This is not a phrase which bears a clear meaning on its face. 'Push' and 'pull' are often employed to express repulsion and attraction, and 'gender' seems to be exerting such repulsion and attraction; but beyond that you have to read the article to find out exactly what is meant. That in fact is the purpose of a headline: to intrigue you, to make you want to read more.
Eventually you will find the phrase fairly explicitly explained:
Each day in Mecca provided powerful reminders of a religion that seems to simultaneously embrace women and push them away.
There's a lesson in this for learners (and indeed for students of any topic): don't be in too big a hurry to achieve complete understanding on your first reading. Often you learn more by running quickly through an article or story, to get a rough sense of the overall content, and then re-reading to fill in the fine details. If you practise reading inferentially—if you fill in the gaps of your understanding as much as possible by figuring out what a given word or expression has to mean for the passage to make sense, without immediately rushing to a dictionary or to ELU—you will eventually find reading English much easier and more natural, and a lot more pleasurable.
This is an established use.
See also here ("I had an inclination where it had come from") or here ("without the slightest inclination of her whereabouts".)
or here:
The Poltergeist is about patience, planning, and high risk high reward gameplay. Being able to ambush survivors while they have no inclination of your whereabouts is a surefire way to shake up a game, especially if the survivors have NO IDEA the poltergeist is the chosen killer.
When someone has told us that they have no idea in which direction a person has gone, we might pursue the matter a little further and ask them to make an intelligent guess, based on whatever knowledge they may have to bring to bear on the question.
Well, which way would you lean? North? South?
That's what to lean means in this context, "to make an intelligent guess, based on whatever (small amount of) knowledge one may have or based on the probabilities."
And that's what to be inclined and to have an inclination means too.
I'm inclined to think they went South.
My inclination is that they went South.
I have no inclination where they went.
When a person says that they have no inclination, they mean that they cannot even begin to "lean" in one direction or the other. They have no information whatsoever that would lead them to think or favor one thing instead of another.
Best Answer
It is a pun on the name of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher (the initials stand for Maurits Cornelis, but the full names are almost never used), who is famous for mathematically precise prints of surreal spaces that seem to fold into themselves or "go around" where nothing ought to go around.
For example, look at Waterfall or Möbius Strip II.
An esker is particular kind of elongated gravelly hill formed by material deposited in meltwater tunnels at the bottom of glaciers during the Ice Ages. Since it follows the path of a meltwater stream, it always goes from somewhere to somewhere. A circular one makes no geological sense and would need to have been made by a meltwater stream that went round and round without any source or outlet -- like the water in the channel of Waterfall.