Gender is a range of characteristics of femininity, masculinity and others described as third gender. Depending on the context, the describing characteristics vary from sex to social roles (gender roles) to gender identity. The academic interdisciplinary field gender studies focuses on gender. Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word "gender" to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like medicine,social sciences, feminist literature, documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and in some dictionaries, but in many contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word. Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use "gender" instead of "sex" in 1993. "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Elizabeth Shilin Spelke (born May 28, 1949) is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies.

Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experiments on infants and young children to test their cognitive faculties. She has suggested that human beings have a large array of innate mental abilities. In recent years, she had an important role in the debate on cognitive differences between men and women. She defends the position that there is no scientific evidence of any significant disparity in the intellectual faculties of males and females.

Spelke did her undergraduate studies at Harvard with the child psychologist Jerome Kagan. Her thesis studied attachment and emotional reactions in babies. She realized that she needed to have an idea of what babies really understood, and so began her life-long interest in the cognitive aspect of child psychology.

She did her Ph.D. at Cornell with developmental psychologist Eleanor Gibson, from whom she learned how to design experiments on young children.

Tomasz Lis [ˈtɔmaʂ ˈlis] ( listen) (born March 6, 1966, Zielona Góra) is one of the most popular Polish journalists, former TV anchor of “TVN Fakty” ("TVN Facts") and “Wydarzenia” ("Events").

Tomasz Lis began his career in TVP (Polish Public Television) in 1990 after winning an open competition for the post of a newsreader.

Since 1994, until 1997 correspondent in Washington, D.C. for TVP.

From 1997 to 2004 co-author of “TVN Fakty” on Polish television station TVN.

From 2006 to 2007 chief editor of "Wydarzenia" Polsat.

In 2003 published his book, Co z tą Polską? (What's with Poland?) which has become a bestseller in Poland (selling over 100,000 copies).

As at end 2010, up to February 2012, Editor-in-Chief of the current affairs weekly "Wprost".

He married Kinga Rusin in June 1994, divorced on June 27, 2006 They have two daughters: Pola and Iga. In 2007 married a Polish journalist Hanna Smoktunowicz.

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war. Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence. Politically, she is a strong supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.