Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

by Cordelia Fine

As University of California–Irvine professor of mathematics Alice Silverberg commented: When I was a student, women in the generation above me told horror stories about discrimination, and added ‘But everything has changed. That will never happen to you.’ I’m told that this was said even by the generations before that, and now my generation is saying similar things to the next one. Of course, a decade or so later we always say, ‘How could we have thought that was equality?’ Are we serving the next generation well if we tell them that everything is equal and fair when it’s not?

Welcome to the second instalment of my "Notes on Quotes" book reviews, as officially endorsed by Kevin Kelly* Back in the day, I studied experimental psychology and neuroscience at university, and for a time, I was supervised by Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen at Trinity College, Cambridge. I can't pretend to be up to date with the latest research any more, but I do still follow along. For one thing, I'd heard of the various studies (carried out by Baron-Cohen, in fact) about how male and female babies gazed at faces/objects in different ways - which, of course, would imply some kind of biological difference. It sounded pretty convincing, although I didn't read the paper. What troubled me about the whole strand of "there are biological differences between men and women, therefore we can tolerate differences in society" is that it usually ends up justifying sex discrimination. So I was curious about this book, recommended by Naomi Alderman (of course). I hadn't heard about it when it was published, but it sounded intriguing to me, as a person who used to be in the field and who also cares deeply about sexism. Let's go! *No, really! Check it out:https://www.goodreads.com/notes/28114110-the-inevitable/49368027-adrian-hon

One list would probably feature communal personality traits such as compassionate, loves children, dependent, interpersonally sensitive, nurturing. These, you will note, are ideal qualifications for someone who wishes to live to serve the needs of others. On the other character inventory we would see agentic descriptions like leader, aggressive, ambitious, analytical, competitive, dominant, independent and individualistic. These are the perfect traits for bending the world to your command, and earning a wage for it.3 I don’t have to tell you which is the female list and which is the male one: you already know.

A succinct critique of the "hey, women are better at men at some stuff! (that just happens to pay fuck all)" attitude.

Measures of implicit associations reveal that men, more than women, are implicitly associated with science, maths, career, hierarchy and high authority. In contrast, women, more than men, are implicitly associated with the liberal arts, family and domesticity, egalitarianism and low authority.

Implicit associations have been in the news quite a lot, usually in the form of implicit bias or racism, thanks to Black Lives Matter. I believe Hillary Clinton acknowledged its existence during the 2016 election, for which she was richly rewarded by all of society... or not. Regardless, implicit associations are just crucial in understanding how we behave and act in the world. I would love to think that I treat everyone equally but there is no doubt in my mind, sadly, that I treat women differently to men, and black people differently to white people, usually in negative ways. All we can do is try harder and realise that it exists. (I do wonder, incidentally, whether pervasive cameras and sensors will blow open the doors on implicit bias. Imagine you had a perfect transcript of every meeting and conversation, and you discovered that women were speaking far less than men, or that you interrupted women more often. Or even further, if you could see that you looked at women differently than men. The data can't lie.)

The type of college experience – coed or single sex – had no effect on the students’ self-reported beliefs about women’s capacity for leadership. However, it did have an effect on their implicit attitudes. At the beginning of freshman year, both groups of women were slow to pair female and leadership words on the IAT. But by sophomore year, the women at the single-sex college had lost this implicit disinclination to associate women with leadership, while coed students had become even slower at pairing such words. This divergence appeared to be due to students in women’s colleges tending to have more exposure to female faculty, and coed students – particularly those who took maths and science classes – having less experience with women in leadership positions.

"The sexism is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE"

a group of French high school students was asked to rate the truth of stereotypes about gender difference in talent in maths and the arts before rating their own abilities in these domains. So, for these students, gender stereotypes were very salient as they rated their own ability. Next, they were asked to report their scores in maths and the arts on a very important national standardised test taken about two years earlier. Unlike students in a control condition, those in the stereotype-salient group altered the memory of their own objective achievements to fit the well-known stereotype. The girls remembered doing better than they really had in the arts, while the boys inflated their marks in maths. They gave themselves, on average, almost an extra 3 percent on their real score while the girls subtracted the same amount from their actual maths score.

Fine (the author) is at her best when summarising studies that demonstrate people are dreadful at understanding themselves. Just look at how stereotypes can hurt people! Ugh. And to think that we encounter such stereotypes on billboards, adverts, TV, and games every day.

