Delusions of Gender

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.