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

Cordelia Fine

4.15 · Rating details · 7,264 ratings · 846 reviews

It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, news ...more

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Hardcover, 338 pages

Published August 30th 2010 by W.W. Norton & Company (first published February 1st 2005)

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· 7,264 ratings · 846 reviews

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Jul 13, 2011 Manny rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Anyone who's ever thought about gender differences

Recommended to Manny by: C.

Shelves: well-i-think-its-funny, the-tragedy-of-chess, science

This is a remarkably good book, and anyone who's remotely interested in claims that there might be inherent differences in mental function between men and women should read it. It's insightful, carefully researched, well-written and often very funny. And if it doesn't make you change your mind about at least a few things in this area, you are either a remarkably knowledgable person or an incurable bigot.

I had read a few books and articles that touched on the subject of inherent gender differences, and ...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: social-theory, psychology, language, science

Didn't realise Cordelia was Australian - This is a lovely video of her views: http://fora.tv/2010/10/02/Cordelia_Fi...

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 expla ...more

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Feb 13, 2015 Cecily rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: miscellaneous-non-fiction, science-ish, read-only-cos-of-gr-friends, sexuality-gender

A detailed but informal look at the pervasive power of gender stereotypes, backed by science. Sounds good, doesn't it? Not for me, though. My reading of this included International Women's Day; that wasn't intentional, but it felt like undeserved penance for such a day.

The 2* rating indicates how interesting and enjoyable this book was for me.
Were I rating in purely objective terms, it would be a solid 3* (maybe even 4*, given the importance of the intended message).

In a Nutshell

Fine deb/>In ...more

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Jan 20, 2012 ·Karen· rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone who's read Men are from Mars and Women can't read maps or some other neurosexist book

Shelves: best-of-2013, non-fiction

Things I have never seen*:

1) A male harpist.
Well, alright there was this guy:

But in an orchestra?
2)A female bishop in the Church of England
3)A female angler
4)A male nursery school teacher
5)A female truck driver

*I'm not saying they don't exist, and I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't exist, it's just that I've never seen one. Actually number 2 really doesn't exist, which is odd, as ...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Sarah rated it it was amazing

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, she ta ...more

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Jun 24, 2011 Simon rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, politics-and-society, gender

Truly a brilliant book. (And laugh-out-loud funny in quite a few places.) It's a book so full of interesting information, it's very tempting to write a review in which one relates one's favorite experiments, factoids, or statistics. But I will (mostly) resist. What I'd like to highlight are two features.

We have all heard (and perhaps told) stories like the following. "I wanted to bring up my children in a gender-neutral way, but at a certain point, the boy naturally took to smashing Truly a brilliant book. (And laugh-out-loud funny in quite a few places.) It's a book so full of interesting information, it's very tempting to write a review in which one relates one's favorite experiments, factoids, or statistics. But I will (mostly) resist. What I'd like to highlight are two features.

We have all heard (and perhaps told) stories like the following. "I wanted to bring up my children in a gender-neutral way, but at a certain point, the boy naturally took to smashing up trucks and the girl naturally took to worshipping pink princess paraphernalia. So I guess these things must be innate after all." This phenomenon is known to sociologists as the "biology as fallback" position. In one particularly grating and smug riff on this theme, Steven Pinker is quoted as saying: "there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless'." And Fine goes on to comment: "The frustration of the naively nonsexist parent has become a staple joke. An all but obligatory paragraph in contemporary books and articles about hardwired gender differences gleefully describes a parent's valiant, but always comically hopeless, attempts at gender-neutral parenting" (190-1). But then Fine tells us about the Bems, psychologists who, in the 1970s, decided to try gender-neutral parenting seriously. And what a lot it involved. They would doctor all their children’s books, whiting out beards, lengthening hair, and adding breasts to some of the illustrations (no doubt to rectify the fact that in the illustrations of children’s books, even today, males are represented at a ratio of 2:1 relative to females – oops, a factoid just slipped out!), “deleting or altering sections of the text that described females or males in a sex-stereotyped manner” (215), and so on. They also taught their children only to allocate people to a gender on the basis of their anatomy and reproductive functions. (In an amusing story, the 4 year old son decided to wear barrettes in his hair to kindergarten. He tried to correct his classmate’s misconception by saying that he wasn’t a girl because he had a penis, not a vagina. The other boy retorted “Everyone has a penis, but only girls wear barrettes.”)

As Fine points out, the moral of this story is not to elicit admiration (or contempt) for the Bems, but to illustrate just how hard it is to raise a child in a gender-neutral way. The best efforts of the comically frustrated liberal parents who find their kids acting according to stereotype do not show that differences in gender behavior are innate. As Fine describes, gendering of children is ubiquitous in the culture, and intense to an almost unimaginable degree. Not even the Bem children could avoid it altogether. And children are acutely sensitive to the multiple instructions they receive, in the very air they breathe, about how to conform to their genders. (Children randomly assigned at preschool to a ‘red’ group or a ‘blue’ group, and wearing the appropriate colored T-shirts to school each day, after three weeks, with no further reinforcement, will find themselves conforming to what they take to be the norms for their respective groups. One needs little imagination to see how much more intrusive the pressures on gender conformity will be, even if the parents are like the Bems.)

