Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

by Cordelia Fine

But more recently, social psychologists have also become interested in the possibility that sometimes we might also perceive our own selves through the lens of an activated stereotype. For, as it turns out, the self-concept is surprisingly malleable.

We are justified in wondering whether, as gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, ‘gender difference is the product of gender inequality, and not the other way around.’

This continuous interplay between the biological and the social means that, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has put it, ‘components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being.’

Our minds, society and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.