suspended, took on the role of care, especially for children.