Anne Innis Dagg was the first female biologist to study giraffes; while all the men who preceded her had observed firsthand that male giraffes are super queer (their primary form of play is a game dubbed "penis fencing," which is exactly what it sounds like), only Dagg was willing to write it down and publish it.

Dagg's work on giraffes -- several of the seminal books on the animals -- was initially mocked or ignored, partly because of her pioneering approach of living among the animals (as opposed to observing them at a distance) offended the establishment; partly because of her gender.

Though Dagg earned a PhD and taught for decades, she was denied tenure. She continued to produce challenging, brave, brilliant work at the intersection of biology and gender politics, ranging over both scholarly and popular works. In particular, she specialized in pointing out the lack of rigor in her male colleagues' work when discussing sex and gender among animals, and how that spilled over into the way the field was organized, and gender bias within research institutions and in research publishing.

Her 2004 book, Love of Shopping is Not a Gene, is an absolute must-read book on the subject, addressing the total absence of rigor and falsifiability in hypotheses from male biologists to explain human gender and power roles with reference to animal behavior and/or the imaginary lives of early hominids -- howlers like "Rape is genetic" or "Black people are genetically destined to have lower IQ scores than white people." Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/M7ZhY7GfnO0/love-of-shopping-not-a-gene.html