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This post at Over­com­ing Bias caught my eye the other day: I Am Sexist

Basi­cally, Robin Han­son points out that a com­mon def­i­n­i­tion and usage of “sex­ism” — hav­ing a “belief or atti­tude that one gen­der or sex is infe­rior to, less com­pe­tent, or less valu­able than the other” is flawed. It makes sci­en­tific obser­va­tion of the dif­fer­ences between gen­ders “sex­ist” and there­fore polit­i­cally incor­rect even where such study is legit­i­mate. It also isn’t nat­u­rally applied to instances of claim­ing that one gen­der is supe­rior to another in some way. This leads to the pos­si­bly objec­tion­able result that women’s supe­rior qual­i­ties may be reported and cel­e­brated, while the report­ing of  men’s supe­rior qual­i­ties tends to be crit­i­cized as “sexist.”

But it’s easy to see where this flawed def­i­n­i­tion of sex­ism came from — the widely shared intu­ition that there is some respect in which all per­sons are equal. The def­i­n­i­tion goes astray in sug­gest­ing that some­thing like “com­pe­tence” is how we are all equal. Clearly some humans are incom­pe­tent. And no other capac­ity or abil­ity can or should ground our equal­ity. After all, we may always find new evi­dence that men and women are not alike in var­i­ous capac­i­ties and abil­i­ties. And sug­gest­ing that intel­li­gence (or ath­letic abil­ity, or typ­ing speed, etc.) is the most morally impor­tant trait would — dan­ger­ously — sug­gest that soci­ety should be ordered in an ine­gal­i­tar­ian fash­ion, along that dimen­sion only.

To make a long story very short, the best expla­na­tion of sex­ism actu­ally comes from peo­ple like Peter Singer who are inter­ested in speciesism. Speciesism holds that moral beings do not have any greater or lesser moral value sim­ply on account of their species, and that the inter­ests of all sen­tient beings must be given equal moral con­sid­er­a­tion. Yet, speciesism does not hold that we must treat all sen­tient beings in the same way because any given being’s inter­ests may be out­weighed by another’s, depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances. The inter­ests of humans will often out­weigh the inter­ests of non-human ani­mals because humans typ­i­cally have other capac­i­ties (mem­ory, life plan­ning, close rela­tion­ships, lan­guage) that make their inter­ests in cer­tain out­comes stronger or weight­ier than those of the non-human animals.

Sex­ism can and should be explained in much the same way. Humans do not have any greater or lesser moral value sim­ply on account of their gen­der, and the inter­ests of all gen­ders must be given moral con­sid­er­a­tion. But there is noth­ing incom­pat­i­ble between this and rec­og­niz­ing the pos­si­ble or actual dif­fer­ences between genders.

Here’s an exam­ple that the pro­fes­sor I TA for often uses: imag­ine you are in charge of hir­ing fire­fight­ers, and both men and women have applied. Men are, in gen­eral, are stronger than women, and this gives you a rea­son to weight their inter­est in being fire­fight­ers more heav­ily than that of the female appli­cants. How­ever, it is pos­si­ble that some of the women are stronger than some of the men. To use gen­der as a proxy for strength is sex­ist, because it favors the inter­ests of men when there is no rel­e­vant dif­fer­ence between a weak man and a strong woman. On the com­mon def­i­n­i­tion, though, even admit­ting the dif­fer­ence in strength is sexist!

So, I agree that the def­i­n­i­tion is bad. Sex­ism is not about infe­ri­or­ity in terms of any abil­ity or capac­ity. Rather, it’s sup­posed to describe a kind of vio­la­tion against the equal­ity of per­sons. But per­sons are only equal in a moral sense, and it’s rather dif­fi­cult to pin­point and explain. As such, I’m not hope­ful that the dic­tio­nary is going to fix this any­time soon. Until then, let’s not let polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness stand in the way of legit­i­mate sci­en­tific inquiry into gen­der dif­fer­ences, or of giv­ing credit where credit is due — whether that is to men, or to women.