When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to. In some cultures there are third genders with different cultural expectations: the Hijra in India, Kathoey in Thailand, some other groups in Indonesia. One would expect different stereotypes about their math, science, and reading talents, so it would probably be quite interesting to study stereotype threat there. That's not the case in this French study (probably) but there's no need to collapse the terminology artificially.

That's the crazy thing about stereotype threat and related psychological phenomena: you can manipulate the same people to perform better or worse simply by manipulating their perception of the situation. Thus the effect really can't be about biological sex. Check out reducingstereotypethreat.org for a comprehensive rundown of studies.

Not really. Boys have about 14 to 17 times the amount of serum testosterone as girls and that does affect their felt incentives for things like competition. Culture can mute this but at great cost to boy's and men's health.

The idea that gender is separate from biological sex is very recent. When you examine its origin you find that it comes from Foucault and Judith Butler. Both were gay. It's unsurprising to me that that idea would come from that lineage. If you are gay you are confronted with a difference between what you feel and what society tells you from a very early age. In general straight people do not have that issue and would never consider drawing that distinction unless the concept is introduced to them.

Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation. This seems both unjust and irrational. If you believe the distinction has no scientific merit, you could cite or propose relevant studies. If you believe it has no cultural merit, you could discuss how the distinction functions in society.

   This seems both unjust and irrational.

Why? As a rule of thumb, humans start thinking about something when it doesn't work for them. And for gays in particular, the traditional structuring of gender roles has been deeply problematic, indeed even today there are many countries where gay sex is illegal. So it's no surprise that homosexuals have though more deeply about gender and its relationship with sexuality than those for whom it works.

Foucault is intersting. In contrast, Butler's work is weak. She really doesn't have a meaningful handle on the relationship between sex and gender.

> Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation.

That's not how I read it. I read it as, Foucault and Butler's idea is unproven because it's based off of their anecdotal experience rather than based off of any scientific evidence.

I don't see where GP claims that the idea is wrong: they're simply pointing out that it's a relatively recent distinction, which implies (reasonably, IMHO) that we likely don't understand it very well yet, or that it may ultimately not be a meaningful distinction to draw once we better understand the underlying mechanisms.

Perhaps near-future advances in genetics and neurology will expand our definition of biological sex to explain gender identity. In that case, our current sex vs. gender distinction would simply be another way of saying "we don't understand how this works yet". There's a lot of this "transitional stuff" in science history, where we have credible anecdotal evidence that our previous understanding is wrong but don't yet know how to coherently explain it. (See: Greek attempts to explain the nature of matter; the infamous cholera map by John Snow; etc.)

That doesn't make the "transitional stuff" wrong: an idea doesn't have to have solid theoretical underpinnings to have merit. It does, however, mean we should continue searching for an explanation.

Differences in testosterone levels don't really show up until puberty. This study was done on pre-pubescents.

They show up in the womb, fwiw.

Isn't caitlin Jenner straight?

    gender is more relevant than sex

No it's not.

The underlying biological reality is that humans reproduce sexually. All gender roles are social elaborations and heuristics that evolve(d) to regulate and structure the biological reproduction of humans. All gender roles directly or indirectly refer to the sexual binary between males (= can father children) and females (= can give birth to children). E.g. the concept of Kathoey doesn't make sense except as an inversion of the biology-based distinction between males and females. After all, a substantial part of the Kathoey lifestyle is to look and act exactly like a biological female (including permanent genital modification), and have sex with a biological male. Clearly that's an extreme identification with the biological binary, except from an unusual angle. By imitating biological females and their conventional gender roles, by trying to look exactly like somebody who can give birth to children, the Kathoey reinforces the binary between male and female.

   stereotype threat

It's deeply questionable that "stereotype threat" actually exists. The 'studies' that claim its existence are methodologically dubious.

The binary between female and male is kind of awkward to say, especially if you're using biological terms. I'm pretty sure that intersex is considered a very normal, if relatively rare,variation of human sex biology. Intersex isn't extremely rare either and isn't a defect so the idea of a biological binary confuses me.

   intersex is considered a very normal

To a quantitative biologist, maybe. But that's the wrong point of reference, as they don't make mainstream culture.

