Gender bias in scientific language and research methodology

¶ … Men vs. Women' -- Nonverbal communication and the egg meeting the sperm

One need look no father than the bookshelves that proclaim men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to see the point-of-view of Emily Martin advocated in her essay "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles." Although readers may like to think of science as objective in its categories, in fact, beginning a study by looking at men and women as the absolute categories of human sexual nature is itself biased, Martin suggests. The language of biological texts is equally as coded between activity and passivity, sperm vs. egg, just as subjective as the language that 'sees' certain planets as male or female.

Scientific language is human created, and it both affects and reflects the way we think about gender. Even in a female-created and directed study such as Monica M. Moore's (1995) "Nonverbal Courtship Patterns in Women: Context and Consequences." Moore defines, for example, distinctly male attention as aggressively approaching the female subject, talking to the woman in question, leaning toward the female and moving closer to her, asking the female subject to dance, touching her, or kissing the woman, all in a fashion that stresses the male as predator and the female subject as a kind of prey, or at very least a passive object.