Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

€œ[Fine€s] sharp tongue is tempered with humor. . . . Read this book and see how complex and fascinating the whole issue is.€€•The New York Times

It€s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children€•boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks€•we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important €œhardwired€ 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 men€s and women€s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men€s brains aren€t wired for empathy and women€s brains aren€t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men€s and women€s behavior. Instead of a €œmale brain€ and a €œfemale brain,€ 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 men€s and women€s brains are intrinsically different€•a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.