Sinclair manipulated one group of women into thinking that they were about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man. (Not a woman-hater, but the kind of man who thinks that women deserve to be cherished and protected by men, while being rather less enthusiastic about them being too confident and assertive.) Obligingly, the women socially tuned their view of themselves to better match these traditional opinions. They regarded themselves as more stereotypically feminine, compared with another group of women who were expecting instead to interact with a man with a more modern view of their sex.25 Interestingly, this social tuning only seems to happen when there is some sort of motivation for a good relationship. This suggests that close or powerful others in your life may be especially likely to act as a mirror in which you perceive your own qualities.

The last two sentences are the real stinger here: you don't tune yourself socially to match people you don't give a shit about, but you *will* do it if you need something (e.g. a job, a reference) or you respect them. It is sadly quite different to deal with the former, especially if you want to enter an exploitative/competitive field, but you can at least deal with the latter by making new friends.

Galinsky and his colleagues found that pretending to be a professor improved analytic skills compared with controls, while a self-merging with cheerleader traits impaired them. Those who had imagined themselves as an African American man behaved more competitively in a game than those who had briefly imagined themselves to be elderly. The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behaviour. The maxim ‘fake it till you make it’ gains empirical support.

Amazing. Such is the power of role-play.

calling a test the ‘Empathy Quotient’ does not, on its own, make it a test of empathising. Asking people to report on their own social sensitivity is a bit like testing mathematical ability with questions like I can easily solve differential equations, or assessing motor skills by asking people to agree or disagree with statements like I can pick up new sports very quickly. There’s something doubtfully subjective about the approach.

The counterargument here is that empathy is internal so it would be hard for an observer to know whether you *really* cared about someone else's pain, or whether you were pretending to.

women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)’,

Reasonable enough. There is a social expectation for women to take on 'emotional labour' and to be caregivers.

A more recent study ‘found only weak or non-significant correlations between self-estimates of performance and actual performance’, while another, with a sample of more than 500 participants, supported the ‘still surprising conclusion that people, in general, are not very reliable judges of their own mind-reading abilities.’

LOL

psychologists Anne Koenig and Alice Eagly used the IPT to explore the idea that the gender stereotype of women’s superior social skills might furnish women with an unfair advantage.25 To one group, the test was accurately described as a measure of social sensitivity, or ‘how well people accurately understand the communication of others and the ability to use subtle nonverbal cues in everyday conversations.’ Before the participant took the test, the experimenter casually mentioned that ‘We’ve been using this test for a couple of quarters now. It’s 15 questions long and, not surprisingly, men do worse than women.’ In this group, the men did indeed do slightly worse than the women. But to a second group of participants, the test was described in a more gender-neutral way. It was presented as a measure of complex information processing, or ‘how well people process different kinds of information accurately.’ In this group, the men performed just as well as the women.

I want to make an app that just gives you motivational messages every time you're about to do something. "Did you know that women are usually 10% better at driving than me?" or "We find that women are significantly better at wage negotiations than men."

When, in one study, participants were told that performance on mental rotation is probably linked with success on such tasks as ‘in-flight and carrier-based aviation engineering … nuclear propulsion engineering, undersea approach and evasion, [and] navigation’, the men came out well ahead. Yet when the same test was described as predicting facility for ‘clothing and dress design, interior decoration and interior design … decorative creative needlepoint, creative sewing and knitting, crocheting [and] flower arrangement’, this emasculating list of activities had a draining effect on male performance.

Such snowflakes.

the more men there are taking a maths test in the same room as a solo woman, the lower women’s performance becomes.31 And, surrounded by men, she herself may come to grudgingly believe that women are indeed naturally inferior in maths

:(

Some researchers speculate that higher testosterone levels are associated with a drive to gain and maintain status, in both men and women. Robert Josephs and his colleagues have been exploring the idea that high-T (high-testosterone, relative to others of the same sex) men and women are cognitively at their best when they are in situations that fit their testosterone-based drive to attain and maintain high status. By contrast, low status, or a threat to status, creates a mismatch for the high-T individual that has detrimental cognitive effects. (The basic theory behind this idea is that while the cognitive, emotional, and physiological reactions of the high-T person to a loss of status may be unproblematic when status can be restored by way of a fistfight, they are less helpful when status must be gained through a clever move of the bishop on the chessboard, a brilliant closing argument in court, or a publication in Nature.) In line with this idea, Josephs and his team found that high-T men and women, when put in a low-status position in the lab, underperformed on cognitive tests like the analytic and quantitative portions of the GRE and mental rotation.36 By contrast, high testosterone works to their advantage when the situation yields an opportunity to enhance status. Josephs and colleagues found that high- and low-T men given a maths test described as identifying weak maths ability performed equivalently. But when the same test supposedly identified exceptional talent, ...