This brings me to the second point I want to emphasize. A host of brain researchers now present themselves as radical iconoclasts because they claim that the evidence of fMRIs, etc. prove that there are innate differences between male and female brains, forcing them to buck the prevailing norms of political correctness, in the starry-eyed gender-neutral utopias of which they would so much love to believe. Boo hoo! As Fine’s book makes amply clear, science has always alighted on the newest thing – brain size, spinal chord strength, nerve fragility, energy-sapping ovaries – to show why gender inequalities (that always accord greater status and power to men) are natural. Seen in this light, fMRIs are just the latest fad. Of course, that doesn’t prove that the claims made about what they show are false. Fine has plenty more to say about how shoddy a lot of the research is, how biased the interpretations of it, and so on. But this history is certainly salient enough that anyone presenting themselves as providing scientific evidence for gender differences in psychology and behavior risks looking somewhat ridiculous. And it places a burden on such researchers to be doubly careful about extrapolating from their results. This is even more true in light of the fact that the existence of the claims made for what brain scans show itself influences how well people perform. In tests, women do less well at male-stereotypical tasks when asked to read some ‘scientific’ claims about women’s innate inferiority in such tasks than if asked to read something else first. These irresponsible and popular interpretations of neurological evidence (neuro-bollocks as they have been called) do not just support the status quo; they reinforce it.

Fine’s book packs a huge punch. In a funny and easy-to-read way, she explodes so much neuro-bollocks, she ought to get a prize for it.
...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Hadrian rated it really liked it

Shelves: gender-studies-sexuality-lgbt-etc, society-culture-anthropology-etc, neuroscience, psychology-and-cognition, nonfiction

I'm impressed with this book. It addresses multiple points of human psychology and has 100+ pages of citations, but still has an accessible and darkly witty style.

Fine's target in this book is what she calls 'neurosexism' - misinterpretations of modern neuroscience which supposedly justify stereotypes and perpetuate discrimination against women in society. Women are supposedly more empathetic, men are more analytic, women can't lead, men can't raise children, etc., etc. The roots of these belie ...more

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Jun 01, 2014 Thomas rated it really liked it

Shelves: psychology, feminism, nonfiction

If I had a dollar for every time someone friend requested me on Goodreads because of my gender ("a guy who reads? wow!") I would probably have enough money to buy a new Kindle. As a male who loves books and aims for a career in clinical/counseling psychology - a more and more female-dominated field - part of me has always wondered whether I just lack the typical "male" brain. Are girls biologically geared toward the humanities and males toward the hard sciences? Do women really empathize more th If I had a dollar for every time someone friend requested me on Goodreads because of my gender ("a guy who reads? wow!") I would probably have enough money to buy a new Kindle. As a male who loves books and aims for a career in clinical/counseling psychology - a more and more female-dominated field - part of me has always wondered whether I just lack the typical "male" brain. Are girls biologically geared toward the humanities and males toward the hard sciences? Do women really empathize more than men because of their brain chemistry?

Cordelia Fine offers a clear answer: no. In Delusions of Gender, she unravels the myth that we can chalk up gender differences to our neurology. With a keen and unrelenting eye, she examines scientific theories and misconceptions, like the role testosterone plays in the fetus. She dedicates a large portion of the book to knocking down neurosexism. In recent years several individuals have boasted about experiments that use fMRI and PET scans to detect differences in the brain; Fine makes sure to reveal the flaws associated with those studies and why we should be skeptical of the conclusions they espouse.

Instead of relying on faulty science, Fine approaches gender differences from a psychological and sociological perspective. As a psychology major, I loved her incorporation of self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotype threat, such as including a study about how women who had to check a gender box (either "male" or "female") performed worse on an exam than women who took the test without marking their gender. The section about gender-neutral parenting stood out to me too. It's not enough to just offer our children toys stereotypically associated with the opposing gender, especially when gender distinctions arise so soon.

Highly recommended for those interested in feminism, neuroscience, psychology, or gender studies. In contemporary society we often cling to claims made by people with scientific backgrounds, even though some of those claims have no legitimate support. I didn't go into too much depth about all of Fine's arguments in this review, but she invested a laudable amount of effort into Delusions of Gender: the book has about 100 pages of citations, and her writing conveys her passion as well. ...more

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Jun 27, 2014 Kaethe Douglas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: gender, education, kids, medicine, skepticism, science, history, feminism, parenting, domesticity

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 t 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.

Israeli study shows that blinding math tests lowers boys' grades and raises girls', just as blinded auditions changed orchestras.

Just to be clear: It is not possible to find biological determinants of gender, because gender is learned social behavior, and, as such, varies significantly between social groups and over time. ...more

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Aug 23, 2013 Zanna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, favourites, stem

I really think all educators need to read this book. Fine's target is the new gender essentialism, the reconstructed sexism that attempts to put women back in their traditional roles as 'unbenders of husbands' brows' and caregivers to children, and to keep them out of politics, mathematics and the sciences, by asserting that they are fitted for their place by essential female abilities and incapacities. In 1869 the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his book The Subjection of Women, was severe on this f I really think all educators need to read this book. Fine's target is the new gender essentialism, the reconstructed sexism that attempts to put women back in their traditional roles as 'unbenders of husbands' brows' and caregivers to children, and to keep them out of politics, mathematics and the sciences, by asserting that they are fitted for their place by essential female abilities and incapacities. In 1869 the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his book The Subjection of Women, was severe on this fallacy, but like a zombie it just keeps getting up, backed by the bad-science fad of the day. 'Neurosexists' are advising school-leaders to adjust their teaching for gender differences, and with the threat of 'empathy-based math' looming Fine felt she must call a halt. She selects some choice quotes to show us how little the new sexism differs from the old (this is a very funny book), then proceeds to dismantle it with a three-pronged attack.

First, she explores the construction of gender and explains aspects of the present inequality from her perspective in social psychology. She quotes trans woman Jan Morris who describes her former competence in matters of car-reversing and bottle-opening evaporating after her transition in the face of others' assumptions about her. The power of stereotyping is not to be ignored; Fine quotes study after study to show how strongly most people, whether consciously or not, associate women with empathy and caregiving, and men with maths, science and power, and how priming gender affects subsequent thinking and performance. Simply reminding a candidate that she is a woman drastically reduces her score on a maths test, demonstrating an effect called 'stereotype threat' which is amazingly easy to remove - including an introduction to a test telling participants that 'in ten years of data-gathering, no gender-related performance difference has been found' dramatically boosts the performance of women and girls. Cross-cultural comparisons also prove instructive, making nonsense of ethnocentric gender assumptions.

