Sex and Gender
Questions about the degree to which concepts of sex and gender influence science and engineering or are appropriate subjects for scientific research and technological manipulation are fundamental ethical issues. This entry discusses those issues and describes the genesis of the development of sex and gender discussions related to science and technology. The focus then shifts to the role of sex and gender in scientific knowledge and issues of inequity and their implications.
Historical Background
Gayle Rubin (1975) described the sex and gender system, distinguishing the biology of sex from the cultural and social construction of gender and revealing the male-centered social processes and practices that constrain and control women's lives. Rubin extended the implications of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1947), who initiated the intellectual, theoretical foundations for the second wave of the women's movement, which itself built on the nineteenth-century first wave and took an activist turn in the United States in the context of protests and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. De Beauvoir provided the philosophical basis for existentialist feminism by suggesting that women's "otherness" and the social construction of gender rest on a social interpretation of biological differences (sex).
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