I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I'll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.
I'm not sure how stable this strategy is. Right now, personal genomics and big data informatics might be making biology smarter at a surprising rate, while sociology has no similar tool ratchet to boost it up. I mean, you're not up against some caricature from the 19th century spouting about God-ordained moral order, but people who are intent on actually looking into the one billion moving parts that make a human come together and make sense of them.
Also, you probably mean sex, not gender-- gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It's more complicated than that, obviously, but that's the pneumonic that's been useful for me.)
Well, you do decide how to behave with what's between your ears, not what's between your legs.
Hmm. I'm getting a bit of what you're getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn't become less true when it's harder to study it, and I'm throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don't have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It's just a definition/clarity issue-- sorry to sidetrack with it!
I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.
Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.
But will the scientific community pull it off?
Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8