Lloyd discusses the relationship between gender and ideals of rationality, and the related issues of relativism and cultural relativism, and addresses the “maleness” of “character ideals centred on the idea of Reason”, which in her view has implications for how gender difference is understood. She discusses philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, beginning with a discussion of her The Second Sex (1949).