Delusions of Gender Quotes

“As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“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 criticize, they are disparaged . Even when they merely offer an opinion, people look displeased. The perceptive reader will notice a certain pattern emerging. The same behavior that enhances his status simply makes her less popular. It’s not hard to see that this makes the goal of getting ahead in the workplace distinctly more challenging for a woman.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think and what you do.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

“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.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“Neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes. Three years ago, I discovered my son’s kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. And so I decided to write this book.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality. This means that when their perception of you is stereotypical, your own mind follows suit. For example, [Princeton University psychologist Stacey] 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. 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. (...)
No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

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

“Some day, I must ask him what it's like to be married to someone who, eyes narrowed in thought, peers at him over the tops of sociology articles with titles like "Who Gets the Best Deal from Marriage: Women or Men?" We've had our disagreements, of course. When, for example, are a few dirty cups a symbol of the exertion of male privilege, and when are they merely unwashed dishes?”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“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.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“Male rats don’t experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behavior in female rats. They never normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He’ll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted, and even build a comfy nest for it.29 The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn’t normally exist.30 If a male rat, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial "motherhood penalty". Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed—as a gift—are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts—who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort—pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task—grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions).”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“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.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as ‘competent but cold’: the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle axe, the dragon lady … The sheer number of synonyms is telling. Put bluntly, we don’t like the look of self-promotion and power on a woman. In experimental studies, women who behave in an agentic fashion experience backlash: they are rated as less socially skilled, and thus less hireable for jobs that require people skills as well as competence than are men who behave in an identical fashion. And yet if women don’t show confidence, ambition and competitiveness then evaluators may use gender stereotypes to fill in the gaps, and assume that these are important qualities she lacks. Thus, the alternative to being competent but cold is to be regarded as ‘nice but incompetent’.15 This catch-22 positions women who seek leadership roles on a ‘tightrope of impression management’.16”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

“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’.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“boys do not pursue mathematical activities at a higher rate than girls do because they are better at mathematics. They do so, at least partially, because they think they are better.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“In response to an article in the New York times that claimed from an fMRI study that 'a mother's impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain' one neuro-curmudgeon put out a plea to 'take experience and learning seriously. Just because you see a response [in the brain] — you don't get to claim it's hard-wired.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“It's simply not the case that people use one particular lobe, or a circumscribed area of the brain, to read a novel, or write an essay, or solve an equation, or calculate the angle of a triangle. And, unfortunately, neuroscience has yet to reach the stage at which it can peer into the brain and determine capacity for solving simultaneous equations or readiness to learn calculus.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are. —John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

“Although self-reported endorsement of sexist attitudes didn’t predict hiring bias, self-reported objectivity in decision making did.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“My husband would probably like you to know that, for the sake of my research for this chapter, he has had to put up with an awful lot of contemptuous snorting.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“As for cognitive empathy there is, it appears, no shortage of people in the world who can unwittingly offend, misunderstand and steamroller over the delicate signals of others, all while maintaining the self-perception that they are unsurpassedly sensitive to subtle social cues.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, 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.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

“As Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji puts it, there is no “bright line separating self from culture,” and the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a “deep reach” into our minds.
It’s for this reason that we can’t understand gender differences in female and male minds – the minds that are the source of our thoughts, feelings, abilities, motivations, and behavior – without understanding how psychologically permeable is the skull that separates the mind from the sociocultural context in which it operates. When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expecations become more prominent in the mind.
This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination.
In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think, and what you do. And these thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of yours, in turn, become part of the social context.
It’s intimate. It’s messy. And it demands a different way of thinking about gender.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“In other words, both the descriptive (‘women are gentle’) and the prescriptive (‘women should be gentle’) elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women. Without any intention of bias, once we have categorised someone as male or female, activated gender stereotypes can then colour our perception. When the qualifications for the job include stereotypically male qualities, this”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences

“an interest in Star Trek and an antisocial lifestyle may not, in fact, be unassailable correlates of talent in computer programming.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“Both women and computer science are the losers when a geeky stereotype serves as an unnecessary gatekeeper to the profession.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference