 In her ground-breaking paper “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” (2000b), Haslanger aims to provide an account of the nature of gender, as well as an account of the meaning of ‘woman’. She assumes the classical distinction between sex and gender, where sex is supposed to refer to biological or anatomical properties distinguishing males from females (although as she argues, this distinction is flexible and permeated by social and political factors too), and gender is supposed to refer to social or cultural factors distinguishing men from women (see the entry on  feminist perspectives on sex and gender).  One of the main virtues of Haslanger’s article is that she makes explicit the methodological approach that she endorses, to wit: she famously distinguishes between a descriptive project, which aims to reveal the concept that we actually use or the property that we actually track with our usage of the term, and an analytical project (or an ameliorative project, as she calls it in Haslanger 2006), which aims to reveal the concept that we should use or the meaning that we should associate to the corresponding term, given our purposes and aims in that inquiry. As she makes clear, she is following the analytical or ameliorative approach, with the explicit aim of providing an account of the meaning of ‘gender’ and ‘woman’ that could be a useful tool in order to fight sexism and help to achieve social justice. With this purpose in mind, she comes up with the following definition of the term ‘woman’, as one particular type of gender: