Catch Delusions Of Gender Penned By Cordelia Fine Presented As File

of the general ideas presented in this book were familiar to me: claims of true neurological basis for differences between the sexes are bunk areas in which people seem to be 'deficient' are often socially created rather than biological current conceptions of binary gender essentialism must be abandoned.
However, for all that the conclusions Cordelia Fine drew were hardly surprising to me, reading this book had a significant impact.
It felt almost like an out of body experience, to read about these studies and then look at similar cases in my own life and, all of a sudden, to be able to see the strings.
This is probably what Neo felt like when he learned to see the Matrix, It's disorienting.

I read this book on a road trip with my parents, and I'm sure they wish I hadn't because I would not shut up about it.
Partly, that's because I couldn't really process it without talking about it and applying it partly, that's because my mom is a teacher and my dad is an engineer and I feel like the things I was learning from Cordelia Fine are intimately applicable to their work and dealing with other people.
That's probably true of most people, though but since one has direct impact on how confident students feel speaking in her courses and the other interacts with younger engineers, this seemed very relevant.
I think I've probably brought the book up once a week since, too,

The one concept that sticks with me the most is that of stereotype threat, Simply put, stereotype threat describes an effect when someone, being aware that a group they are part of is believed to have a certain capability, changes the way they approach that task.
For instance, women who are reminded of the stereotype that women are bad at math perform worse on math tests.
I had to set the book aside when I read that, because it explained so much about things I've struggled with: when you're under stereotype threat, your brain switches from trying to achieve success to trying to avoid failure, making you less innovative and confident, and slowing you down in completing the task.
It's a feeling of being stifled, being trapped, that I've experienced a lot more than I'd like to, and finally having an explanation for it is clearing up a lot in my life.


I wound up taking a star off of my rating for this book for two reasons one, Fine's very binarist, cisnormative handling of gender erases or ignores trans people, and while I see the rhetorical reasoning for that given the Delusions of Gender's argument, it's still a weakness and two, while she dissected research that she disagreed with very thoroughly, I found myself wondering if the studies she cited would stand up to a similar level of scrutiny.
Given the nature of the book, I assume her research was thoroughly done, but there's still a distinct rhetorical strategy to the final work and I couldn't stop wondering if that had shaped the results presented.
Delusions of Gender is an enjoyably acerbic and eloquent takedown of evolutionary psychologists and their neuroscientist collaboratorsthose practitioners of Bad Science, whose work is often repeated uncritically in tabloid newspapers or used to shape educational curricula.
Cordelia Fine examines a number of supposedly scientific studies, together with the books and newspaper articles which have popularised them for a general audience Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and their odious ilk, which seek to explain gender difference and inequality through neurological differences.


Many of these studies, as Fine points out, have shoddy methodology, questionable assumptions and/or have conclusions which rely on circular logic.
Researchers conflate the brain and the mind in order for their findings to conform with gender stereotypes, Men and women have biological differences, Fine states, which may reflect on different brains, but there is no proof that these differences map onto tasks, preferences, modes of thinking, etc.
Indeed, there may be more similarities between a man and a woman who both have a comparatively large brain relative to their body mass than between a woman with a comparatively large brain and a woman with a comparatively small brain.
Gender difference doesn't create gender inequalityit may well be vice versa,

As someone who works in the humanities and not the sciences, I did learn a lot from this book, particularly in terms of how to interpret or not neuroscientific data.
Fine has done a good job of synthesising a lot of secondary material in a very readable way, However, I did think there were some surprising omissions herethere is no consideration, or even mention, of societies in which there are more than two genders, and there's no mention of transgender or genderqueer people.
While I'm sure that most of the scientific data that Fine deals with assume binary gender, and was gathered from predominantly white Westerners, I do think that had she done a bit more digging, she would have unearthed a wealth of work which would have undermined the assumption of the Westerncentric gender binary while supporting the very point she's trying to make.
Just when it looked like neuroscience was justifying our current worldview that innate differences are somehow “hardwired” into the brains of little boys and little girls author Cordelia Fine comes along and checks out the scientific studies.
What she exposes and describes in detail are poorly designed experiments, blind leaps of faith and convoluted circular reasoning, In scientists!

According to what Fine uncovered we have mutable brains, continuously influenced and changed by our cultural environment.
Besides being thought provokingit may make you rethink a lot of your beliefsthis book is both funny and well written.
I really think all educators need to read this book, Fine's target is the new gender essentialism, the reconstructed sexism that attempts to put women back in their traditional roles as 'unbenders of husbands' brows' and caregivers to children, and to keep them out of politics, mathematics and the sciences, by asserting that they are fitted for their place by essential female abilities and incapacities.
Inthe philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his book The Subjection of Women, was severe on this fallacy, but like a zombie it just keeps getting up, backed by the badscience fad of the day.
'Neurosexists' are advising schoolleaders to adjust their teaching for gender differences, and with the threat of 'empathybased math' looming Fine felt she must call a halt.
She selects some choice quotes to show us how little the new sexism differs from the old this is a very funny book, then proceeds to dismantle it with a threepronged attack.


