Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

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Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 · rating details · 1,437 ratings · 269 reviews

A vehement dismantling of the latest pseudo-scientific claims about the differences between the sexes.

Sex-based discrimination is supposedly a relic of the distant past. Yet popular books, magazines, and even scientific articles increasingly defend continuing inequalities between the sexes by calling on immutable biological differences between the male and the female brai...more

Paperback, 338 pages

Published August 8th 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published August 30th 2010)

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Jul 19, 2011 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: language, psychology, social-theory, science

Let’s say you have read a couple of books on the ‘science’ that ‘explains’ the differences between the sexes. So, just what are you likely to have been told? Well, one thing would be that men have brains that are built to be more logical and mathematical than women’s brains (this is due to men’s better spatial rotational abilities that are a consequence of right brain localisation) and that this helps to explain why men end up in most of the high status jobs like Engineering or Science, just as...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Scribble Orca added it · review of another edition

Recommended to Scribble by: Trevor

Shelves: to-be-consideread

How gratifying to find authors who know their stuff, have the necessary tools to analyse and critique, and who take the time to pick holes in the commercial follies of these pseudo-scientific wanna-be-never-could-so-better twist-everything-to-please-myself-and-make-a-fast-fbuck-simultaneously authors.

Should dovetail quite nicely with Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn.

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Aug 30, 2012 Kaethe rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, science, domesticity, education, gender, history, kids, medicine, nonfiction, parenting, skepticism, social-issues

Let me boil the book down for the busy reader: whenever someone* chooses to ignore all the documented evidence of discrimination in favor of just-so stories about biology, in order to keep right on discriminating, you can take their evidence as having all the validity of the presenter's good intentions to end discrimination.

Sorry, that was a long and awkward summation. In justice to the book, I'd prefer to be pithy, funny, and understandable. Fine has tackled an immense and largely thankless tas...more Let me boil the book down for the busy reader: whenever someone* chooses to ignore all the documented evidence of discrimination in favor of just-so stories about biology, in order to keep right on discriminating, you can take their evidence as having all the validity of the presenter's good intentions to end discrimination.

Sorry, that was a long and awkward summation. In justice to the book, I'd prefer to be pithy, funny, and understandable. Fine has tackled an immense and largely thankless task. First, she's read all those awful gender-essentialist pop psych books**, for which she should receive medals, cookies, and probably hazard pay. Next, she's actually gone through all the books and articles making claims about how neurobiology is gender destiny. That task involved a lot of the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, who among other things publishes on autism in a sexist and really annoying way. Then she went through the references of these many works and actually looked at the studies, to show where they were bad, and more often, where they just plain don't say what the authors claim they do. Finally, she puts it all together, along with research from many other areas, in a way that is dryly amusing, occasionally snarky, but I think probably very clear even for those who don't read medical journals for work.***

A sample which amused me:

So let us, with healthy skepticism, summarize all of this as clearly as we can. Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.
Confused?
We've only just begun.

It's brilliant and authoritative and she loathes bad science reporting just as much as I do, so of course I love it. But I recommend it to others who might be curious about the topic, as well as those who enjoy seeing bad science thoroughly mocked.

*Lawrence Sumner, for example

**Men Can't Be Bothered to Be Nice, Women Can't be Taught to Be Smart and the like.

***I do, so I'm just guessing what the non-scientist would think.

Library copy.(less)

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Dec 24, 2011 Daniel Casey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: pop-lit, nook-books

turns out vast amounts of psychology is psuedo-science...who knew? everyone...everyone knew...

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Apr 10, 2013 Matty rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fine assesses the wealth of pseudoscience that people have used to prop up the idea that there are large scale neurological differences between men and women. She is very careful to cite her sources, and presents ample her opposition charitably before ripping them competently to shreds. Filled with fascinating scientific tidbits that challenge pop-psychology and neurology that we've probably all heard and absorbed, eg. the wide held idea that men and women have drastically different amounts of g...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Sasha Hayden rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I didn't even finish the whole book. I was really excited for it, to be honest. I think it was too hyped up by those recommending it that it ended up being disappointing.

My main issue with the book is that Fine doesn't seem to understand any of the science that goes into the researches. She may be well educated in the field of psychology, but I would've appreciated it more if I saw that she did some extensive research on fields that she isn't familiar with. Or at least make it a collaboration w...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Marta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: owned, feminism

A spirited debunking of the perennial claims that women are different (and usually, it so happens that this difference is in truth inferiority) from men because SCIENCE. It is both amusing and infuriating to read how sexist scientists and journalists try angle after angle, and when one is debunked (say, no, brain size does not actually matter), they find another, even more dubious claim.