The problem with this book, and others like it, is that it descends into endless recitations of psychological and neuroscientific studies. I have no problem with studies - we need data. But it can be exhausting to read one study after another demonstrating this or that effect. Given the subject, I think it may have been more interesting if Fine had widened her scope a little to talk to the scientists and people affected. I realise that takes quite a lot of time (and thus money) which is hard to come by, though.

The same researchers also sent out applications for the position of tenured professor, again identical but for the male and female name at the top. This time, the application was so strong that most of the raters thought that tenure was deserved, regardless of sex. However, the endorsement of Karen’s application was four times more likely to be accompanied by cautionary caveats scrawled in the margins of the questionnaire: such as, ‘I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own’ and ‘We would have to see her job talk’.

I'm sure I've done this in the past.

participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’21 Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most. Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.

This sums up why "women are worse because science" bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the scientific method and objectivity. The issue is that - as Fine describes - it is very easy to excuse your own sexism if you choose to believe in second-hand reporting of hard-to-replicate studies.

Unlike men in the same position, women leaders have to continue to walk the fine line between appearing incompetent and nice and competent but cold. Experimental studies find that, unlike men, when they try to negotiate greater compensation they are disliked. When they try out intimidation tactics they are disliked. When they succeed in a male occupation they are disliked. When they fail to perform the altruistic acts that are optional for men, they are disliked. When they do go beyond the call of duty they are not, as men are, liked more for it. When they criticise, they are disparaged. Even when they merely offer an opinion, people look displeased.25 The perceptive reader will notice a certain pattern emerging. The same behaviour that enhances his status simply makes her less popular.

Exhibit A: Hillary Clinton

Michelle Ryan and her colleagues noticed a curious pattern when they looked at the share-price performance of the top 100 companies in the UK, both before and after the appointment of male and female board members. In the months before a man was appointed to the board of directors, company performance was relatively stable. But women tended to be appointed after a period of consistently low performance. In other words, women were being appointed to positions ‘associated with a higher risk of failure, and [that] were therefore more precarious.’

Exhibit B: Marissa Mayer. No-one on this planet could have turned Yahoo around.

Many golf courses are run around the principle that there would be something unnatural and absurd about women playing golf at the same time as men – or even at all. Even when women and men can play together, the different tee boxes used for the two sexes keep them somewhat separate. ‘Many women reported that men used the different tee boxes to leave them behind on the course or to require them to ride in a different golf cart.… In essence, they used the different tees as a way to exclude women even when playing with them’, report University of Michigan sociologists Laurie Morgan and Karin Martin,

I knew there was a reason I hated golf. Minigolf, though...

as a woman’s financial contribution approaches that of her husband’s, her housework decreases. It doesn’t actually become equitable, you understand. Just less unequal. But only up to the point at which her earnings equal his. After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does.3 In what sociologist Sampson Lee Blair has described as the ‘sadly comic data’ from his research, ‘where she has a job and he doesn’t … even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.’

I occasionally hear of men who claim they don't know how to use a washing machine, but they're capable of custom-building PC. Or men who can't change a diaper, but can clean a car. Or men who can't cook dinner, but manage complex fantasy football teams. Pathetic.

John Gray, author of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern working woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is ‘testosterone-producing’ tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that then wipe themselves along the countertops). Thus, ‘putting things back together after a flood or disaster’ is testosterone-producing, but ‘[t]o expect him to join in and share each day in her daily routines as a helper would eventually exhaust him.’

John Gray is an easy target for Fine - but he's popular, so it's worth it. Plus it's very satisfying.

Michael Gurian in his popular book What Could He Be Thinking? In the chapter entitled ‘The Male Brain at Home’ we learn that because ‘[t] he female brain takes in more sensory data’, a woman is more likely to ‘neurally register the bit of paper, the dog hair, the children’s toy shoved into the couch’. The ‘female brain’ is also ‘more likely to sense the book that is awry on the coffee table, the dust on the end table, the bed not made as she’d like it’.