First, she explores the construction of gender and explains aspects of the present inequality from her perspective in social psychology.
She quotes trans woman Jan Morris who describes her former competence in matters of carreversing and bottleopening evaporating after her transition in the face of others' assumptions about her.
The power of stereotyping is not to be ignored Fine quotes study after study to show how strongly most people, whether consciously or not, associate women with empathy and caregiving, and men with maths, science and power, and how priming gender affects subsequent thinking and performance.
Simply reminding a candidate that she is a woman drastically reduces her score on a maths test, demonstrating an effect called 'stereotype threat' which is amazingly easy to remove including an introduction to a test telling participants that 'in ten years of datagathering, no genderrelated performance difference has been found' dramatically boosts the performance of women and girls.
Crosscultural comparisons also prove instructive, making nonsense of ethnocentric gender assumptions,

Fine explores how stereotypes and the lack of role models work against women in the workplace and in education.
This section is more broadly relevant to racial, social class, disabled, LGBTQ etc representation and the double bind problem of administrators appointing people like themselves on one side, and aspirations being damped by the invisibility of marginalised groups on the other.
CVs with female names are rated lower and receive fewer responses than identical ones with male names, Fine also indicts sexist work practices such as entertaining clients in stripclubs, Stereotypes also operate in the home, where men are conditioned to believe themselves incompetent the hunter brings home the the carcass and collapses to stare into the fire unless jaropening brawn or plugwiring brains are required.
Fine demonstrates that men are very competent parents, Even ratdads, with no hormonetampering, are readily able to raise perfectly adjusted ratkids,

Surveying the data, Fine finds very scant evidence for the assumption that women are more empathic than men there is no magical female ability to read people's thoughts, and slight differences in young children could easily be due to parents talking more to infant girls.
The evidence for male superiority in mathematical/analytical tasks is also thin, restricted to performance at mentally rotatingD objects.
Even this could be due to more exposure to active toys, and in any case hardly constitutes an excuse to exclude women from the workplace.
Fine is hilarious when exposing the loaded survey questions that have been used to find gender differences, Research makes it very clear that people will rate themselves higher or lower on abilities stereotyped to or against their gender, especially when that aspect of their identity has

been primed.


The search for genderdetermined ability differences continues with a painstaking survey and critique of the popular literature enthusiastically claiming they exist and the neurological and psychological research which has supposedly found them.
Fine is incisive in her discussion and criticism of studies around the effect of testosterone, including play differences, but she is damning when it comes to the shocking dishonesty and misrepresentation employed by 'neurosexist' popular 'science' books.
Oh, and if you don't manage to read this book, please take it from me here and now, that anyone trying to persuade you of a gender difference on the basis of pictures from brain scans is to be scornfully ignored.


The final section deals with how children are socialised to perform gender, Many parents assume they are providing genderneutral parenting and 'fall back' on a biological explanation when their little girls demand pink dresses and dolls.
Fine shows just how far parents have to go to eliminate the pressure to perform gender by recording the hilarious experience of the Bem family, forced to such lengths as denying that they knew the gender of friends, and erasing beards from picture books.
How can a preference for pink be genetic In Victorian times, it was a male colour, while girls wore tranquil VirginMary blue.
Fine demonstrates with survey after survey and study after brilliant study that gender roles are pushed on us by our culture, not our chromosomes.


'As neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier put it over two decades ago, we should "view biology as potential, as capacity and not as static identity.
Biology itself is socially influenced and defined it changes and develops in interaction with and in response to our minds and environment, as our behaviours do.
Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant"' If I had a dollar for every time someone friend requested me on Goodreads because of my gender "a guy who reads wow!" I would probably have enough money to buy a new Kindle.
As a male who loves books and aims for a career in clinical/counseling psychology a more and more femaledominated field part of me has always wondered whether I just lack the typical "male" brain.
Are girls biologically geared toward the humanities and males toward the hard sciences Do women really empathize more than men because of their brain chemistry

Cordelia Fine offers a clear answer: no.
In Delusions of Gender, she unravels the myth that we can chalk up gender differences to our neurology.
With a keen and unrelenting eye, she examines scientific theories and misconceptions, like the role testosterone plays in the fetus.
She dedicates a large portion of the book to knocking down neurosexism, In recent years several individuals have boasted about experiments that use fMRI and PET scans to detect differences in the brain Fine makes sure to reveal the flaws associated with those studies and why we should be skeptical of the conclusions they espouse.


Instead of relying on faulty science, Fine approaches gender differences from a psychological and sociological perspective, As a psychology major, I loved her incorporation of selffulfilling prophecy and stereotype threat, such as including a study about how women who had to check a gender box either "male" or "female" performed worse on an exam than women who took the test without marking their gender.
The section about genderneutral parenting stood out to me too, It's not enough to just offer our children toys stereotypically associated with the opposing gender, especially when gender distinctions arise so soon.


Highly recommended for those interested in feminism, neuroscience, psychology, or gender studies, In contemporary society we often cling to claims made by people with scientific backgrounds, even though some of those claims have no legitimate support.
I didn't go into too much depth about all of Fine's arguments in this review, but she invested a laudable amount of effort into Delusions of Gender: the book has aboutpages of citations, and her writing conveys her passion as well.
I decided to take a break from being girlishly bad at math and reading people's minds with my lady empathizing skills to read this book, and I sure am glad I did.
Because it is hilarious. And fascinating. Cordelia Fine goes through all the old lines that I'm sure you've heard a thousand times I know I have: that men's brains are just better at building stuff and making money while women are just natural nurturers, they just want to nurture the shit out of everything, because FEELINGS.
Anyways, she takes a closer look at all these claims and experiments and disputes just about every one of them with scientific criticism.
And she does it in a way that is sarcastic and witty and readable and interesting,

This book mainly focuses on white, middle to upperclass gender construction and brain research, which makes sense, because most claims about brain sex differences are based on middle to upperclass white folks.
It would be interesting, however, if she wrote a sequel with a wider focus, And occasionally the scientific terms get a tad bit overwhelming, but if you want a readable academic book about neurosexism, you aren't going to find a better, more interesting, more readable book.


This book should be on the bestseller list, Everyone should read this. This should be in the waiting room of every maternity ward and in the break room of every public school.
I am so glad that I stumbled across this gem of a book, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
It's funny and substantive, and that is about the rarest a combination there is,
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