Hi all
My penny's worth. I touched on this issue a little in my PhD Education when I looked at gender and teaching practice so this is where I'm speaking from. If we acknowledge that sex (biological) and gender (socio-cultural) are distinguishable much like ethnicity versus some bio-genetic measure of 'race' or anything else you care to imagine and of import then there are a number of possibilities for outcomes, some of which have been addressed in the literature. Let's assume for the purposes of this little illustration tbat design like nursing, civil engineering, etc., are activities that are neutral (in principle) to sex, gender (I'm artificially extracting them from context to develop a point) then we can have the following. we can have, e.g., a mismatch of (biological) sex weighting in a field where, e.g. there are more mails than females and vice versa. If this is the case then we can look for reasons - historical (read political, ideological) and otherwise that might explain why, all other things being equal, such a situation could have arisen. This is often the approach to disease and illness that is taken in Public Health - both qualitative and quantitative - to explain such anomalies. In design we might have, for example lots if female interior designers and not many males or in industrial design lots of males and not many females (at whatever level interests us) then we can also ask, all other things being equal how did this arise? And then we'll come up with multiple explanations than we can evaluate as more or less productive in explaining things and matching our current preoccupations and concerns (thus explanations are always purposeful - pragmatic)

We might also find that by talking and watching to men and women (and we already have the precedent of established 'facts' about existing differences in men and women's speak, cultural and social roles etc) - discourse analysis and ethnography etc., that the meaning and practice of design is done differently by the two sexes on average and that, however, we find some males and some females acting according to what is dominant in the other averaged out sex grouping. Given that the different behaviours can no longer be comprehensively explained by sex alone we will have an instance of gender = the dominant way of thinking and practicing among a group which is distinguished by being largely composed of a biological sex. We can use Wittgenstein's fuzzy protoypes to gather together the centre and the peripheries. Notwithstanding, we can still ask, how did things get this way, all other things being equal, in terms of whatever interests us, e.g. workplace activity etc., or childrearing, whatever. One thing that history, anthropology teaches us is that most of the gendered and culture distinctions we take for granted regarding how we do social life are either not universal historically, i.e. we did it different in the past, or synchronically, i.e. somebody else somewhere does is different than we do. So, I suppose what I;'m saying is I can see, in my rather pithy view, that gender can do some important theoretical work and remains useful for all kinds of things we might want to achieve - including change, writing a thesis, emaaling our thoughts, and being intellectually challenged. Musing. Gavin Melles

Dr Gavin Melles
Research Fellow, Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology