Gender categories are regulated by natural and social mechanisms

Abstract

I argue that social constructivists should treat gender largely as a category of social science, in particular, as an homeostatic property cluster (HPC) regulated by both natural and non-natural homeostatic mechanisms. I canvas two social constructivist approaches to accounting for gender, these being the analytical and descriptive approaches in Haslanger’s (2000: 33) terms and how the metaphysics of these can be spelled out in terms of objective types (Haslanger, 2012) and HPCs (Mallon, 2016; Bach, 2016) respectively. I suggest that both approaches, the ameliorative and social scientific projects, yield appropriately anti-essentialist theories of gender at a first pass. I argue that if a social constructivist adopts an HPC theory of gender, the theorist should treat gender as regulated by a natural mechanism, sexual dimorphism, which plausibly is responsible for the bodily traits that gender gives arbitrary social significance. The proposed HPC also has the social mechanisms that maintain separate gender roles for women and men, which I argue are selected by social science to be the direct causes of gendered phenomena. I then present and support Bach’s (2016) argument that treating gender as an HPC is empirically adequate in a way that the objective types of Haslanger’s ameliorative project may fail to be. In doing so, I respond to an objection from Hawley (2018) that enquiry motivated by feminist values favours ameliorative over social scientific projects, suggesting that an HPC theory has better prospects to advance feminist aims. Social constructivists, therefore, should adopt a social scientific approach to theorising about gender.