Sexual reproduction so as to perpetuate humanity is the single most important function a society executes. All human culture directly or indirectly relates to this task. One of the key tasks in this context is the choice of partner(s) whom to reproduce with. Alas, not any two humans can reproduce together. Indeed, an exact determination who can successfully reproduce with whom is still not possible in 2016, although we are much better at this task than say 1000 years ago.

Given that we can't predict mate compatibility perfectly, humanity needs heuristics to make this decision efficiently. The following heuristics are being used in practise:

- Divide humans into two, male and female, based on the shape of their genitalia.

- Have sex with members of the opposite group.

Humans use additional heuristics for deciding with whom to mate, e.g. social status, age, but the male/female binary is by a large margin the most important.

As you correctly point out, not all humans neatly fall into the genital-shape based classification between. But it doesn't matter, because the heuristic works so well that humans can reproduce successfully by ignoring those outliers. That means outliers must be infrequent enough (say > 99% fit the binary).

I can't overemphasise this: the heuristic has been extremely successful.

The very concept intersex makes sense only in contradistinction from binary normalcy. To see this, consider the fact that most humans have 10 fingers, but not all. Yet, there is no socially relevant concept of 'interhanded' people, no pressure groups, nobody claims to have been born with the wrong number of fingers, no finger reassignment surgery etc. That's because the number of fingers is not all that important.

In the future we might have a refined classification, as our understanding of human reproduction has improved immeasurably in the last century. But note that a finer classification still relates to biological facts about human bodies. It would probably be something along the lines of

- Can give birth to children, i.e. falls in the category woman, despite non-standard genitalia.

- Can father children, i.e. falls in the category man, despite non-standard genitalia.

- Can neither father children, nor give birth to children.

In other words, it would be a refinement of the male/female binary.

> When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex.

This is a very broad statement which is trivial to prove false. Look at powerlifting: men perform better than women, and testosterone plays a well-understood role in this performance. This is a function of sex, not gender. And while it's most numerically provable and obvious in powerlifting, this is true for a lot of sports.

At a more fundamental level, I question whether the gender/sex divide is scientifically valid. One can point to the example of a transman and say, "Their female sex didn't align with their male gender at birth" but that seems like a very surface assessment; it's also possible that chemicals released by (for example) their brain or pituitary, are causing the dysphoria they experienced. Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? Or might it make more sense to broaden our understanding of sex to realize that genitalia aren't the only organs regulating sex, and instead say that the transperson wasn't born female, but was instead born with a mixture of sex characteristics, and only the most obvious sex characteristics were female, while the characteristics which more fundamentally defined their identity were male.

In a larger sense, this seems related to the categorization error of separating mind and body as if they are two different things, a separation which seems more clearly false.

NOTE: Please don't construe anything I say as negative toward transpeople. I think humans have an inherent, fundamental right to define their identities and modify their bodies in any way they choose. People don't need excuses or justification to exercise that right. Certainly we don't need an abstract distinction between sex and gender to let people dress and socialize with people the way they want or change their bodies.

I would disagree, actually. I am a woman who loves powerlifting, actually, and I think that the attitudes of many women in the United States toward lifting heavy things renders them less likely to actually do it. Many women believe they'll bulk up, they'll be unwomanly, men won't like them, women won't like them, it's ok to be physically weak as a woman because you can always get a guy to open the jar/lift the box. As a result, these women don't try to lift heavy things and when you ask them why, they say, "I can't! I am just not good at it." I'm a relatively small woman who got up to a 220-lb deadlift without much effort -- I know active helplessness when I see it.

But if those attitudes changed, it wouldn't mean that suddenly women would be able to deadlift as much as men.

Take a look at this chart: http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards....