Fine explores how stereotypes and the lack of role models work against women in the workplace and in education. This section is more broadly relevant to racial, social class, disabled, LGBTQ etc representation and the double bind problem of administrators appointing people like themselves on one side, and aspirations being damped by the invisibility of marginalised groups on the other. CVs with female names are rated lower and receive fewer responses than identical ones with male names. Fine also indicts sexist work practices such as entertaining clients in strip-clubs. Stereotypes also operate in the home, where men are conditioned to believe themselves incompetent (the hunter brings home the the carcass and collapses to stare into the fire) unless jar-opening brawn or plug-wiring brains are required. Fine demonstrates that men are very competent parents. Even rat-dads, with no hormone-tampering, are readily able to raise perfectly adjusted rat-kids.

Surveying the data, Fine finds very scant evidence for the assumption that women are more empathic than men; there is no magical female ability to read people's thoughts, and slight differences in young children could easily be due to parents talking more to infant girls. The evidence for male superiority in mathematical/analytical tasks is also thin, restricted to performance at mentally rotating 3D objects. Even this could be due to more exposure to active toys, and in any case hardly constitutes an excuse to exclude women from the workplace. Fine is hilarious when exposing the loaded survey questions that have been used to find gender differences. Research makes it very clear that people will rate themselves higher or lower on abilities stereotyped to or against their gender, especially when that aspect of their identity has been primed.

The search for gender-determined ability differences continues with a painstaking survey and critique of the popular literature enthusiastically claiming they exist and the neurological and psychological research which has supposedly found them. Fine is incisive in her discussion and criticism of studies around the effect of testosterone, including play differences, but she is damning when it comes to the shocking dishonesty and misrepresentation employed by 'neurosexist' popular 'science' books. Oh, and if you don't manage to read this book, please take it from me here and now, that anyone trying to persuade you of a gender difference on the basis of pictures from brain scans is to be scornfully ignored.

The final section deals with how children are socialised to perform gender. Many parents assume they are providing gender-neutral parenting and 'fall back' on a biological explanation when their little girls demand pink dresses and dolls. Fine shows just how far parents have to go to eliminate the pressure to perform gender by recording the hilarious experience of the Bem family, forced to such lengths as denying that they knew the gender of friends, and erasing beards from picture books. How can a preference for pink be genetic? In Victorian times, it was a male colour, while girls wore tranquil Virgin-Mary blue. Fine demonstrates with survey after survey and study after brilliant study that gender roles are pushed on us by our culture, not our chromosomes.

'As neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier put it over two decades ago, we should "view biology as potential, as capacity and not as static identity. Biology itself is socially influenced and defined; it changes and develops in interaction with and in response to our minds and environment, as our behaviours do. Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant"' ...more

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Oct 06, 2010 Lobstergirl rated it really liked it

Cordelia Fine, a psychologist, decided to write this book after discovering her son's kindergarten teacher "reading a book that claimed his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language."

The first section of the book was slow reading for me. Fine engages in occasional snark, which was a little tiresome, followed by a lot of discussion of studies in which subjects are either told or not told statements about gender and then asked to perform certain tasks, ...more

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Sep 08, 2013 notgettingenough rated it liked it

Shelves: australian, sociology, science-sort-of

18 Sept 2013 Update: some stories reading Karen's review brought to mind from my childhood....

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

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My mother spent a year or so teaching at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, one of the posh boys schools, at a time when women didn't do that (perhaps they still don't?). It was the early seventies and 18 Sept 2013 Update: some stories reading Karen's review brought to mind from my childhood....

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

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My mother spent a year or so teaching at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, one of the posh boys schools, at a time when women didn't do that (perhaps they still don't?). It was the early seventies and she was a huge hit with the boys - big tits and sexy legs - and the teachers - big tits, sexy legs...arrhh, no, I mean great mind, they all admired her mind no end. They admired the way it went all the way up to her breasts. I mean the top of her head. All the way up there. One of the reasons she left was because they were all so very kind to her. 'Monica,' they'd kindly say to her, 'you don't have to bother going to staff meetings.' The fact that she protested and insisted she wanted to go to staff meetings was of no avail. It is one of those things, isn't it? Nobody wants to go to staff meetings, every man there must have rather envied the idea that femininity could excuse her, and yet my mother had to insist on her innate right to go to the darn things. To be fair, my mother's the exception, one of those who really did like doing stuff like that, a trait I have most certainly neither inherited nor acquired.

So she left and went to Methodist Ladies College, the posh girls equivalent. At some point two of the kind male teachers from PAC happened to be visiting MLC, so she took them to the staff room for a cuppa. Afterwards she washed her cup and said to them 'If you are wondering why I don't wash yours, I happen to believe that men are just as good as women at washing up.' 'Oh, better,' said one of them to her, 'Much better.'

And that is pretty much the point of this guide to the literature on the brain differences between men and women. If there were some reason why men suddenly thought that washing teacups was a desirable occupation, there would be an academic redefinition of the brain to fit this. In fact for now it is the other way around. The desirable occupations in life, the ones that are seen as the plums, must be taken up by men rather than women because they have the right brain composition. Depending on how good your sense of humour is, it is either discomforting or hilarious to discover that neuroscience is not above redefining what is 'necessary' depending on how their business of deciphering the brain develops.

