It is not hard to see how the study of sex differences came to be politically charged. 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. In her book, Delusions of Gender, academic psychologist Cordelia Fine talks an interactionist game but her heart belongs to cultural determinism. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math men too focused for housework.ĭrawing 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. 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.

And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it.

A brilliantly researched and wickedly funny rebuttal of the pseudo-scientific claim that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.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.

Delusions of gender by cordelia fine