This is not a book without faults. Firstly, the author veers to the verbose side, and secondly, the book pays...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, nonfiction

I decided to take a break from being girlishly bad at math and reading people's minds with my lady empathizing skills to read this book, and I sure am glad I did. Because it is hilarious. And fascinating. Cordelia Fine goes through all the old lines that I'm sure you've heard a thousand times (I know I have): that men's brains are just better at building stuff and making money while women are just natural nurturers, they just want to nurture the shit out of everything, because FEELINGS. Anyways,...more

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May 22, 2012 Truehobbit rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Easily one of the most entertaining non-fiction books I've ever read.
With scathing wit that makes the book often laughing-out-loud funny, psychologist Cordelia Fine debunks the currently fashionable beliefs that traditional differences between the sexes are based on differences in male and female brains.

I have to admit that I had heard those claims she debunks, too, and believed them. Hey, if it shows in modern machinery, it must be true, right? Who am I to doubt findings of scientific measureme...more Easily one of the most entertaining non-fiction books I've ever read.
With scathing wit that makes the book often laughing-out-loud funny, psychologist Cordelia Fine debunks the currently fashionable beliefs that traditional differences between the sexes are based on differences in male and female brains.

I have to admit that I had heard those claims she debunks, too, and believed them. Hey, if it shows in modern machinery, it must be true, right? Who am I to doubt findings of scientific measurement? And it seemed so nice and simple, too. Who hasn't heard about even toddlers behaving in ways we traditionally recognise as male and female? And that women use different parts of the brain to do some tasks than men? Why would that be if not because gender is somehow wired in the brain?

Fine not only gives detailed explanations of how MRTs etc really work and what conclusions can be drawn from their results - and what can't! She also looks at child development and the role of gender in it to show that those 'biologically ingrained' behaviours can certainly be learnt before the child is two years old.

Most importantly, though, she recognises how these 'nature over nurture' theories serve to reinforce old gender tags that relegate women to subservient roles because of their supposed nature, and she shows that this makes those mis- and over-interpretations of scientific findings about how the brain works such a negative influence in modern society. She shows how sensitively humans react to even quite subtle gender priming, making sweeping assumptions, such as found in the "Men are from Mars..."-type of popular 'science' texts, quite pernicious.

In spite of its entertainment value, it is a thoroughly scholarly book. As an only caveat one might say that she shows up the methodological errors in a lot of studies that come to conclusions she argues against, but then cites similar types of study to support her own views - and one can only hope that these studies did not have those methodological errors that seemed to be so common in a previous chapter (or, of course, do what she had to do and look up the original studies she cites in support of her views).

She doesn't say that biological gender differences don't exist, of course, or that the study of them is wrong, but she cautions against simplifying 'nature over nurture' explanations.(less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Jenny Schwartz rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: aww2012, non-fiction, science

Nearly 20 years ago I studied sociology at a feminist, Marxist university. I’m pretty much disposed to accept the argument that culture heavily influences behaviour, i.e. I’m on the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. So I thought reading “Delusions of Gender” would simply be a matter of nodding as new data supported that view.
Oh boy (pun intended!) was I deluded.

Well-researched, well-argued, wittily written, Cordelia Fine hits hard at the wide spread (and I’d argue, lazy) assumpti...more Nearly 20 years ago I studied sociology at a feminist, Marxist university. I’m pretty much disposed to accept the argument that culture heavily influences behaviour, i.e. I’m on the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. So I thought reading “Delusions of Gender” would simply be a matter of nodding as new data supported that view.
Oh boy (pun intended!) was I deluded.

Well-researched, well-argued, wittily written, Cordelia Fine hits hard at the wide spread (and I’d argue, lazy) assumption of biology-as-destiny. The gender implications of that attitude of so deeply imprinted in our culture that we’re often blind to our own behaviours that perpetuate them.

Reading through studies and anecdotes I was shocked out of my complacent assumption that I’m non-sexist, indeed feminist. Far from it. In fact – and this is a rare achievement for a book – it started me re-assessing my life from way back and seeing … well, seeing how often I had lived within gender assumptions and even played to them just because it made life not simply easier, but pleasanter. Fighting the culture we live in isn’t a job for cowards.

