DELUSIONS OF GENDER

I would like all my feminist friends to read this book. (Actually, I’d like everyone to read this book, but I’m trying to be realistic.) As someone who believes gender is a social construct, it’s a little discouraging to reach childbearing age and hear from a million different people, friends and cultural pundits alike, “I used to think that, too, until I had a kid and realized differences between girls and boys are totally innate! I tried to raise my son/daughter gender-neutral and he turned everything into a gun/she turned everything into a doll!” Thank goodness for the wry, reasonable voice of Cordelia Fine, who in this book, subtitled How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, handily debunks the pervasive scientific myth that gender stereotypes are rooted in actual hard-wired differences between men’s and women’s brains. Instead, she demonstrates that those stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in human culture that they color every survey, psychological study, neurological experiment, and expert analysis, as well as our own thoughts and actions.

Good news: The human mind is incredibly adaptive! Bad news: It loves to adapt to society’s expectations, even against our conscious will. (For instance, women perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests after being told that women usually perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests—or even after simply being asked to check a box indicating their sex at the beginning of the test—than those given no gender cues.) In an environment so completely saturated with gender tropes, is it any wonder that one parent’s well-intentioned purchase of a toy fire truck for her daughter or a pink sweater for his son isn’t enough to reverse the barrage of traditional-gender-role messages from all other sources? After all, gender is the central signifier we use when identifying babies (as the rigid pink and blue dichotomy makes clear), and studies have shown that gender stereotyping begins even before birth (pregnant women who knew the sex of their babies characterized the strength and frequency of their kicks accordingly—calling the boys more “strong” and “athletic” and the girls more “calm” and “quiet”—even though fetal monitoring showed no difference). It should be no surprise, then, that small children quickly pick up on the fact that their gender seems to be of the utmost importance to the adults around them, minutely study the smallest clues as to how boys and girls are “supposed” to behave, and then do their best to conform. Gender differentiation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is usually a topic guaranteed to make me both righteously indignant and depressed, but those feelings were leavened by sheer glee at watching Fine so methodically demolish biased studies, pseudoscience, and the distorting sensationalism of the media in her measured, well-researched, yet incisively witty prose. Although the overall tone is serious, Fine’s frequent displays of sardonic humor and occasional sparkles of self-deprecating personal asides reminded me of Mary Roach, my all-time fave science writer. For instance:

When I tell parents that I’m writing a book about gender, the most common response I get is an anecdote about how they tried gender-neutral parenting, and it simply didn’t work. (The next most frequent reaction is a polite edging away.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Delusions of Gender and will definitely check out Fine’s earlier neuroscience title, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.