We hear a lot about the conflict between science and religion. However, as I’ve argued before, the real conflict 
these days is between science and various forms of political correctness, including feminism.
This conflict is starkly highlighted in this documentary [1]. It was shown a couple of years ago on Norwegian State television and is presented by a well known comedian there, Harald Eia, who also happens to have a qualification in the social sciences.
Eia’s target is feminist theorists who insist that the differences between the sexes (or ‘genders’), apart from the obvious physical ones, are purely cultural and are not innate.
Therefore, they say, the fact that the vast majority of engineers even in a very egalitarian country like Norway are men, and the vast majority of nurses are women, has nothing whatsoever to do with the innate inclinations of men and women and has everything to do with the way society shapes us.
Having interviewed two gender theorists, Eia then goes and speaks to a number of academics who have conducted research which at the very least seems to indicate that some of the differences between the sexes that lead them to choose different jobs typically, are indeed innate.
One of the academics interviewed, Professor Anne Campbell of Durham University, who studies evolutionary psychology posed a particularly apposite question for the gender theorists.
Eia put it to her that they believe the only differences between the sexes are the obviously physical ones, chiefly the reproductive organs.
Campbell said they had to explain why it should be that the brain, which orchestrated these differences “through feedback systems”, would produce differences in those organs and almost nothing else, and especially not in the brain itself. She simply didn’t believe this was credible.
Eia went back to the gender theorists and they still flat out denied that there were any innate differences between the sexes. It was all culture they insisted.
One was asked about her scientific basis for making this claim. She answered: “I have what you would call a theoretical basis”. In other words, she doesn’t have a scientific basis.
Another gender theorist asked: “Why are they [the scientists] so concerned with finding the biological origin to gender? Why this frenetic concern?”
In other words, he was questioning their motivations, not their findings. But the motivations of the gender theorists could equally be questioned.
Then he said: “So far science hasn’t been able to prove a genetic origin” [to gender differences].
Eia asked him how he knew this. He responded: “My hypothesis is that there are none. Science hasn’t shown any”.
Eia then asked him: “You presume there are no differences until the opposite is shown?” Response: “Yes”.
But if someone said their hypothesis is that there are innate differences and that science hasn’t shown otherwise, what would this gender theorist say? To put it another way, which theory or hyopothesis has to be disproved?
But while Eia could point to research showing there are innate differences, the gender theorists couldn’t point to any suggesting the opposite.
Basically, the gender theorists started with the presupposition that no such differences exist and insisted that their presupposition be disproved. They then rejected any research which seemed to contradict their presupposition.
So what we see here is a dogmatic insistence that there are no innate differences between the sexes that might incline the two sexes towards different walks of life, an insistence that appears to be impervious to evidence. In other words what we seem to have is a conflict between science and politically correct equality theories.
Any chance a similar documentary might be made in Ireland?
Postscript: The Eia documentary has since helped to bring about the closure of the Nordic Gender Institute (NKK), one of the leading proponents in Scandinavian countries of gender theory.