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Thursday, November 18, 2010

Just up at MercatorNet: Are men's and women's brains really different?

My review of Cordelia Fine's new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference:
The gender wars take no prisoners. In 2005, suggesting that there might indeed be innate differences between men and women derailed the career of Harvard president Larry Summers. He reemerged, years later, as President Obama’s sometime finance guru). Meanwhile, a host of neuroscientists report differences between the brains of men and women that, they say, account for different abilities and career choices.

Psychologist and author Cordelia Fine disagrees with the neuroscientists. In Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, she has no time for the “special powers” that pop brain science currently imputes to the female brain, reminding us that such claims were made long before the magnetic resonance imaging machine was invented.

She takes aim at books such as What Could He Be Thinking? where we hear that images of male and female brains were “marriage saving” for author Michael Gurian and his wife, to say nothing of Gurian’s Leadership and the Sexes which “links the actual science of male/female brain differences to every aspect of business.”

And if that doesn’t make you feel like Employee Double X or XY clocking in, what will?
For more, go here.

See also:

Evolutionary psychology: Pink for a girl, blue for a ... girl?

Neuroscience: Philosopher rips "drivel" - pop science media 's bread and butter

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