Your deadlift of 220lbs puts you in the "Advanced" category assuming your body weight is somewhere in the middle. By comparison, I'm deadlifting 360lbs at 185lbs, and that's not even close to "Advanced", I'm well within the "Intermediate" category. For me to be considered advanced, I would have to lift 440lbs, literally twice what you're lifting. That's not a difference explained by psychology.

Besides, we can easily remove the factor you're talking about: there are plenty of sports which don't have the social factors you're describing. There are tons of women who run, for example. In the 60 meter dash, the top male performer, Maurice Greene, finished in 6.39s, more than half a second faster than the top female performer, Irina Privalova, at 6.92s. A half second might not seem like a lot, but consider that Privalova's time wouldn't place her even in the top 25 of male atheletes. [1] Similarly, Paula Radcliffe's 2:15:25 marathon record doesn't wouldn't put her even in the top 10 (I suspect there are hundreds of men whose personal record beats her time, but Wikipedia only shows the top 10).[2]

Do you really think Irina Privalova or Paula Radcliffe is just being actively helpless?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_metres#Top_25_performers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon#All-time_top_ten_athl...

> Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender?

That about sums up the usual definitions, yes.

Why make that distinction when they are fundamentally interconnected?

The point is that they're not fundamentally interconnected. The current line of thinking among transgendered people is that their sex is not appropriate for their gender, regardless of what the chromosomes say. I.e., their genital profile and secondary sex characteristics ("ovaries and testicles") do not exhibit the same sexual mode as their identity ("brain and pituitary", though in many cases likely just "brain").

>> It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to.

The problem with that is that most of the time the group you're perceived to belong to and what groups you identify with do have everything to do with your "equipment".

Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity. Discrimations are based on gender, not sex. Women are told to wear pink dresses because of how our society see women (female gender), not because they have a vagina (female sex).

> Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity

That's only a very recent distinction, and still a contentious one. According to Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender) and the OED (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gend...), it's far from clear.

Based on what the dictionary says? The idea that gender and sex mean two different things isn't contentious amongst the people who study the phenomenon academically.

Well, gender studies is not very scientific. It is more "theorizing", in the sense of writing obscurantist explanations for everyday phenomenon.

The difference in gender and sex also comes up in biology and neuroscience...

Do you feel the same way about all social sciences? Does "materialism" only mean valuing material things to you or do you respect the Philosophical definition? Honestly it's a lot of handwaving to excuse ignorance (what not knowing the difference between the two terms is)

Every generation of soft social "scientists" (I use scare quotes because they don't usually use the scientific method. When I say "soft" social scientists I mean e.g. Gender studies people as opposed to demographers.) tends to disagree with the previous generation on huge fundamental tenets for mostly arbitrary reasons. It is wise to take any dictionary-defying claims from these fields with a large grain of salt, because there's a substantial chance that such a claim is made for social or political (but not scientific) reasons.

The general statement "they mean something different" is a pronouncement on language as a broad concept. The OED and Merriam Webster are about as authoritative an answer as you can get on that in English, which for the sake of HN, will have to do for now. That's not to say one day the differences won't evolve (linguistically) into fairly concrete and well-understood distinctions across all languages, but we're definitely not there yet.

Regardless, these factors are in a 1-to-1 relationship for around 99% of schoolchildren in the third grade "aged 9 years old on average" including, presumably, every single child studied in this study. Discussion of the specific differences, or of the other cases, might have substantial merit... but seem less than productive on this particular occasion as the topic is at best only tangentially related.

Sure; I was only explaining the difference to OP who seems to think gender and sex are two words for the same thing.

> Women are told to wear pink dresses because of how our society see women (female gender), not because they have a vagina (female sex).

Really? I'm pretty sure a large part of any discrimination against women is due to their physical sex, not the way they identify.

> Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity.

What evidence do you have that identity doesn't originate in biology?

I'm well-aware of the existence of transpeople, but I'm not ready to conclude that gender dysphoria doesn't originate in biology. There's more to a person's biology than their genitalia.

Why does one need a gender identity?

We only need it because we live in groups. If we were all by ourselves we would not need this language (and much other language). Much of language is for signaling.