“Gender-neutral education will never erase the anthropological differences between men and women”

Sami Biasoni is a doctor of philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, lecturer at ESSEC, co-author (with A.-S. Nogaret) of the essay “French despite them”. In 2022, he will publish “Statistically correct” with Éditions du Cerf.

Never has society been so concerned about issues of equality between men and women, now considering the fair sex as a "minority" to be defended and promoted, even if it constitutes half of the population. However, according to the work of researcher Pascal Huguet, quoted by the ministerial delegate for equality between girls and boys to Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, "the result is that gender stereotypes in career choices are more important today than twenty years ago.

Ignoring any possibility of “natural” differentiation of choice, strategy or desire linked to the sex of individuals, the government thus persists in affirming that the main determinant of the gaps comes from the effects of representation and visibility. While the latter most certainly contribute to the formation of these gaps, it nevertheless seems problematic, even counterproductive, to reduce the debate to their sole scope of influence, as the factors at work are numerous and complex.

So-called inclusive writing, political laws establishing quasi-quotas – first and foremost parity in politics –, the voluntarist forcing of balances concerning figures of media representation, professional lobbies formed on the sole criterion of gender community should have - if they had proven effective - enabled the acceleration of the growing historic equalization between the conditions and rights of men and women, already encouraged by our Constitution of 1958[1] which ensures "equality before the law of all citizens” ^and magnified by the evolution of mores throughout the second half of the 20th century, without any reasonable person finding fault with it.

It is true that in the sectors dedicated to the textile or beauty professions, there are now more than 80% of girls, while boys are very much in the majority in training related to building (99%) or to certain technical specialties. (computer development, climate engineering for example). These differences appear during the choice of orientation and persist very clearly in the professional world.

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The French situation is far from isolated; on the contrary, it is even accentuated in certain countries which are nevertheless extremely proactive in matters of equality between the sexes. Counter-intuitively, at first glance, it is in societies whose mode of operation comes closest to "patriarchal" systems marked by assumed differences between individuals that we find the most women in the disciplines related to the hard sciences: Indonesia, the Maghreb countries, India are among the countries with the highest proportions of women in engineering courses, while the most progressive countries (including Sweden, Finland and Norway) in this area rank last in the world. This so-called “Scandinavian” paradox should prompt us to exercise the greatest caution in this area.

As early as 1986, Norway set up a gender-balanced government and has never ceased to work since then to deconstruct everything that has to do with the differences noted between the sexes. Yet the polarization of professional orientations has remained striking: in 2010 in the medical field, 90% of nursing positions were occupied by women, while conversely it was men who embraced engineering careers in nearly 90% of cases. Since then, the gaps have narrowed somewhat but remain significant since the engineering and public works sector still attracts five times more men than women (the ratio being slightly higher than 2 in India) according to data from the Global Gender Gap Report published in 2020 by the World Economic Forum. It is as if, when individuals are granted greater freedom of choice, they tend to satisfy their real orientations.

Virulent debates agitated Norway at the beginning of the previous decade, in particular following the publication of a controversial television documentary directed by Harald Eia in 2010 which reports this paradox and tries to support it from several results. presented as decisive (study by Professor Richard Lippa on the permanence of differences in choice despite cultural variations, work by specialist in child psychiatry Trond Diseth on the preferences of young children, experience by Cambridge evolutionary psychologist Simon Baron Cohen suggesting an attraction different according to the sexes for human and mechanical representations from the first days of the child). If some of these works remain rather recent and methodologically perfectible, they seem to constitute scientific refutations of the hypothesis defended by gender theory of a lack of differentiation of marginal biological origin between men and women.

Based on an abusive exegesis of the texts of certain reference authors of the so-called “gender” theory – which denies biological determinism and posits the primacy of social and subjective determination – of which Judith Butler remains one of the most emblematic, radical neo-progressivism came to reject any form of biological reality other than morphological. The Scandinavian paradox highlights the strength of the real in its ability to remind us once again of it. It must also encourage us to understand that the best intentions often turn out to be the seeds of the worst torments.

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An enlightened democracy cannot do without nuance. However, this is what the objective of equality defended by the government seems to forget when it announces the creation of “gender scholarships at the start of the 2022 school year” in order to achieve a “objective of 30% diversity in specialist education in high school […] within 5 years[2]”. That such mechanisms have never been able to prove themselves – especially on the other side of the Atlantic where quota policies are commonplace – that they are even contradictory to our meritocratic republican tradition and attached to free individual determination , worse: that they induce unfortunate externalities in terms of degradation of the feeling of fairness within the social body, none of this seems to worry decision-makers resolved to give in to the ease of technical measures that are easy to implement. Whatever the effect as long as we have the haste...

No one can dispute the need to fight against any form of impediment to the fulfillment of an individual because of his sex, it is about the most elementary humanism. Nevertheless, it is important to consider ex ante all that the unbridled promotion of equality induces that is harmful in terms of our ability to live together harmoniously, in confidence and in serenity. It is also crucial to prevent the debate from sinking into the discursive facilities that assail it: the condition of the countries that have tried it is hardly enviable, any more than that of the societies which, by the past, have become convinced of the need for an outrageous simplification of the argument in the name of the sovereign good. Secularized, the summum bonum of our time is inclusivist, at least vis-à-vis those who actively work for its promotion or who take advantage – from their positions of putative oppressed – of the benefit of its largesse, establishing new privileges on the rubble of those they claim to have deconstructed.

[1] Constitution which the legislator nevertheless saw fit to amend by the constitutional law of 23 July 2008 on the modernization of institutions which specifies in Article 1 that "the law promotes equal access of women and men to electoral mandates and elective functions, as well as professional and social responsibilities. »

[2] B. Mathieu, “Diversity at school: ^“ We are going to create gendered scholarships in high school at the start of the 2022 school year ^” ” (interview, online), L'Express, November 16, 2021, consulted on November 18, 2021.