Classic evolutionary psychology of the "on the African savannah, women did this, men did that" variety. Although surely if men were more detail-oriented (as you'd need to be to build jet engines or hunt animals) they would notice books that were awry *even more* than women? In any case, I know that I'm about 100x more sensitive to things on tables not being at right angles than any of the women in my life...

One legacy of the neat breadwinner/caregiver division of labour is an expectation of the ‘zero drag’ worker who, because home and children are taken care of by someone else, can commit himself fully to his job.

"Zero drag", I love it. This worker surely drinks Soylent, travels on Uber, uses HomeJoy, and dines out with Seamless.

According to his hypothesis, higher amniotic testosterone should bring about worse empathising skills. So, does amniotic testosterone negatively correlate, in boys and girls separately,5 with frequency of eye contact at twelve months old with a parent during play, quality of social relationships at four years old (as assessed by the mother), propensity to use mental-state terms, scores on the child version of the Empathy Quotient (EQ; as assessed by the mother), and performance on a child’s version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test? The answers are, respectively: no;6 not really;7 not really;8 no;9 and yes.

Please do not: a) write like this because b) it's not as funny as you think, and c) it's confusing to read.

As Nash and Grossi have pointed out, as has Harvard University developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, there is little evidence for a systemising advantage in young boys: a large body of research exploring infants’ understanding of objects and mechanical motion finds no advantage for males.35 As for the development of empathy, evidence of divergence is modest. Boys and girls develop an understanding of the mental states of others at a similar rate. But girls do have a small advantage, on average, in facial expression processing and, overall, studies find signs of greater affective empathy in girls. However, as is the case in adults, this difference is much smaller when based on observations rather than self-report or report by another

The important thing here is that *even if* there is a real difference in terms of empathising/systemising between men and women, it is really far too small to explain or justify the massive differences we see in women's representation in government and politics, their salaries, etc.

there is something a little unsatisfying about this reframing of the life sciences as: Now with added empathising for extra feminine appeal! Is the supposed female drive to work with living things, or to engage with mental states, really likely to be satisfied by looking at cells under microscopes or de-sexing cats?

It's curious that biological sciences and medicine have seen far more women enter the field than in the past. Obviously I don't think it's because women 'like' biology because it's more cuddly - if I had to guess, it's because there's less stigma and fewer barriers for women entering that field as compared to (say) physics, even if biology requires just as much (if not more) attention to detail and intelligence. God knows I couldn't hack it as a biologist or neuroscientist - I wasn't able to pay attention for long enough to carry out really complex experiments reliably.

Perhaps in a few decades we will be redefining women’s new levels of participation in the physical sciences, politics and business as reflecting their innate drive to nurture. After all, is there any more powerful way to help others than to develop sustainable technologies, set tough emissions targets or, like Bill Gates, write big fat cheques to charitable causes?

Nice.

In 1915, the illustrious neurologist Dr. Charles L. Dana set out in the New York Times his professional opinion vis-à-vis the wisdom of women’s suffrage: There are some fundamental differences between the bony and the nervous structures of women and men. The brain stem of woman is relatively larger; the brain mantle and basal ganglia are smaller; the upper half of the spinal cord is smaller, the lower half, which controls the pelvis and limbs, is much larger. These are structural differences which underlie definite differences in the two sexes. I do not say that they will prevent a woman from voting, but they will prevent her from ever becoming a man, and they point the way to the fact that woman’s efficiency lies in a special field and not that of political initiative or of judicial authority in a community’s organisation. There may be an answer to this assertion, but no one can deny that the mean weight of the O.T. and C.S. in a man is 42 and in a woman 38, or that there is a significant difference in the pelvic girdle.

As a former neuroscientist, I feel confident that our understanding of the brain is far better than in the past - but I also know that compared to our understanding a hundred years hence, it will seem laughably inaccurate.

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.’4 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.

"BREAKING NEWS: RESEARCHERS DISCOVER NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN AT REPAIRING FURNITURE!"

the obscurity of the relationship between brain structure and psychological function means that just-so stories can be all too easily written and rewritten. Do you find that your male participants are actually less lateralised on a spatial problem? Not to worry! As the contradictory data come in, researchers can draw on both the hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use just one hemisphere, as well as the completely contrary hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use both hemispheres. So flexible is the theoretical arrangement that researchers can even present these opposing hypotheses, quite without embarrassment, within the very same article.

