Delusions of Gender

A droll and informative anti-pseudo-science book from Fine that essentially debunks the Mel Gibson-film What Woman Want.

I’m delighted to have read the scholarly and entertaining Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine: it’s precisely the book that I feel like I want to always have in my pocket to give to the people that claim woman’s and men’s brains are somehow biologically different and predisposed to certain different behaviours. For instance, it would have been so handy to whip out a copy while teaching a class of writers, one of whom was insisting that women wrote in a particular way and about particular topics better than men. Sadly, those topics didn’t include neuroscience.

Admittedly, that person’s sexual politics may have been Victorian, but it’s a depressingly common view that somehow there’s a natural predisposition in the biology of the male or female brain to certain attributes, which, invariably, seem to reflect popular social attitudes about gender. Fine’s book effectively debunks this theory whilst also providing a genuinely entertaining and literary voice for the reader. The book takes its place among the growing number of works presenting accessible science to the populace, which is tremendously important if we ever want to move on from the Men Are From Mars / Why Women Can’t Read Maps phenomenon. Fine draws a distinction between the brain and the conditioned mind, and I hope that this thought-provoking, intelligent work makes a real impact in the landscape of thinking around gender.