I liked how Cordelia quoted “experts” from history on the biologically determined differences between the sexes. The examples show in pitiless detail that their biological determinism was merely supergluing on cultural blinkers. As her argument runs, later decades are likely to look back and have the same response to our use of neuroscience to plaster authority onto scientifically unsupported notions of gender.

It’s depressingly no surprise to realise that where the biologically determined gender differences argument is run (and it runs freely through popular science) it generally supports a cultural power balance in favour of males.

There are many, many examples of our gendered culture in this strongly argued but easily read book. One that has particularly stayed with me is a study (student subjects, not real world HR folk) who flip flopped 180 degrees so that whatever the male candidate’s qualifications and experience, those were what the job required. Hmm.

For me, the scariest part of the book was its assertion that as sexism buries itself deeper, we believe we aren’t sexist but our behaviour (what sneaks out when we’re tired or not monitoring ourselves) shows otherwise – and this implicit sexism has an arguably stronger impact on our self-perception than the overt stuff that we can grasp hold of and challenge.

Read the book – male or female, the impact of culture on your self-perception, and therefore, your life and choices will rock your assumptions of autonomy.(less)

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Jan 08, 2012 Catherine Siemann rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone, and especially new parents

A surprisingly quick read. Fine looks at gender essentialism and at the biases of studies and media reporting, and suggests that we've been too quick to throw up our hands and say, "but it's biological!" If little girls have only been wearing pink for fifty years, then clearly that can't be a hard-wired preference.

As a woman who preferred baby blue to pink for my childhood frilly dresses, liked to play with my brother's trucks and robots as well as my own stuffed animals (dolls are creepy and as...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Alex Templeton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of those books that has the potential to completely change your thinking on a particular subject: in this case, the idea that there are brain, and therefore inherent behavioral, differences in girls and boys. Fine presents a significant amount of damning evidence to the contrary, suggesting the power social conditioning to operate even when we are not aware of it. I found fascinating, for example, the studies Fine cites in the early chapters that suggest that once someone is primed t...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Cara Pulley rated it 5 of 5 stars

We like to believe that sexism is on the decline, but is it really? This author doesn't think so and after reading her book, I'm convinced.

She says that gender distinctions continue to exist and that they start from our very beginnings - pink is for girls, blue is for boys. Gender comes to define us and these distinctions shape our abilities and interests. Certain skills are identified as male or female: Men are rational and brave; and Women are empathetic and nurturing. These assumed traits the...more

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Jul 08, 2011 Robin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Cordelia Fine attempts to refute the popular idea that men and women have an innate neurological difference which results in different brains. I read this book after "The Essential Difference" by Simon Baron-Cohen. I recommend reading them in that order because Fine's book refutes many of the points made in Baron-Cohen's.

Fine makes a good case that many of the differences we see in gender could readily be traced back to cultural or sociological phenomena, and that it is too early to declare tha...more

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Jun 07, 2011 Alex rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

It can be incredibly frustrating to argue against someone who is convinced by the idea of preformed gender roles in society because they feel that "scientists have proven that male/female brains are different" and that to think otherwise somehow flies in the face of common sesne. Gender roles in society are supposedly natural and pre-ordained and we should learn to like them and love them.

It's so easy to believe in the myth and Cordelia Fine does an excellent job of outlining why this is a myth...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Catherine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, aging, gender, mainstream-us, medicine

It's common for people to resort to biological determinism when they look at the choices small children make in terms of colors, books, clothes, and toys. "We tried to raise him/her gender neutral!' goes the cry, 'but look! It really must be biological.'

It's not, as Fine deftly points out. From the moment the pink or blue hat is put on our head in the maternity ward, and the pink or blue card stuck in the hospital room door to announce the arrival of Baby Girl or Boy, our world sends us messages...more

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Feb 15, 2011 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

READ IT.

Cordelia Fine's examination of the many popular books and research studies which purport to prove that the male and female brains might as well belong to different species is simply brilliant. I gobbled this non-fiction up like it was a light lunch after a hard day's manual labor. Every page was packed with jaw-dropping information - horrifying methodological flaws, research which argues two diametrically opposed concepts, and outright deception, all designed to prove that men and women...more READ IT.