This explains the choice of word in the subtitle - neurosexism - but it is the sort of thing that irritated me as I read this - I don't like the current style of pop science where impartiality is a positive defect. It's like there is something going on which we might call 'extreme pop science'. You have to outdo the last writer in outrageousness. But while I was aghast at some of the ways she put things, I imagine the reader at large would not have noticed, let alone taken umbrage. Fine probably thinks it was acceptable to do so because all that mattered was getting her very important point across. I couldn't disagree more. Her material spoke for itself, the relentless mass of it which she brings to bear. She didn't need to be spurious on top of it. She should have left that for her publicly disgraced subjects. As it is, by waving the flag of her partiality - which she somehow attempts to do whilst claiming that this is the issue with the other side - right in our faces, she left me wondering if she is as trustworthy as she wants to be. Having the longest bibliography in the world doesn't cut the mustard if the reader is left gasping at the shamelessness with which she prejudicially discusses her data. Take this, for example:

rest here:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres... ...more

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Oct 02, 2014 Marshall rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, psychology

This nature vs. nurture debate is getting old.

This book argues against the claim that women and men have different brains and that this difference causes women to be significantly better or worse at some things and men significantly better or worse at others. As far as I knew, few legitimate scientists today make this claim, which is clearly sexist and would justify discrimination, so I was pretty surprised and somewhat skeptical to discover this immense sexist contingent among brain ...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Saafir Evada rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology, neuroscience, feminism

I like nothing better than to discover that I was completely and utterly mistaken about something. The deeper the rotten belief sits, the more satisfying the pop when it is wrenched out.

This book changed my mind in ways few books ever do. I had a cavalier belief that psychological differences between men and women were "innate" and "biological." I had no idea how scant the evidence was for this idea.

I highly recommend this book.

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Mar 16, 2012 Jenny Schwartz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, science, aww2012

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 arg 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. ...more

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Apr 22, 2015 Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, best-10-books-read-in-2015, 4-stars-and-a-half, psychology, science

We’ve all encountered those pop science books, the ones that claim “hardwired” differences between male and female minds. Cordelia Fine has seen them too, but instead of simply accepting their assertions because they sound scientific, she delved into the research, tracking down the studies that purportedly establish these claims, as well as the substantial body of research showing quite the opposite. The result is this book. It is not pop science – there is nothing dumbed-down about it, and Dr. We’ve all encountered those pop science books, the ones that claim “hardwired” differences between male and female minds. Cordelia Fine has seen them too, but instead of simply accepting their assertions because they sound scientific, she delved into the research, tracking down the studies that purportedly establish these claims, as well as the substantial body of research showing quite the opposite. The result is this book. It is not pop science – there is nothing dumbed-down about it, and Dr. Fine’s points are supported by extensive research, included in the endnotes and bibliography – but nor is it dry, academic material. It is aimed at the intelligent reader who may or may not have a science background; I do not, but found the book fascinating, clear, and well-organized, with strong, logical analysis of the research and even a few moments of humor.

There is a strange tendency to view differences in current achievements between men and women as proof of inherently different abilities. This was true even in the 19th century, when women lacked the educational tools and the freedom to even begin to compete. Regardless of that small detail and the fact that gender roles in society continue to change, there are always those who claim that whatever women are achieving at the moment is the absolute biologically-determined limit. Now that we have at least officially achieved equality, some writers continue to make the same claims, conveniently setting aside differences in expectations, role models, and differing social demands on women’s time (women still do the bulk of the housework – even when they’re employed and their male partners are not!). This book deals with three main areas of gender research, to see what has actually been proven.

First, tweaking the environment can eliminate gender differences in test performance: tell women before a test that they as good at math as men, and they will be; tell them they’re biologically limited, and they fall behind. Show a commercial featuring women behaving in stereotypical ways before a math test, and women’s performance goes down. On a test in mental rotation of objects, tell participants that it predicts ability in fields such as engineering and navigation, and men do much better; say it predicts ability in clothing design and interior decoration, and men’s scores go down. On the other hand, remind participants that women are supposed to be better at empathizing than men, and they’ll do better at recognizing emotions. Women report more empathetic ability than men do, but in in real-life situations, no gender differences in mind-reading have been found. Women will respond to an ethical dilemma in more caring ways than men after an exercise forcing participants to think about gender, but both genders will respond in the same way after non-gender-related exercises. In other words, emphasizing gender makes us more stereotypical; it reminds us how we are supposed to behave and what our strengths and weaknesses should be. And if a simple reminder right before a test can alter performance, how much more growing up in a world with constant reminders of gender?

Second, the book takes on brain research that has been used to “prove” inherent differences between men and women. We should approach this research with a healthy dose of skepticism, for several reasons. This field is still experimental, tends to use very small sample sizes, and the actual studies often show much less than (or something completely different from) what pop science authors claim. (In one particularly egregious example, an author drew gender differences from a study with only female participants.) But the unsuspecting public tends to take as immutable fact anything labeled “brain science,” even if the results aren’t borne out in observed human behavior. Nevertheless, every generation seems to have its own pseudoscientific theories for why women are inferior, whether it’s that women’s smaller bodies or energy-sapping ovaries prevent sustained mental activity, or that men use one brain hemisphere at a time while women use both (a theory that will presumably be revised based on research showing that interaction between the hemispheres is associated with strong math abilities).

Third, there’s the section on gender development in children. Many parents, finding that their daughters love princess costumes and their sons toy trucks without need for parental encouragement, conclude that these differences must be hardwired. But unless your children consume no media and interact with no one outside the family, it’s impossible to prevent their picking up on societal expectations, and kids are always searching for information about how the world works and how to categorize themselves within it. That’s leaving aside unconscious differences in the way parents (and researchers) treat children: for instances, studies have found mothers talking more to baby girls than baby boys, and underestimating girls’ crawling abilities while overestimating boys’.

One can see, then, how all of these areas work together to create continuing perceptions of different abilities. As the author puts it: “So far, the items on that list of brain differences that are thought to explain the gender status quo have always, in the end, been crossed off. But before this happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our minds, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.”

