Wait a second. You’re not holding social and biological explanations of observed sex differences to the same standard. You say that coercive social forces are r

Wait a second. You’re not holding social and biological explanations of observed sex differences to the same standard. You say that coercive social forces are realities that “definitely” drive observed sex differences, but you’re not willing to allow that physiological differences are also clearly realities and must obviously also drive observed sex differences, to a greater or lesser extent? The unstated assumption seems to be that since coercive social forces and observed sex differences are both social phenomena, much less rigor is required when attempting to extablish causal links between them. I think it’s just as easy for “social constructivists” to pass “just so” stories off as proof as it is for “biological essentialists” to cling to what you call a “gender of the gaps”. My question is, “The gaps between what?” Certainly not the kind of experimentally verified, quantifiable casual links that you expect them to provide for their own explanations. In order to avoid getting lost in abstraction, here’s a concrete example. A social constructivist might present a study of differences in the types of toys that parents buy for boys and girls as evidence that a coercive social force definitely drives the different levels of interest that men and women show in STEM fields. (This isn’t actually the best example, because studies of very young infants have shown that males and females display clearly different levels of interest in different types of toys long before social conditioning can possibly have had any effect, but that’s beside the point.) A reasonable biological essentialist would counter that the constructivist has taken two observed social phenomena and asserted a definite causal link between them without doing a fraction of the legwork that would be demanded if an essentialist tried to tie the differing levels of interest to a physiological phenomenon, no matter how well quantified. Have longitudinal studies been done? How was differential parental encouragement measured? What makes the attempt to link these two social phenomena less of a “just so” story than those leaned on by evolutionary biologists? In the absence of rigorously tested links between coercive social forces and observed sex differences, the null hypothesis can’t be that the latter are primarily caused by the former. It has to be, “Observed sex differences are caused by some mixture of social and physiological factors, and we haven’t done enough research to determine their relative contributions.” What you’re trying to say is that social phenomena have social causes until proven otherwise, and that’s an assertion that I see no reason to accept uncritically. Take something like differential rates of incarceration for violent behavior. Given that male mammals are almost universally much more aggressive than female mammals, are you willing to accept the argument that we must assume this observed sex difference to have a social cause until the link between physiology and human male violence has been rigorously worked out in detail? That strikes me as unreasonable.