This is a problem true of many, many scientific papers, unfortunately.

Or, rather less technically, women always had two left blobs and one right blob, while men had either two right blobs or two left blobs, depending on the task – painting a rather less striking image of contrast. (Bear in mind, too, that blobs represent differences in brain activity, not brain activity per se. If a search for regions activated more in men yields a blob-free left hemisphere, for example, that doesn’t mean that that hemisphere is switched off in men. Rather, it means that the researchers didn’t find any regions in the hemisphere that were activated more in men than in women.)

My research supervisor at Cambridge, Richard Dyball, had a *killer* set of jokes about scientists who relied on brain imaging. He specialised in electrophysiology - recording the electrical signals from nerve cells. Like many talented scientists I've known, he married a deep technical and scientific skill with something that resembled artistry when it came to crafting and placing electrodes, or listening to the tell-tale sounds of cell signals. Scientists like to pretend that everything they do is easily replicable, as long as you read the instructions and methods, but nothing could be further from the truth. It really is an art.

Some neuroscientists have even died while making reverse inferences. Actually, I made that last bit up, but as we will see, it is extremely tricky.

Fine has a tendency to finish passages with truly awful and distracting 'jokes' which have the undesired effect of trivialising her arguments. I wish her editor had removed them.

Not only are some of my best friends, as well as family members, neuroimagers, but I also think that neuroscience is an extremely exciting and promising field, and can be usefully employed in combination with other techniques.

Brilliant.

Hall’s review of research with tests such as the PONS nonverbal decoding task (which we encountered in Chapter 2) suggests that if you randomly chose a boy and a girl, over and over, more than a third of the time the boy would outperform the girl. Brizendine does not understate these findings, then, when she says that ‘[g]irls are years ahead of boys’ in these abilities.

We aren't so different, you and I.

Sax claims that because the primitive hippocampus has ‘no direct connections to the cerebral cortex’ [um, again, not quite right] boys are happy dealing with maths ‘“for its own sake” at a much earlier age than girls are.’ But for the girls, because they’re using their cerebral cortex, ‘you need to tie the math into other higher cognitive functions.’36 The goal of inspiring children to get excited about maths is certainly admirable. But Sax’s claim that the results of a neuroimaging study of maze navigation point to a brain-based need to teach girls and boys in these different kinds of ways is simply neurononsense.

Truly terrible pseudoscience. This guff will be rightly compared to phrenology by future generations.

And, as it turns out, contemporary investigations of variability – both in the general population and in the most intellectually blessed pockets – have been showing that ‘inevitable’ and ‘immutable’ are adjectives that need not apply when it comes to describing greater male variability in mental ability. One cross-cultural study, published several years before the Summers debacle, compared sex differences in variability in verbal, maths and spatial abilities to see if the greater male variability in the United States was invariably seen in other countries. It was not. In each cognitive domain, there were countries in which females’ scores were more variable than males’.

What, the US *isn't* representative of humanity after all?

Being underrepresented on the IMO team, or the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP), is not, as you might assume, a girl problem. It’s more subtle and interesting than that. First of all, if you’re Hispanic, African American or Native American, it matters not whether you have two X chromosomes or one – you might as well give up now on any dreams of sweating for nine hours over some proofs. Then within girls, interesting patterns emerge. Asian American girls are not underrepresented, relative to their numbers in the population.

Clearly the real explanation here is that Asian American girls are genetically smarter than white girls.

Sociologist Barbara Rothman asked a group of mothers to describe the movements of their foetuses in the last three months of pregnancy. Among the women who didn’t know the sex of their baby while they were pregnant, there was no particular pattern to the way that (what turned out to be) male and female babies were described. But women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently. All were ‘active’, but male activity was more likely to be described as ‘vigorous’ and ‘strong’, including what Rothman teasingly describes as ‘the “John Wayne fetus” – “calm but strong”’. Female activity, by contrast, was described in gentler terms: ‘Not violent, not excessively energetic, not terribly active were used for females’.

The world needs the "Michelle Yeoh" fetus.

Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and over-estimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts – meaning that in the real world they might often wrongly think their daughters incapable of performing or attempting some motor feats, and equally erroneously think their sons capable of others.