Cordelia Fine's examination of the many popular books and research studies which purport to prove that the male and female brains might as well belong to different species is simply brilliant. I gobbled this non-fiction up like it was a light lunch after a hard day's manual labor. Every page was packed with jaw-dropping information - horrifying methodological flaws, research which argues two diametrically opposed concepts, and outright deception, all designed to prove that men and women are not and cannot possibly be equal. Like, here's one example: Fine mentions the author of a popular book on the subject, who cites research about "mirror neurons," (women have more of them, which supposedly makes them more empathetic.) The author mentions a study of therapists which indicated that the most successful therapists are those that "mirror" their clients words, gestures, and verbal patterns. Interestingly, (says the author), ALL of the successful therapists were women. Because they have more mirror neurons, and are more attuned to others, right?

WRONG. Cordelia Fine looked up the study (thank you, Cordelia! That would be a big nuisance for the Average Reader) and as it turns out? ALL OF THE THERAPISTS IN THE STUDY WERE WOMEN. Yeah, that's right. They only recruited women for the study, so the study proves absolutely nothing about men vs. women. And if you think this sort of thing is an anomaly, wrong again - Fine's detailed work found this sort of thing occurring over and over again. Moreover, Fine is terrific at highlighting how the social context of everything men and women do contributes to these gender stereotypes, and at explaining how gender bias affects the neuroscientific research. This is an absolutely fantastic book - I have the urge to acquire copies for every teacher, every employer, every parent on the planet. It made me rethink more of my life that I would have believed possible. Seriously, even if you think you would disagree with it: READ IT. If nothing else, you will enjoy Fine's smooth and witty prose.(less)

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Feb 12, 2011 Susan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Fine has collected all the psychological and neurocientific research that's been done so far on men's vs women's brains, and she talks through it all, pointing out assumptions, sloppy reasoning, self-fulfilling prophecies, and even a few cases of inaccurate claims. She explains clearly how such things as gender salience and stereotype threat can distort the results obtained in even very careful experiments. And she even addresses the case of parents who say "but I gave my daughter a truck, and s...more

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Dec 28, 2010 Laurie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

All those studies that say that women are bad at math and men are bad at relationships because their brains are hardwired that way can be very discouraging, and there are a LOT of those studies. But Cordelia Fine has looked into those studies and found flaws in them. Add into that a large number of studies that show how easy it is to jigger people’s minds into doing better or worse at tasks depending on how they are psychologically primed before hand and we can see where the author is coming fro...more All those studies that say that women are bad at math and men are bad at relationships because their brains are hardwired that way can be very discouraging, and there are a LOT of those studies. But Cordelia Fine has looked into those studies and found flaws in them. Add into that a large number of studies that show how easy it is to jigger people’s minds into doing better or worse at tasks depending on how they are psychologically primed before hand and we can see where the author is coming from.

Fine’s thesis is rather than there being any physical difference between male and female brains, the differences that we see in math scores are there because our culture expects them to be there. Even when people attempt to raise their children in a gender neutral environment, culture intervenes. On TV, in schools, in children’s books, in the clothing sold to children- everything is divided into genders, and females end up less adventuresome, more nurturing, expected to be nicer and not fight, and to focus on home and caring rather than invented and discovering. Toys for girls and boys are separated, and children who choose to play with toys for the opposite gender are disapproved of, especially boys who play with dolls or other ‘girl’ toys. Tomboys may be told to act more ladylike, but boys will get beat up by other boys.

The core of her argument is that studies where test takers are primed to consider themselves members of sets other than gender yield different results than tests taken when the test takers are told things like “men traditionally do better on this test”. For instance, when a group of males and females take a test and are told before hand that people who go to certain colleges (colleges that some of the test takers go to) do better on this same test, the test takers conform to this and the males and females who belong to the colleges mentioned both do better on the test than the non-certain collegians- and the males and females in that group score the same as each other on the test under these conditions. These tests have been done numerous times by different researchers, and the results are always the same- the test takers conform to expectations set up before the test. Therefore, psychology trumps brain structure where intellectual subjects are concerned.