And I’ve only scratched the surface of the information found in this book. Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in gender (and with the possible added benefit of reducing your own stereotypical behavior!). ...more

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May 03, 2014 Alissa Thorne rated it it was ok

Shelves: genre-nonfiction, about-gender

Warning: ranty.

I was hoping for a balanced examination of the scientific evidence of biological/brain gender differences or the lack thereof. What I got was, firstly a heavy handed review of the sociological and cultural explanations for gender differences in society, and second a condescending and clearly biased review of the scientific evidence for biological/brain gender differences as an explanation for cultural gender differences.

I did learn some interesting things. Warning: ranty.

I was hoping for a balanced examination of the scientific evidence of biological/brain gender differences or the lack thereof. What I got was, firstly a heavy handed review of the sociological and cultural explanations for gender differences in society, and second a condescending and clearly biased review of the scientific evidence for biological/brain gender differences as an explanation for cultural gender differences.

I did learn some interesting things. One study showed a clear gender prejudice in hiring for engineering roles. Identical resumes were sent to companies with only a change in the name being obviously female versus obviously male, and the male resumes had a higher response rate.

A theme throughout the book was the relationship of self-identification and social grouping--basically the influence that feeling that "people like me" has on our self-image, and in turn our actions, behavior, aptitude. A simple example is the study in which female college students were asked if they were interested in pursuing engineering studies, but in differing environments. One environment featured a classic geek decor, while the other featured a more preppy decor. The female students were about equal to the male students in positively responding to the idea of studying engineering in the preppy lab, while response rate dropped when asked surrounded by D&D and candy wrappers. (This seems much broader than a gender issue to me, but it's a gender book, so ok.)

When it came to the potential non-social influences though... bias and condescension, oh my! (I think the narration made this particularly cringe-worthy--the sneer when describing a competing theory, or the pompus and self-important voice used when quoting an opponent were particularly off-putting.) In a study showing evidence in favor of biological explanations for gender differences in behavior, the author would (rightly) lambaste the study for using self-reports valid evidence. Then pages later, in a study intended to offer an alternate explanation would be a phrase like, "Mothers of infants report..."

Peppered throughout the book, most often on opening chapters, were arguments that amounted to:

"Here's an obviously incorrect or invalid argument that would horrify modern readers with current data." --some sexist dude from 100 years ago

"Here's a current hypothesis regarding gender differences that deserves further study." --some modern scientist

See how they're the same! Obviously the modern scientist is wrong because their hypothesis bears some surface similarities to someone from a different time who held beliefs we know to be untrue!

While I did learn that there was little or no valid evidence for some of the biological gender differences that I had previously heard touted, it was hardly a review of what differences are known to exist. This was most obvious when the author mentioned in passing that one known gender difference--smaller brains of females versus males--results in extensive structural differences in the brain. And that this most likely served to make the genders more similar, as the different structures achieved different things in the same way.

Such a key piece of data and the huge assertion must be backed by chapters of exposition of the evidence and detailed critique of the studies backing it--in short, the same treatment given to any other hypothesis in the book, right? In a book about how gender based brain differences may impact gender behaviors, surely the fact that there is allegedly structural brain differences will be examined in detail. And the hypothesis that these differences may work to achieve gender similarities will be backed by multiple studies, each carefully critiqued, right? No, this statement was simply made, and then passed right on by.

I'm glad I forced myself through this book--you can still learn a lot from a biased account. But man, it was tough to get through. ...more

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Jun 07, 2011 Alex rated it it was amazing · 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 thi ...more

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Feb 13, 2018 Barbara (The Bibliophage) rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio, feminism-and-women-s-studies, science-and-medicine, 2018, own-digital, booked2018

Cordelia Fine is a scientist, feminist, and a mom. Her book debunks studies that purport to be solid science, but ultimately just support gender stereotypes. She discusses how gender neutral parenting is nearly impossible in today’s society. And how this, along with neuroplasticity, mean that brains cannot possibly be hard-wired by gender. (Neuroplasticity = brain’s ability to change.)

Many more details in my review at TheBibliophage.

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Dec 07, 2010 David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

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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Aug 11, 2012 Marta rated it really liked it

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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Nov 06, 2010 Kogiopsis rated it really liked it

Shelves: reviewed, nonfiction, why-i-love-my-kindle, favorite-2015-reads

Many of the general ideas presented in this book were familiar to me: claims of true neurological basis for differences between the sexes are bunk; areas in which people seem to be 'deficient' are often socially created rather than biological; current conceptions of binary gender essentialism must be abandoned. However, for all that the conclusions Cordelia Fine drew were hardly surprising to me, reading this book had a significant impact. It felt almost like an out of body experience, to read a Many of the general ideas presented in this book were familiar to me: claims of true neurological basis for differences between the sexes are bunk; areas in which people seem to be 'deficient' are often socially created rather than biological; current conceptions of binary gender essentialism must be abandoned. However, for all that the conclusions Cordelia Fine drew were hardly surprising to me, reading this book had a significant impact. It felt almost like an out of body experience, to read about these studies and then look at similar cases in my own life and, all of a sudden, to be able to see the strings. This is probably what Neo felt like when he learned to see the Matrix. It's disorienting.

I read this book on a road trip with my parents, and I'm sure they wish I hadn't because I would not shut up about it. Partly, that's because I couldn't really process it without talking about it and applying it; partly, that's because my mom is a teacher and my dad is an engineer and I feel like the things I was learning from Cordelia Fine are intimately applicable to their work and dealing with other people. That's probably true of most people, though; but since one has direct impact on how confident students feel speaking in her courses and the other interacts with younger engineers, this seemed very relevant. I think I've probably brought the book up once a week since, too.

