Delusions of Gender

"Cordelia is really a fine writer, no pun intended. It’s always impressive when academics write as beautifully as professional authors. Cordelia’s book dispelled many myths about gender differences, between men and women. Gender is the only phenomenon in the field, that I know of, which required a theory of similarity to be articulated. Despite the fact that empirical studies consistently find gender differences are usually much smaller than expected and only show up in very narrow circumstances, the belief that the differences between men and women were large and profound prevailed until it was proven otherwise. Janet Hyde, a psychologist from University of Wisconsin, Madison, had to propose a theory that men and women aren’t so different from each other after all, which is sort of stunning. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Cornelia’s book is a rigorous walk through the scientific literature that presents the facts about gender differences. She blows up a lot of the popular books which posited that ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ and described the male and female brain as fundamentally different. Cordelia’s book puts the real (and relatively small) differences between men and women into perspective. When it comes to lots of different sorts of cognitive functioning, women are mostly the same as men. The very small differences between brain functioning are directly related to sex. Neurosexism, as she described it, is the presumption that neurological differences are due to intrinsic differences in the brain. Delusions of Gender exposes the neurosexism that led so many psychologists to make mistaken inferences about the differences between the brains of men and women."

"Cordelia Fine is a really well established and respected neuroscience ethicist. Since this 2010 book there have been other books that have developed similar arguments, but I like to go back to this one because it is very clearly and accessibly argued and documented. She has had such a big impact, so this is kind of the original source to go to. What she’s showing here is that brain research over a hundred years or more has tried to establish that women are inferior, that their brains are inferior. But it has been unsuccessful in every instance. In all the testing that’s ever been done, there’s basically been no difference. Supposedly women’s brains are not good at mathematics, right? But this idea that women have, like, biologically inferior brains for maths comes from a study that’s 30 years old that never really panned out; it said that babies in utero with flushed? With testosterone and boys were changed forever and girls weren’t. But now we have a radically different understanding of the brain, and how much it develops after birth. It’s all learning. The reason we do see patterns of similarities between girls, and between boys, is due to the impact of the education system, gender practices, the malleability of the brain. “Brain research over a hundred years or more has tried to establish that women are inferior, but it has been unsuccessful in every instance” In general, we find that brains are more like livers or kidneys or hearts than testicles or ovaries. They are a kind of gender neutral organ. And we have a huge amount of performance data that shows that it cannot possibly be true that men and women have different cognitive abilities when it comes to mathematis or anything else. In some populations, women outperform men on mathematical performance. There’s a huge amount of variation within each population. In fact, your postal code—or your zip code—is known to predict your performance on a mathematical test more than your gender. So she does a really good job of showing that this particular myth is just a myth."