It’s an interesting proposition, and one I think needs to be investigated more- much more. There’s a lot still to be untangled in gender studies. Intellectual abilities are jumbled in with emotional tendencies, and I definitely think they should be considered separately. She pretty much ignores the effect of hormones on emotional states except for the case of fetal testosterone. I think that while this book doesn’t settle any gender issue questions, it does cast a lot of doubt on previous studies and urges us to look at them much harder.
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Dec 16, 2010 Nathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned, science-fact

There's a lot of bollocks claimed about "innate mental differences" between men and women, which Cordelia Fine does a good job of breaking down. She is sharp and acerbic, sarcastic and yet scientifically precise, in her demolition of the claims of differences. I can understand how, if you've been fighting the good fight all your life, saying that "girls are better with people, boys are better at programming" is a social construct not a biological one, then this book is something you clap and che...more

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Dec 07, 2010 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, sociology, science, feminist, psychology, female-author, evolution

This is not what I'd call a "popular science" book -- it's aimed at an intellectual audience with some understanding of science and a willingness to deal with academic language. That makes it less accessible than a lot of the talk show-fodder books it's debunking, like all those ridiculous "Why Men Are Insensitive Horndogs Who Suck at Housework (Surprise! It's Biology!) and Women Are Born Loving Ponies and High Heels" books. Fine takes on pretty much the entire field of neuroscience, or rather,...more

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Oct 23, 2010 Ashleigh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Gender studies have always interested me, and I was delighted to have the privilege to read an intelligent and eye opening book that looked at the subject of gender through neutral eyes. Though some call Delusions of Gender a feminist book, I disagree. I think it is an informative book that takes both female and male perspectives into account without judging either sex. Fine's book is full of research and fascinating studies and through these she debunks popular myths that keep women on the back...more

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Oct 13, 2010 Aurochz rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, feminism, neuorscience-evolution, science

I have been thinking about the topic contained in this book a lot lately. I have roughly asked friends, mostly male ones at that, what they think of the topic. A lot of them dismissed this sort of thing as environmental egalitarianism. While I agree that books of this nature and feminists in some extreme regards dismiss science and biological differences in favor of ideology, I also believe that this book in particular tries to avoid such measures.

The main point in this book is to point out that...more

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Feb 14, 2011 aimee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Gender studies have never been my thing. Not even a a little bit.

However, a recent review of Delusions of Gender inspired me to acquire and read it: an experience which certainly had an effect.

The book, in essence, calls out (and calls bullshit on) the popular neuroscience work and writings of people who claim that gender behavioural differences are due to inherent differences in brain structure.

While the book's message is a single, and clear, one hammered home repeatedly, I nonetheless enjoyed...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Fergus Ray murray rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, is an extended critique of efforts to scientifically study differences between the sexes, and the efforts of many writers to apply alleged science in their writings about such differences. The book is rich in technical detail, which might bog down some readers, but most of those details are fascinating. Fine is a lucid and entertaining writer, especially in her more acerbic moments - of which there are plenty here. She finds a lot of shoddy science and sham...more Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, is an extended critique of efforts to scientifically study differences between the sexes, and the efforts of many writers to apply alleged science in their writings about such differences. The book is rich in technical detail, which might bog down some readers, but most of those details are fascinating. Fine is a lucid and entertaining writer, especially in her more acerbic moments - of which there are plenty here. She finds a lot of shoddy science and shameless misuse of would-be science that would raise the hackles of any neuroscientist or feminist, let alone someone like her who happens to be both.

This is a book with an agenda, and political agendas tend not to sit comfortably with science - but to pretend that politics never seeps into science while nobody is looking would be disingenuous. In fact, Fine's agenda - to bring out the reasons to doubt science that supposedly demonstrates innate differences between sexes - is at least as much scientific as political, and I think it is legitimate. It is something to bear in mind while reading this book, though, and there are times she goes out of her way to present things in such a way as to minimise the possibility of interpretation in terms of innate differences. As far as I can see she always stops short of misrepresenting the science, though, and the whole approach needs to be seen in the context of discourse which routinely takes essential differences for granted, whether the evidence supports them or not.

The book is divided into three parts. The first is 'Half-changed World', Half-Changed Minds, which largely focuses on the interplay of cultural expectations and attempts to measure sex differences scientifically. This largely consists of accounts of experiments demonstrating the effects of cultural norms on things that people might be interested in measuring, and experiments which fail to take these factors into account. For example, she looks at experiments investigating the effect of telling the subjects what 'the latest science' has to say about the sorts of tests they are about to perform, to show that girls do significantly better on mathematical tasks if they think that science says they should. Even more subtly, females rate their mathematical ability as worse after they have just been reminded of their sex by having to tick a box at the beginning to say they are females. This gives us an interesting lens for looking at gender differences in maths tests which disregard the weight of cultural expectations, and indeed at systematic tendencies for females to choose less mathematical study and career paths.