The one concept that sticks with me the most is that of stereotype threat. Simply put, stereotype threat describes an effect when someone, being aware that a group they are part of is believed to have a certain capability, changes the way they approach that task. (For instance, women who are reminded of the stereotype that women are bad at math perform worse on math tests.) I had to set the book aside when I read that, because it explained so much about things I've struggled with: when you're under stereotype threat, your brain switches from trying to achieve success to trying to avoid failure, making you less innovative and confident, and slowing you down in completing the task. It's a feeling of being stifled, being trapped, that I've experienced a lot more than I'd like to, and finally having an explanation for it is clearing up a lot in my life.

I wound up taking a star off of my rating for this book for two reasons - one, Fine's very binarist, cis-normative handling of gender erases or ignores trans* people, and while I see the rhetorical reasoning for that given the book's argument, it's still a weakness; and two, while she dissected research that she disagreed with very thoroughly, I found myself wondering if the studies she cited would stand up to a similar level of scrutiny. Given the nature of the book, I assume her research was thoroughly done, but there's still a distinct rhetorical strategy to the final work and I couldn't stop wondering if that had shaped the results presented. ...more

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Jul 08, 2011 Robin rated it liked it

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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Jul 29, 2012 The Crimson Fucker rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

God damn! This book actually changed the way I see the world!! I shall do it justice with a worthy review! Just way till I get my hands on a computer!

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Feb 08, 2015 Deema rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: by-women, feminism-gender-equality, interesting-recommendations, best, 2015, thinking-about-thinking, science-for-the-masses

I’ve been meaning to review this book for ages, but whenever I attempt to write something, I’m lost at what to include and what to leave out. All of it was so important in shaping my understanding of gender and I don’t know how to write a review convincing enough to get other people to read it. That being said, I’ve raved about this book to enough friends to know that it’s made an impact on me, and so I will sit down and attempt this for the fifth time and hope that I will finally be able to get I’ve been meaning to review this book for ages, but whenever I attempt to write something, I’m lost at what to include and what to leave out. All of it was so important in shaping my understanding of gender and I don’t know how to write a review convincing enough to get other people to read it. That being said, I’ve raved about this book to enough friends to know that it’s made an impact on me, and so I will sit down and attempt this for the fifth time and hope that I will finally be able to get the right words out.

Delusions of Gender is split into three sections, all of which argue the same thing: there are no discernible neurological differences between males and females. But society, our minds, and badly designed scientific experiments have made us believe that there are.

I have no background in cognitive psychology or neuroscience, so I picked this up as a beginner, and worried that I wouldn’t be able to understand the more technical parts. As it turns out, Cordelia Fine has an accessible writing style and is able to take complex concepts and explain them in relatively simple terms, so I never found myself lost or confused. I may have slightly benefited by preceding this book with David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, which explained “priming” to me – a concept mentioned heavily in Delusions of Gender, and a concept everyone should be familiar with.

Priming, by the way, is the way our minds are affected by subtle changes in our surroundings. These changes in surroundings, which would seem insignificant to you and me, can affect our brains so drastically that they seep into our performance on tasks and our perceptions of reality. For example, if a girl who is just about to write an exam is told that girls normally perform worse than boys on this type of exam, then her brain will be primed to do worse, regardless of her actual skill level. Similarly, if she is told that girls normally perform better than boys on this type of exam, then she will do better, regardless of her skill level.

We have been primed by society to perform according to our genders, and this process starts early. The continuous nature of this priming, which comes to us in the form of advertisements, television programs, teachers, school peers, and even our parents, has led to a cycle of self-confirming “biological certainties,” such as “girls are better than boys at communication” and “boys are better than girls at math”. The more we are taught these differences, the more we perform according to them. The more we perform according to them, the more we believe in biological differences between genders. The more we believe in biological differences between genders… you get the picture. It’s fascinating, and shocking, and phrased a whole lot better by Cordelia Fine.

When you take this theory and expand it on a mass level, it makes sense why people think women and girls aren’t good at math, science, sports, and other typically “male” things and why their behaviors normally align with these gendered expectations.

In the next section of the book, Fine carefully rebuts the many scientific experiments and studies that claim to prove the inherent differences between male and female brains. Scientists and the public have used these experiments for decades to support their sexist claims about girls and women, but Fine is here to tell us that those experiments had small sample sizes, flimsy experiment designs, and other glaring holes that should make us all question their scientific authority.

Each claim she makes in this section is backed up by solid research, and all her sources are outlined in the endnotes and bibliography, which together span about 80 pages. She also provides counter-studies along the way to disprove these experiments, all of which help drive her initial point home. At the end of this section, she points to a mass study, or meta-analysis, that puts together data from thousands of participants from various studies investigating the same question, and showed that, when using a large sample size (as opposed to the small ones normally used in these experiments), most of the trends that scientists have claimed to find on gender differences turn out to be statistically insignificant, and therefore unsupported by science.

Fine also points to the important concept of neuroplasticity, or how our brains are constantly being shaped by external factors, such as our social environment and experiences: “where else but in the brain would we see the effects of socialization or experience?” As such, it isn’t as simple as making X discovery about the female brain and then making Y pronouncement about “hardwired” gender differences. Our brains are malleable and heavily influenced by external factors, which, more often than not, are working against us, and these factors need to be honestly discussed by scientists who enter into this field of work.

All in all, I have benefited greatly from this book. It has reshaped the way I think about gender, and has made me much more wary of oft-repeated statements on “gender differences” and “female psychology”. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in gender, science, neuroscience, or even just in a good book on psychology, because it’s well written, funny, and highly informative. ...more

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Aug 21, 2013 Siria rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, nonfiction, science

Delusions of Gender is an enjoyably acerbic and eloquent takedown of evolutionary psychologists and their neuroscientist collaborators—those practitioners of Bad Science, whose work is often repeated uncritically in tabloid newspapers or used to shape educational curricula. Cordelia Fine examines a number of supposedly scientific studies, together with the books and newspaper articles which have popularised them for a general audience (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and their odious ilk), which seek t(Men Delusions of Gender is an enjoyably acerbic and eloquent takedown of evolutionary psychologists and their neuroscientist collaborators—those practitioners of Bad Science, whose work is often repeated uncritically in tabloid newspapers or used to shape educational curricula. Cordelia Fine examines a number of supposedly scientific studies, together with the books and newspaper articles which have popularised them for a general audience (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and their odious ilk), which seek to explain gender difference and inequality through neurological differences.

