Delusions of Gender

A fine book which dives deep into the prevalent social attitude of creating gender differences and how difficult it becomes to disassociate oneself from the gendered identity. The more I think about gender, more and more I become entangled into this weird loop of seeing every social thing in a different light.

Those seemingly-innocent “bro” comments between male friends, saying that the new hire in the team is a “diverse candidate”, claiming “they don't have the balls to do it” as if two-round-eggs-in-a-sac somehow magically makes you superior to everyone else - all of these reinforce the gender stereotypes. Cordelia discusses at length about all the subtle cues that we don't even notice but which has a pretty significant impact on how we treat others. It's amazing how difficult it has become in today's world to not discriminate sexually, more so especially for a parent to bring up their children in a gender-neutral way.

It's all about the mindset, but this benign word is the most difficult to change. I'm not claiming myself to be immune either. I can't count how many times I've said something really stupid when discussing something with my girlfriend, and it's only when she objects on my choice of words that I pause and reflect on how wrong it was. Reading this book was one baby step towards consciously trying to change that status quo, and I'd recommend doing this to everyone else as well.

So, Women are more emphatic and men are better at systematising? Turns out what we think of as gender differences can all be blamed on neuroplasticity. Our culture nurtures our minds into different genders, and our minds reinforce our culture with its gender differences. It's a chicken and egg problem, that must have started somewhere. And by now it's everywhere, in children books, movies, books, baby clothes, all our conscious and subconscious behavior, ...

With a dry humor, but also a mix of bitterness and glee, Fine picks apart a century of gender studies and gender experiments, debunks misconceptions that first clearly are based on sexism (women's smaller brains explain their cognitive inferiority) then later based on faults and inaccuracy in the testing setup (priming, p, focus on differences over similarities, .. )

For example: The simple fact of ticking a [ ] male or [ ] female checkbox on the top of a test results in significant performances differences for females and males. When women are reminded of their apparent “inferiority” in all “male” subjects (math, science, ...) their results drop.

We're clearly on an upwards curve to actual gender equality, but it might take a few generations to fully reinvent our cultural norms.

Debunking books like ‘The Female Brain,' an interesting analysis of neuroscience-based gender identification and issues, societal propagation of gender stereotypes, and how it affects us all, from childhood to workplace. This was a quick read, and utterly fascinating. And it does have a few things to say about ‘The Female Brain.' This book rocked.