{DOWNLOAD} Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex
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DELUSIONS OF GENDER: THE REAL SCIENCE BEHIND SEX DIFFERENCES PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Cordelia Fine | 368 pages | 03 Feb 2011 | Icon Books Ltd | 9781848312203 | English | Duxford, United Kingdom [PDF] Delusions of Gender : The Real Science Behind Sex Differences | Semantic Scholar Retrieved August 24, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. London Evening Standard. Evening Standard. TSL Education. The New York Times. Retrieved August 23, The Washington Post. Book claims brain scans sell sexes short". USA Today. Gawker Media. Kirkus Reviews. Nielsen Business Media. June 15, The Psychologist. British Psychological Society. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Despite the large amount of junk science on the topic that is reported in the popular media and in some academic outlets, there are also consistent findings of sex differences that hold up across studies, across species, and across cultures. Most of these are ignored by Fine. PLoS Biology. Lewis Wolpert " — via YouTube. 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CORDELIA FINE DELUSIONS OF GENDER PDF Early science discovered many differences between the male and female brain. And we routinely observe that men and women behave differently. Men are observed to be good at maths whereas women tend to be more empathic. Men think in a more focused way whereas women think more holistically. Those differences have spawned many books driving a wedge between male and female innate abilities and stoking the argument that men and women are just better at different things. We are encouraged by some scientists and pseudo-scientists to assume that the physiological differences explain the psychological differences. As a result, many, in what Fine refers to as neuro-sexism, are enthusiastic to conclude that differences that we see in scans explain what we experience every day in careers, parenting and relationships. No other conclusion makes any sense. But Fine takes us through a journey beginning with the foetal fork, where half of all foetuses are flooded with testosterone at week 12 of pregnancy to become boys. She explores the physiological and psychological differences, concluding that what we see in scans and autopsies does not necessarily demand that resulting behaviours and abilities should be different. Her closing arguments show that social conditioning, right from the earliest days in the womb, is a far more powerful explanation for ultimate differences in preference and ability between the sexes. Perhaps one of the most memorable parts is towards the end. She describes a husband and wife — both scientists - who try very hard to avoid any sexist stereotyping in bringing up their kids. This and other descriptions show the sheer difficulty in avoiding such societal norms as girls in pink and boys in blue. They show just how deep our assumptions are and just how long it will take to flush sexism through the societal system to achieve equality. Delusions of Gender is a must-read for anyone interested in equality. It helps generally in making sense of gender gaps like those in careers and pay. This book mainly focuses on white, middle- to upper-class gender construction and brain research, which makes sense, because most claims about brain sex differences are based on middle- to upper-class white folks. It would be interesting, however, if she wrote a sequel with a wider focus. And occasionally the scientific terms get a tad bit overwhelming, but if you want a readable academic book about neurosexism, you aren't going to find a better, more interesting, more readable book. This book should be on the bestseller list. Everyone should read this. This should be in the waiting room of every maternity ward and in the break room of every public school. I am so glad that I stumbled across this gem of a book, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's funny and substantive, and that is about the rarest a combination there is. View all 3 comments. Shelves: best-of , non-fiction. Well, alright there was this guy: But in an orchestra? Actually number 2 really doesn't exist, which is odd, as women may be ordained in the C of E. Things I have heard, which I really wish I hadn't: 1 An Austrian mother who said they weren't going to send their daughter to the academic secondary school, but to a more vocational type school, "Because an education isn't so important for a girl". When I looked at him somewhat aghast, he said it was because my husband didn't have anyone to play ball with - well to do real sport with, like football. As Cordelia Fine says in her book, you'd think that girls were born without arms or legs. It was always the two girls in the class who had to share a computer. Every week. Well well. View all 55 comments. Jun 24, Simon rated it it was amazing Shelves: gender , non-fiction , politics-and- society. Truly a brilliant book. And laugh-out-loud funny in quite a few places. It's a book so full of interesting information, it's very tempting to write a review in which one relates one's favorite experiments, factoids, or statistics. But I will mostly resist. What I'd like to highlight are two features. We have all heard and perhaps told stories like the following. So I guess these things must be innate after all. In one particularly grating and smug riff on this theme, Steven Pinker is quoted as saying: "there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless'. An all but obligatory paragraph in contemporary books and articles about hardwired gender differences gleefully describes a parent's valiant, but always comically hopeless, attempts at gender-neutral parenting" But then Fine tells us about the Bems, psychologists who, in the s, decided to try gender-neutral parenting seriously. And what a lot it involved. They also taught their children only to allocate people to a gender on the basis of their anatomy and reproductive functions. In an amusing story, the 4 year old son decided to wear barrettes in his hair to kindergarten. The best efforts of the comically frustrated liberal parents who find their kids acting according to stereotype do not show that differences in gender behavior are innate. As Fine describes, gendering of children is ubiquitous in the culture, and intense to an almost unimaginable degree. Not even the Bem children could avoid it altogether. And children are acutely sensitive to the multiple instructions they receive, in the very air they breathe, about how to conform to their genders. One needs little imagination to see how much more intrusive the pressures on gender conformity will be, even if the parents are like the Bems. This brings me to the second point I want to emphasize. A host of brain researchers now present themselves as radical iconoclasts because they claim that the evidence of fMRIs, etc. Boo hoo! Seen in this light, fMRIs are just the latest fad. Fine has plenty more to say about how shoddy a lot of the research is, how biased the interpretations of it, and so on. But this history is certainly salient enough that anyone presenting themselves as providing scientific evidence for gender differences in psychology and behavior risks looking somewhat ridiculous. And it places a burden on such researchers to be doubly careful about extrapolating from their results. This is even more true in light of the fact that the existence of the claims made for what brain scans show itself influences how well people perform. These irresponsible and popular interpretations of neurological evidence neuro-bollocks as they have been called do not just support the status quo; they reinforce it. In a funny and easy-to-read way, she explodes so much neuro-bollocks, she ought to get a prize for it. View all 13 comments. Jun 01, Thomas rated it really liked it Shelves: nonfiction , feminism , psychology. If I had a dollar for every time someone friend requested me on Goodreads because of my gender "a guy who reads? Are girls biologically geared toward the humanities and males toward the hard sciences? Do women really empathize more th If I had a dollar for every time someone friend requested me on Goodreads because of my gender "a guy who reads? Do women really empathize more than men because of their brain chemistry? Cordelia Fine offers a clear answer: no. In Delusions of Gender , she unravels the myth that we can chalk up gender differences to our neurology. With a keen and unrelenting eye, she examines scientific theories and misconceptions, like the role testosterone plays in the fetus. She dedicates a large portion of the book to knocking down neurosexism. In recent years several individuals have boasted about experiments that use fMRI and PET scans to detect differences in the brain; Fine makes sure to reveal the flaws associated with those studies and why we should be skeptical of the conclusions they espouse.