Having established many profound and subtle ways that social expectations and structures shape behaviours and perfomance, the theme of the second part of the book is Neurosexism - premature efforts to explain differences in behaviour and performance with reference to the brain, rather than society. Fine's most basic point is that it is rather soon to be looking for explanations of most of these things in neuroscience, when societal explanations have not been ruled out, and the relationship between the mind and the brain is still so unclear. More than that, she shows time and again that many authors are disturbingly willing to go way beyond what neurology can tell us, while pretending that they are not. Perhaps the single worst offender here is Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain, a serial abuser and inventor of neuroscience to back up her ideas about the differences between males and females - but she is one of many. Fine makes the point that people have been finding 'explanations' for sex differences in the brain for well over a century, from the observation that female brains tend to be a bit lighter than male ones through to modern notions of hardwiring. At the same time, people have routinely assumed that all kinds of observed differences between the sexes are natural and inevitable, when later experience has regularly shown them to be no such thing.

The final section is titled Re-Cycling Gender, and it concerns itself with the future of gender relations and the science of sex. Fine is worried about the cyclical nature of some kinds of self-fulfilling prophecy - about dodgy science being used to teach yet another generation of young men and women that there are certain natural roles that they ought to be filling, certain characteristics they should expect to have. She emphasises again how difficult it is to pick apart innate and culturally conditioned differences, and the importance of keeping an open mind about questions that science has not yet been able to settle. With a better scientific understanding of the role of society in forming the mind and the brain, and a sceptical eye on the interesting but inconclusive findings of neuroscience, we may approach true sexual equality yet. Without such circumspection, as Fine argues, we may find ourselves sliding back to ideas about the sexes which are both unhelpful and ill-founded.

This is an important book, because the trend towards explaining sex differences with impressive-sounding neurological findings has great potential to set back ideas about gender roles, on the basis of evidence which is far flimsier than it might look. Because we are shaped by our ideas, this has major practical, political ramifications - it is not just good science that is at stake here. There is no doubt that some will resist Fine's approach for its politicisation of science, but I would be inclined to see it more as exploring the role of pre-existing, unexamined political bias, rather than introducing politics to the debate. Delusions of Gender is compelling, informative and perhaps most impressively, funny. I recommend this highly to anyone with any interest in neuroscience or gender.'

This review first appeared at http://everything2.com/title/Delusion...(less)

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Dec 02, 2012 Leanne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sociology, psychology, science, social-issues, non-fiction

I love the author's snarky sense of humour as she completely demolishes the claims of the neurosexist writers who have convinced the popular media that gender inequality is the necessary result of biological differences between the sexes. I really appreciate her thorough exposé of the misinformation peddled by those who want to see the sexes trapped in rigidly defined gender roles. I am actually quite relieved to learn that there is no real evidence to show that women are more emotional and nurt...more

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Sep 07, 2012 Duzzlebrarian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A great debunking of all those awful 'evo-devo' books that claim that the social inferiority of females is all our own fault, because we're born that way and anyway secretly we like it, and if you don't then there's something wrong with you. If you've ever read any of those books, and walked away grouchy feeling as if you've been both pathologised and patronised, but have been unable to debunk them because where do you get the data to throw against all those studies? - then this is the book for...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Alison Dellit rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, gender

This is the fourth book I've read in roughly seven months dealing with the debate around the neuroscience of gender, and it feels most like the outlier. I found myself wishing that Fine hadn't felt constrained to write as part of this broader debate, as a stand alone book on the topic of how we live up to our own sexist assumptions would be fascinating.

I'll say at the outset that I don't think the book really lives up to the title - the book doesn't ever really prove how differences are created...more This is the fourth book I've read in roughly seven months dealing with the debate around the neuroscience of gender, and it feels most like the outlier. I found myself wishing that Fine hadn't felt constrained to write as part of this broader debate, as a stand alone book on the topic of how we live up to our own sexist assumptions would be fascinating.

I'll say at the outset that I don't think the book really lives up to the title - the book doesn't ever really prove how differences are created exactly. Instead it focuses on showing the thousands of ways that researchers bring their own gender assumptions into measuring difference, and how, from early childhood, children learn to interpret implicit messages about gender, and how we all instinctively shift our behaviour and confidence to meeting these implicit assumptions. In doing so, it certainly shows the social construction of gender, but if there is a take-home message embedded in here, it is about the impossibility of humans truly breaking free of the culture and society we have constructed to understand who we might be within a different construction.

