Who Is a Woman: Sex, Gender and Policy Making
1 School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel,
2 School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia,
* Corresponding author:
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 7 Jul 2021 / Revised: 15 Jun 2022 / Accepted: 11 Jul 2022 / Published: 31 Oct 2022
Abstract
Heated debates are taking place over the question: Who is a woman? Many of these are over inclusion criteria for policies that seek to promote equality, safety and/or privacy for girls and women by excluding boys and men. Science cannot resolve these debates, but its concepts and data can offer useful insights and information for policy makers who have to make principled and workable policy decisions about inclusion criteria. To assist policy makers in this difficult task, we begin by reviewing three key concepts that are often misunderstood and conflated: sex, gender, and gender identity. We then review key issues that policy makers should consider: the purpose(s) of the specific policy and whether it relates to sex, gender, and/or gender identity, and the distributions of benefits and costs for all stakeholders. As these considerations sometimes point to a conflict of interests, we end with some suggestions for how such conflicts might be ameliorated. Although we do not offer solutions to these difficult policy decisions, we hope that this article will help reduce misunderstandings, and facilitate open discussion and good decision making in this contentious policy context.
Keywords: gender; gender identity; sex; gender roles; transgender; ethics; policy
OPEN ACCESS
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
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provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
CITE
Joel, D.; Fine, C. Who Is a Woman: Sex, Gender and Policy Making. Controversial_Ideas 2022, 2, 6.
Joel D, Fine C. Who Is a Woman: Sex, Gender and Policy Making. Journal of Controversial Ideas. 2022; 2(2):6.
Joel, Daphna; Fine, Cordelia. 2022. "Who Is a Woman: Sex, Gender and Policy Making." Controversial_Ideas 2, no. 2: 6.
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