Depressing.

Cross-gender behaviour is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term ‘tomboy’ there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the ‘sissy’.21 Parents were aware of the backlash they might, or indeed had, received from others when they allowed their children to deviate from gender norms.

I hadn't considered this previously, but it's a really good point. We are starting to see the inklings of what Fine calls 'sissies' in popular culture, at least in terms of dress and hair style and makeup, but it's not widespread at all. A couple of positive signs can be found in TV shows like Steven Universe, where the main character's 'weapon' is a shield and his superpower is arguably radical empathy; and (bear with me) The Flash, who, yes, can run very fast, but is usually more skilful at trying to make sure all his friends feel good.

The gendered patterns of our lives can be so familiar that we no longer notice them, as this anecdote reported by legal scholar Deborah Rhode slyly makes plain: One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.

A fish doesn't notice water.

in a classic study, children were shown a video of men and women playing a game, with the men performing one kind of ritual and the women another. Girls copied the women’s ritual, and boys the men’s, but only after they had confirmed for themselves that this is what women (or men) in general did, and not just one particular woman or man. ‘Thus a parent,’ suggests David, ‘no matter how loving or loved, cannot be a model for appropriate gender behaviour, unless the child’s exposure to the wider world (for example, through friendship groups and the media) suggests that the parent is a representative or prototypical male or female’.

It needs a village.

it is easier to find an adventurous girl than a sissy boy. The bucking of gender stereotypes in young children’s books is a task usually performed by female characters, many researchers have found. Just as in the real world women have been quicker to forge forth into the masculine world of work than men have been to sink back into domesticity, in children’s books, too, it is mostly females who do the crossing of gender boundaries.

More on that 'sissy' trend. Does anyone have a better word than that, by the way? It's very pejorative.

Every semester, my youngest son’s kindergarten has a dress-up day. One little girl in a cat costume walked into the room to discover that every other girl, without exception, was dressed up as either a princess or a fairy. She burst into tears and wailed to her mother, ‘I should have worn my princess dress!’ On the next dress-up day, she did.

Truly heartbreaking

In one small study, Rebecca Bigler and her colleagues identified eight preschoolers, four girls and four boys, who reliably avoided toys traditionally played with by the other sex. These children were then read two carefully constructed tales that unsubtly exploded gender stereotypes at every turn: one story starred the exuberant Sally Slapcabbage and her pilot mother; the second featured Billy Bunter, who finds and cherishes a talking doll. Thanks to the stories, two of the four boys overcame a little of their reluctance to explore their feminine side on the playmat, venturing to play with the sorts of toys they would normally ignore. Yet even more remarkable was the effect of the stories on three of the four girls. After just a few readings of the counterstereotypic stories, these girls abandoned stroller, baby doll and ironing board to experiment with fire trucks, blocks and helicopters. By the last few days of the experiment these girls were playing almost exclusively with the boyish toys.

Second app idea: read counterstereotypic stories to children every day. Maybe on the Amazon Echo.

So focused were they on locating the cause of inequality in some internal limitation of women – the lightweight brains, the energy-sapping ovaries, the special nurturing skills that leave no room for masculine ones – that they failed to see the injustice, as Stephen J. Gould put it, of ‘a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within’.

Gould with the perfect quote.

When a woman persists with a high-level maths course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotions, values, interests, hormones and brains – because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.

The End (more or less). I didn't highlight any of Fine's criticism of Baron-Cohen's work on baby girl/boys looking at faces vs. mobiles. It seemed persuasive enough, but as you'd expect, Baron-Cohen disagrees strongly:https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-23/edition-11/book-reviews Baron-Cohen's review of this book is, well, mixed. He likes Fine's roundup of social psychology, but he "would part ways with Fine ... in her strident, extreme denial of the role that biology might play in giving rise to any sex differences in the mind and brain." (Oof, "strident"? You could've picked a better word there, mate) Moreover, he makes some good counterarguments against Fine's criticisms of his experiments. It's a little inside-baseball but it all matters. I haven't read Baron-Cohen's papers so I don't feel qualified to judge either way. Even so, I think that Fine's larger point holds, that individual studies showing only marginal differences (if any) between sexes are being used to justify and perpetuate sex discrimination. And any reader will find value in her roundup of studies showing how easily we can fool ourselves into being sexist. So: yes, 4/5 stars.