Many of the studies Fine cites are both fascinating and disturbing. She cites study after study that shows the mere act of being asked to define our gender can change the way we perform on a test, or respond to images. She argues persuasively that we are in fact more likely to change our behaviour from "benign" sexism than blatant discrimination. That our thoughts are governed by dozens of implicit assumptions, and that these assumptions - even when our concious mind understands them to be untrue - extend to our self perception and the expectations we set of others.

While briefly, the book tackles one of the most unasked questions in the other books I've read - if childhood gender differences in academic pursuit and games must be biologically based, what does that say for childhood racial difference (which is generally even more pronounced than gender in tests). Fine examines some of this research, and points to how powerfully we construct ideas about race at an early age as well. When these differences are mentioned in the gender debate, they are often ut down to economic and opportunity difference - to social causes. Boys and girls raised in the same houses, by "gender neutral" parents, it is argued, do not have these differences. Fine strongly challenges, however, this notion. Describing a world in which gender is the first, and strongest, difference children encounter, she points to studies which show children show a social understand of gender often in advance of a biological understanding. Where children pay less attention to what is told to them about gender, than to the patterns of behaviour they see around them.

She briefly talks about experiments with offering children different ways of defining difference, and how they respond, in what for me was the most interesting part of the book. Fine states a truth that I'm very familiar with among my friends and family, the shock that feminist parents encounter when their small children become the most rigid enforcers of gender 'norms' oftens disillusions them into certainty of biological gender difference. But Fine presents an alternative scenario - that children, at heart, just want a group to belong to, want to understand their role in the gender world. Children's desire for clear behavioural boundaries might be biological driven, but the content they put into the stereotype is socially understood. One of the strongest arguments in favour of this is that much of this content - the pink princess phenonoma - is relatively recent, historically speaking. Toy preference is one of the strongest gender differences in children - yet Fine cites studies where simply changing the colour of the toys changed the preference of children markedly.

Fine's approach is mostly look at studies of human assumption, more than to tackle the current theories around testosterone et al. The strong, and powerful, exception is a chapter on studies of human brain structure, where Fine points out the shaky basis for most claims, and even the completely contradictory findings which are both cited as justifying gender stereotypes.

The book is well written, and persuasive. I could have used more details on the differences in some of the studies, but the references are well-organised and easy to check. It's not an 'objective' book and does not pretend to be.

The areas where Fine's argument is weakest for me were in dealing with the multitude of studies of Intersex individuals, which Fine deals with briefly, and simply suggests that these women and girls know they are different, and change behaviour accordingly.

Fine also more or less ignores studies on animals, with a couple of exceptions for apes and monkeys (funniest part of the book for me - fine pointing out that a monkey selecting fake cookware toy could hardly be viewed as the "girls toy" decision it is reported as). There is, I suspect, an entire book to be written on the nature of non-simian and non-human gender construction and how relevant such studies are, but so far I've seen nothing.

This was a powerful, well-written, challenge to our notion that we can ever minimise or understand the way gender is created. Fine castigates us, at one point, for our failure of imagination in being able to envisign beyond the world we have created. In studying history, this failure is striking about other societies, who create their science and their gods alike in thier own image. I'm not sure, to be honest, it is simply a question of imagination. Maybe the world beyond our most implicit assumptions is only ever something we can briefly grasp.

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Mar 06, 2012 Nicole Ysabet rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

This book was a cogent, readable rebuttal to all the pop-psychology, pseudoscientific nonsense published about how alleged differences between men and women make men thuggish morons who can't wash a dish and women lightheaded bimbos incapable of understanding math. It made me want to do a dance of joy. Also, when talking about neuroimaging experiments which supposedly prove these "hardwired" differences, Cordelia Fine wrote this paragraph:

[...] When looking for changes in blood flow between two...more

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Mar 22, 2013 Sien R. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Delusions of Gender is a counterargument to the ever-popular "gendered brain" theory which has gained more and more momentum in the last decade. As someone who's studied Neuroscience in my undergrad, I felt that Fine's discussion of neurosexism as well as her enumeration and subsequent deconstruction of the common gendered brain arguments were definitively well-researched and convincing.

I would say, however, that conversations in the book regarding race, sexual orientation, and/or non-tradition...more

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About Cordelia Fine

An Australian author and academic psychologist.

http://www.cordeliafine.com/about.html

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“In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.” — 7 people liked it

“The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.” — 1 person liked it

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