Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences [Hardcover]

 

 

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I found this book stunning. All around you see all this stuff about 'Men's brains' and 'Women's brains', and it always struck me as odd that a sex that has, for example, written so much brilliant literature should be deemed semi-autistic, etc etc. So here comes this brilliantly researched book (just take a look at the pages and pages of notes at the end - this author knows her onions backwards and forwards and sideways) - and she points out how shoddy it all is.
And she's funny!
No one will ever again have to sit through a dinner party with some parent going on about how 'I thought that too, but you only have to LOOK at my ttwo children to see there are innate differences...bleh bleh'. She unpickes it all and shows how social pressures are so important and the brain differences that are so often claimed are, essentially, neurotosh, aka neurosexism. I think I shall carry a copy round with me.

In the nineteenth century they thought bumps on your head showed what your personality was like. They thought that a university education damaged female fertility. They thought the angle of a nose had to do with racial quality. They tested would-be immigrants to the US for their mental fitness by setting them questions about tennis and breeds of chicken.

Today we wonder: how could people believe such patently socially-constructed nonsense?

Those people were no more and no less stupid than us. And today we believe gender science: right brains, left brains, empathy, aggression. The length of the ring finger tells you about prenatal testosterone which tells you about drive to succeed.

Does that sound just a teensy bit like phrenology?

Cordelia Fine takes it apart without mercy, and with a good deal of humour to boot.

Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender" has been making the rounds among the literati and the general public interested in popular science alike, and with good reason. Her work is the much-needed answer to all the explicitly or implicitly sexist nonsense peddled in the domain of popular science nowadays and a breath of fresh air after all the pseudoscientific screeds along the lines of "Men are from Mars, Women from Venus" etc. Fine, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne, wrote this work out of frustration with the proliferation of such books, and a fine counterblast it is. With humor, insight, and a knack for making complicated issues obvious and appealing, she systematically demolishes the case for understanding gender differences in culture and society as the immediate result of 'inherent' brain functioning or hardwired evolutionary patterns.

Fine's book discusses priming, that is how women perform worse when reminded of womanhood rather than of some other trait or none at all, as well as stereotype threat, the phenomenon when women are reminded of particular stereotypes adhering to their identity as such and this undermines their performance also. These issues are not just important for gender discrimination and exclusion, but also for racism in testing and recruitment. She discusses the way in which, often inadvertently, various cultural and subcultural elements in everything from big business to computer science recruitment are set up in a way that unnecessarily discourages and presumes against female participation. Following that, she considers in depth the many studies that have been done in social psychology on test differences between men and women as well as the meaning and nature of studies done on the basis of PET and fMRI scans of the brain, and the habitual nature of wildly overinterpreting them in favor of patriarchal conclusions on the part of both some neo-sexists like Baron Cohen and the Pinkers as well as popular science journalists. She shows how most 'innate' test differences disappear when the tests are set up differently and correct for preconceived notions and priming. Another major part of the book is concerned with gender differences in babies and young children, and the supposed confirmation of the thesis that gender differences are large and innate and have immediate social consequences following from the repeated failures by individual parents to raise their children 'gender-free'. As Fine points out, the chances of succeeding at that on your own in such a heavily genderized society as ours are virtually zero, so that's not very surprising. But as she discusses at length, the evidence actually strongly indicates that gender identification and segregation is learned behavior of young children (albeit at a very young age indeed), reinforced often unwittingly by parents and supervisors, not an innate phenomenon; this goes even for choice of toys and play partners. Finally, the book spends some - though perhaps not enough - time on discussing evolutionary psychology and its modular brain thesis and the way in which this misrepresents how the brain works in favor of an imaginary, retroactive patriarchal interpretation of human behavior. This bit has been done more in depth in the work of David Buller and Valerie Hardcastle, "Adapting Minds" Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books).

Given the prevalence of these notions about how women and men's behavior really are innately and predeterminedly different across the board in society and the manner in which, since the 1970s, the gradual acceptance of this new 'scientific sexism' has created a counterrevolution against gender equality, it is of the utmost importance that as many people as possible read this excellently written book. Fine writes with subtlety and humor and will not turn off any reader even remotely inclined to objectivity. The next time some false concern is expressed by a condescending businessman or Harvard professor stating that he wished it weren't so that women are unsuited for maths and politics, but that one just can't argue with science, the reader of this book can now throw the real science right back at him. Real science always triumphs over human prejudice and naked self-interest, and the sciences of psychology and neurology are no different. All throughout the 19th century scientists attempted to find the inferiority of women, blacks, and other oppressed groups in their skull shape, facial angle, brain size, brain/pelvis ratio, and whatever else they could find to 'scientifically' ground their antiquated patriarchal nonsense. Today, it is genetics and neurology that play these roles. We must reclaim these sciences from the avatars of sexism and racism and in so doing free the way for good research and real social reform. For more on how sexism affects women in practical ways in daily life 'even' in our modern Western societies, try The Mismeasure of Woman.

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5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book
This book is well written and organised. Some critics have said it is "witty", I prefer to say that some part of it, mostly near the end, is "tongue in cheek" kind of humour. Read more

Published 28 days ago by sleepybird

4.0 out of 5 stars Delusions of Gender: Teh Real Science Behind Sex differences
This critical review on stereotype gender research - mostly brain and cognitive research - is giving an important and highly valuable lesson in decoding manipulative research... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Marianne

5.0 out of 5 stars great fun for all of us who do not want to be misleaded by simplistic men-women stuff anymore
Fortunately a lot of us already know that the popular idea of men and women being fundamentally different is something largely created by ourselves (and somethimes despirately... Read more

Published 7 months ago by vp

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
Well written, amusing, and thought provoking. Debunks many of the myths around gender (almost all of which seem to show women as possessors of inferior brains / capabilities)... Read more

Published 9 months ago by bookworm

2.0 out of 5 stars pop journalism with an axe to grind
author presents herself as a scientist but behaves like a journalist. she has already decided that there is no difference between men and women. Read more

Published 10 months ago by asp

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrifying book. All boys and girls (left-handers and right-handers) should read this
Oh my LORD! You will never feel the same way about using a simple pronoun again.

This book highlights all sorts of ways in which male and female stereotypes affect the... Read more

Published 13 months ago by Albertine Davies

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and entertaining
This book should be required reading for all women - and men, and especially all those who would wish to be enlightened parents. Read more

Published 13 months ago by Cathy

1.0 out of 5 stars Delusions of science: a question of scientific validity
There is an implicit oxymoron in the notion of anything referred to as 'real science'. If science has taught us one thing throughout history, it ought to be that we know very... Read more

Published 14 months ago by A. Drummond

2.0 out of 5 stars Misleading critique
I admit that when I bought the book I already knew it was no good. The reviews (Hilary Rose) and blurbs were very informative in this respect. Read more

Published 15 months ago by Jippu

4.0 out of 5 stars loved this book
This book broke down a lot of my own bias unifnformed pre conceptions about gender difference. Usually you just believe what you read about gender difference especially biological... Read more

Published 15 months ago by rachel

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