Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Fine, Cordelia, PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company, Itâs the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex childrenâboys who play with dolls and girls who like trucksâwe failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important âhardwiredâ differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between menâs and womenâs brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as menâs brains arenât wired for empathy and womenâs brains arenât made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between menâs and womenâs behavior. Instead of a âmale brainâ and a âfemale brain,â Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that menâs and womenâs brains are intrinsically differentâa belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.