Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine

Author:Cordelia Fine
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biology, Sociology, Psychology, Gender, Non Fiction, Science, Neuroscience, Feminism
ISBN: 9780393068382
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2010-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

I once bought a toy drum that promised to stimulate my child’s auditory nerve. I took this to mean that it made noise. Clearly, the genius minds behind the marketing had stumbled on the discovery that information sounds far more impressive when couched in the grand language of neuroscience. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that these words of mine you’re reading are stimulating your occipital lobe, as well as refining the neural circuitry of your anterior cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex? This isn’t just a book – it’s a neurological workout.) There’s something special about neuroscientific information. It sounds so unassailable, so very … well, scientific, that we privilege it over boring, old-fashioned behavioural evidence. It brings a satisfying feel to empty scientific explanations. And it seems to tell us who we really are.

After Lawrence Summers’s controversial suggestion that women might be inherently less capable of high-level science, Steven Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen were not the only ones to talk brain differences. So did Leonard Sax. Refreshingly, Sax did not argue that brain research hints at an innate female inferiority, on average, in science and maths. Instead, he argued that the problem lies in an educational system that teaches boys and girls the same things at the same time. This is a mistake because, as he explained in the Los Angeles Times, ‘while the areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls, the areas involved in math and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys.’1 Sax argues that teaching should be sensitive to sex differences in the timing of development of the various regions of the brain because ‘[a] curriculum which ignores those differences will produce boys who can’t write and girls who think they’re “dumb at math.”’2

Now, I’m all behind Sax’s goal of improving educational outcomes for boys and girls. There might be good reasons for single-sex schooling. But what are we to make of his claim that, as he put it to CBS News, ‘[b]oth boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences’?3

By now, you will probably be uneasy about the idea that complex psychological skills like language, maths and geometry can be pinpointed to a single part of the brain. It’s simply not the case that people use one particular lobe, or a circumscribed area of the brain, to read a novel, or write an essay, or solve an equation or calculate the angle of a triangle. And, unfortunately, neuroscience has yet to reach the stage at which it can peer into the brain and determine capacity for solving simultaneous equations or readiness to learn calculus. I can understand why this relatively subtle point didn’t set off alarm bells in Sax or the editors or journalists who brought comments like this to the public eye. But why did no one query the relevance of Sax’s statement on the grounds that boys are

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