Many of these studies, as Fine points out, have shoddy methodology, questionable assumptions and/or have conclusions which rely on circular logic. Researchers conflate the brain and the mind in order for their findings to conform with gender stereotypes. Men and women have biological differences, Fine states, which may reflect on different brains, but there is no proof that these differences map onto tasks, preferences, modes of thinking, etc. Indeed, there may be more similarities between a man and a woman who both have a comparatively large brain relative to their body mass than between a woman with a comparatively large brain and a woman with a comparatively small brain. Gender difference doesn't create gender inequality—it may well be vice versa.

As someone who works in the humanities and not the sciences, I did learn a lot from this book, particularly in terms of how to interpret (or not) neuroscientific data. Fine has done a good job of synthesising a lot of secondary material in a very readable way. However, I did think there were some surprising omissions here—there is no consideration, or even mention, of societies in which there are more than two genders, and there's no mention of transgender or genderqueer people. While I'm sure that most of the scientific data that Fine deals with assume binary gender, and was gathered from predominantly white Westerners, I do think that had she done a bit more digging, she would have unearthed a wealth of work which would have undermined the assumption of the Western-centric gender binary while supporting the very point she's trying to make. ...more

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Nov 27, 2018 Ben Babcock rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, non-fiction, science, culture, 2018-read

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and that’s just the way it is, right? Girls like nurturing toys and boys like toys that involve motion or action, and don’t even bother trying to change those habits—they’re ingrained at birth, yeah? Doubtless you’ve heard these and other stereotypes and claims about the biological origins of sex differences. In some cases, such as the pink/blue divide, you might already be aware of the history of the phenomenon, including the fact that the colour assignme Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and that’s just the way it is, right? Girls like nurturing toys and boys like toys that involve motion or action, and don’t even bother trying to change those habits—they’re ingrained at birth, yeah? Doubtless you’ve heard these and other stereotypes and claims about the biological origins of sex differences. In some cases, such as the pink/blue divide, you might already be aware of the history of the phenomenon, including the fact that the colour assignments used to be reversed. Nevertheless, like any area of science, pseudoscience has set up shop in the study of gender, bolstered by media’s intense desire to seize on anything that has the patina of advanced, hi-tech science even when the results come from flawed research.

Delusions of Gender is a thorough debunking by Cordelia Fine of scientific studies and scientific posturing regarding what we know about the biological (and particularly, neurological) differences between sexes. Fine basically wants to restore the reader’s doubt and uncertainty, challenging us to be a little more sceptical and critical of what we read and hear. She isn’t making the claim that sex and gender are entirely social constructs with no biological influences. Rather, her thesis is that the scientific study of sex and gender is still fraught with uncertainty, and we really don’t know as much as some people claim we know. There are a few reasons for this: firstly, although our technology for studying the brain has advanced considerably, we’re still a long way off from understanding it; secondly, it seems like people doing these studies are really vulnerable to spurious correlations; thirdly, the biological influences on sex and gender are complex because they interact with cultural conditioning in ways that are difficult to replicate reliably in a lab.

Somehow, Fine manages to distill this into a 250-page book, and it mostly works. She does a good job of wading through recentish (from my perspective, given that this book is verging on a decade old) research and writing, picking apart arguments and debunking theories. She links these ideas to much older ideas about sex and gender. And she provides some guidance to the layperson in terms of how we can approach learning about sex and gender, from a scientific perspective, in the future.

In Part 1, “'Half-Changed World,' Half-Changed Minds”, Fine catalogues the sex differences seen in modern society (mostly American, though often her homeland of Australia and sometimes the unhelpfully nebulous “West” in general). She reviews the standard gaps in workforce distribution, in pay, in equity of housework and other caring labour. This part is interesting but perhaps the least memorable, in my opinion, particularly if you’re not someone who needs much convincing of the inequities that exist owing to one’s gender. Perhaps the most interesting chapter was “XX-clusion and XXX-clusion”, in which Fine discusses the difficulties of defining gender in any concrete biological sense. This seems particularly topical given absurd rumblings from the US government about defining gender in law. Again, I was already well aware of a lot of what Fine said in thsi chapter, but she lays it out clearly.

Part 2, “Neurosexism”, is where the book really starts to come into its own. This is where Fine tackles claims about differences between “male” and “female” brains. This whole part is valuable because she talks specifics, right down to the study and the scientists conducting them. Laypeople (myself included) often put a lot of stock into scientific results that come from what appear to be more rigorous or “hard” experiments, like MRI scans, as contrasted with a “soft” experiment like a psychological study. This is a bias that’s really hard, at least in my experience, to counteract. So it’s well worth my time to check that bias by being reminded of all the ways in which scientists (who are human, and therefore faulty) can draw faulty conclusions from these types of experiments. Fine challenges the shallow understanding most people have of the links between testosterone and masculinity; she points out that animal behaviour (even primate behaviour) can’t always be used as an analogy for unsocialized human behaviour, etc. This section is just a great reminder in general that science is a human process, and like any human process, is prone to error and a good tonic against thinking of science as this black box that we put experimental data into and get facts about the world out of.

