BOOK REVIEW: Delusions of Gender

By Cordelia Fine

BOOK REVIEW:

I'm currently half way through with this book and I've just got to share. Cordelia Fine finds a humorless, clear and compelling way to delve into a very interesting topic: how society and neurosexism creates a society where women are labeled biologically inferior-- poor with spatial skills, less prone to excelling at math, emotional chatter boxes and a slew of other gender stereotypes. She looks into the research that society has accepted as truth, for both genders, and dissects where science stops and gender bias starts to create faulty experiments and incorrectly interpret data.
A great jab at pseudo-science and the tendency to skew results to reflect what we expect rather than what we see. It's chock full of fascinating experiments; for example, scientists told a group of women that females, in fact, do better on spatial reasoning tests than men. And, when told so, they actually did do better than the male participants. (When another group of women were told of course they wouldn't do as well as the men, surprise again, the women did awful.) The idea that men and women are wired differently actually has never been scientifically proven in humans, but it sure doesn't look that way when we look at education, the workplace hierarchy, or the number of female engineers and scientists, among other things.

Fantastic look at the subtle (and not so subtle) environmental factors that tell men and women what they should and shouldn't be, all wrapped up in a package of biased science. Good read and not too heavy for what the topic is (yay for layman's neuroscience).

BUY: http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244