Essentialism

Essentialism, within feminism and anti-racist critiques, is the view that there are inherent, likely biological, differences between people's mental, emotional, and physical abilities, based on grosser biological differences between sex, race or other classes.

In other words, gender essentialism posits that there are essential characteristics of male and female in addition to the obvious, observable, physical dimorphisms. In racist thought, the notion would be that the "races" (a notion that is itself fraught with definitional difficulty) are comprised not just of differences in various morphologies (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and so on) but of differences particularly in intellect. Essentialism thus defines the relevant classes in part on observable phenomena, and in part on presumed differences; and presumes a causal correlation between the observed differences and the presumed differences. For instance, that women are various intelligence tests suggest that women are less capable of certain types of abstract thought than men (or, phrased more neutrally, that the sexes have different abilities); that this can be measured quantifiably (on intelligence tests) and demonstrated in social outcomes (there are fewer female mathematicians than male mathematicians); and that there is an inherent, essential, likely biological cause for the differences.

While essentialism has fallen out of favor for distinguishing among, for instance, the Irish and the English; or the English working class and the English nobility; it continues to have adherents regarding ethnicity and gender. A major trend of late 20th-century and early 21st century biology, sociobiology and related evolutionary psychology, have effectively updated essentialist arguments in the age of statistics and genomics. After being long discredited in scientific circles, racial essentialism (aka "racism") saw a surge of popularity following the publication of The Bell Curve, which did a variety of statistical hand-waving over socio-economic facts of unequal distribution of wealth, access to resources, and power, suggesting that instead of discrimination and bias, inherent differences among the "races" was to blame.

Stephen Jay Gould, a foremost critic of essentialist thinking in the history of the science of "race" updated his major work in the history of such discrimination, The Mismeasure of Man, to account for these new trends, and a number of other scientists took this on as well.

Gender essentialism has undergone a significant resurgence in science due primarily to work done in the sociobiology/evolutionary psychology field, and to certain largely anecdotal studies of high-profile sex reassignment cases; see esp. John Money. Scholars Carol Tavris and Anne Fausto-Sterling have looked at gender as Gould did at race, with their respective works, Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex and Myths of Gender.