The final part, “Recycling Gender”, is where Fine provides some opinion and analysis of the state of the field. She basically says: we don’t really know a lot about gender, and it’s really hard to test, and I’m not going to tell you there are no biological differences between sexes—but can we please stop falling back on this explanation because we think gender-neutral parenting is futile? She points out that gender-neutral parenting often seems to “fail” (as in, kids still adopt gender stereotypes) because no matter how good the parents are at being neutral (and they usually aren’t as good as they think), the rest of our society is still hella stereotypical, and, you know, most families end up being part of society. I like the inclusion of this part in the book, because it encourages readers to consider how we actually apply scientific discoveries to our lives. That being said, this part of the book is probably the most scattered of the three and the least interesting from a scientific perspective.

Delusions of Gender endears itself to me because, at the end of the day, Fine is basically saying we need to stay skeptical of claims that appear to be scientific on the surface but, if you scratch that surface, reveal supposition. Beyond its subjects of sex and gender, this book encourages critical thinking about doing science, and that is something that is sorely needed in society today. Lastly, although I have long been interested in gender and thinking more deeply about it, this book definitely got me thinking about gender along different tracks. While I already knew much of what Fine explains or alludes to, I learned more things and even had my own unconscious biases checked at some points. And really, that’s what I want from a pop science book!

...more

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Oct 04, 2010 Jaylia3 rated it it was amazing

Just when it looked like neuroscience was justifying our current worldview that innate differences are somehow “hardwired” into the brains of little boys and little girls author Cordelia Fine comes along and checks out the scientific studies. What she exposes and describes in detail are poorly designed experiments, blind leaps of faith and convoluted circular reasoning. In scientists!

According to what Fine uncovered we have mutable brains, continuously influenced and changed by our cultural env ...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Scribble Orca marked it as to-be-consideread

Recommended to Scribble by: Trevor

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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Jul 31, 2014 Beth (bibliobeth) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In my other, non-blogging life, I work as a scientist and every so often you’ll see a review popping up on my blog about a non-fiction book I’ve read that has more than likely been science-y. I’m also a firm believer in gender equality and women’s rights so Delusions of Gender seemed like the perfect mix of science and feminism which encouraged me to pick it up. I found it to be a fascinating read which I learned a lot from and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the differences be In my other, non-blogging life, I work as a scientist and every so often you’ll see a review popping up on my blog about a non-fiction book I’ve read that has more than likely been science-y. I’m also a firm believer in gender equality and women’s rights so Delusions of Gender seemed like the perfect mix of science and feminism which encouraged me to pick it up. I found it to be a fascinating read which I learned a lot from and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the differences between our two genders. The book is divided into short chapters with intriguing titles such as “Why You Should Cover Your Head with a Paper Bag if You Have A Secret You Don’t Want Your Wife to Find Out,” “Sex and Premature Speculation,” and “Gender Detectives.” With titles like these you may want to read this book already but let me assure you that the author backs up the humour in her writing with clear facts, possible theories and very strong evidence that lends a note of seriousness into why exactly we still have gender inequality in a modern, 21st century society.

You’d think we’d have come a long way in achieving more rights for women since say, the nineteenth century yet consider this point that the author makes in the introduction. An English clergyman called Thomas Gisborne wrote a manual called “An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex,” and noted that things such as legislation, political economy and the conduct of government should be assigned to men as they have “the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intensive and continued application.” Whereas, females enjoy “powers adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise, and to diffuse the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness.” Ladies, I hope you are extremely insulted right now. But then Fine encourages us to move forward 200 years and look at The Essential Difference written by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychologist who states “the female brain is pre-dominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.” Hmm… sounds pretty much the same thing as what Gisborne was trying to say in the nineteenth century?

Throughout the book, Cordelia Fine investigates how different males and females really are. Are we all so hard-wired into our gender that there is no wiggle room in terms of qualities we should possess? Is it really a man’s world? Is it absolutely pointless for a woman to even consider a top level management job as it requires stereotypically more aggressive characteristics that for a woman is considered unattractive? I did enjoy the way that the author discredits work carried out by Baron-Cohen, and theories from the author of A Female Brain, Louann Brizendine that seem to want to put males and females in their own little boxes. For example, the assumption that a woman can use more areas of the brain than a man i.e. multi-tasking, was an experiment based on only 14 brains and the conclusions weren’t even statistically significant? In this way, a lot of experiments dealing with differences between the sexes have used just a few subjects, or made scientific “guesses,” depending on what their own stereotypical views were.

This is a brilliant and fascinating book, injected with a little bit of wit and sarcasm which I always appreciate in a non-fiction book and which I think is needed when dealing with this subject which can sometimes be a little bit touchy. I don’t think Baron-Cohen or Brizendine will be amongst her fans if they ever read it but I really enjoyed the way she picked apart neurosexism and shone a light upon the shadier areas of gender research. Oh, and you don’t need to be a scientist to read or enjoy this, it’s very accessible without being patronising.

Please see my full review at http://www.bibliobeth.com ...more

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Play Book Tag: Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, by Cordelia Fine - 1 star	13	35	Jan 22, 2018 04:59PM
The F-word: March NON-FICTION Group Read DELUSIONS OF GENDER	13	66	May 21, 2014 06:14AM
Speaker Geeks!: Gender differences: Do they really hardwired in our brains? Do they really exist? Or a cultural Myth?	31	84	Oct 04, 2013 09:35PM
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About Cordelia Fine

Cordelia Fine

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Cordelia Fine (born 1975) is a Research Associate at the Center for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of. Melbourne, Autsralia. Her previous book, 'A Mind of Its Own' was hugely acclaimed and she was called 'a science writer to watch' by Metro.

Books by Cordelia Fine

A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society

Delusions of Gender / Testosterone Rex / A Mind of Its Own

Homens não são de Marte, Mulheres não são de Vênus: Como a nossa mente, a sociedade e o neurossexismo criam a diferença entre os sexos

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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.” — 18 likes

“As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.” — 13 likes

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