If you want to make the eyes of everyone around you glaze over, just say the word “gender.”  If you want to cause people to back away from you, use the word “sexism.”  And if you want your friends to laugh at you, suggest that boys and girls are not really all that different, and that what we believe are innate differences are actually behaviors demanded and reinforced by our culture.

Cordelia Fine commits all of these crimes in Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, but I recommend reading it anyway.  Fine takes on the prevailing beliefs about gender differences and dismantles them one by one, demonstrating the paper-thin nature of the “proof” that props up our self-fulfilling constructs. 

Take math, for instance.  Everyone “knows” that males outperform females in math.  But subtle changes in the environment in which math skills are tested dramatically alter the results.  In one study, researchers tested college students enrolled in a calculus course.  One group was told at the outset that the test was intended to measure their math ability and help determine what made some people better at math than others.  The other group was told that no gender difference had ever been found on this test.  The results?  Both men and women in the first group averaged 19 percent correct on the (very difficult) test, as did men in the second group.  The women in the second group, however, released from the girls-aren’t-good-at-math stereotype, averaged 30 percent on the same test.  Similar experiments compared Asian women who were reminded (by checking a box) that they were women with Asian women who were reminded that they were Asian.  As you may have guessed, the “I’m Asian” group outperformed the “I’m female” group on math tests.

Fine painstakingly combs through the research on structural brain differences and the male or female “qualities” that have been attributed to them.  Over and over, researchers have started with a commonly held belief about gender characteristics and asserted that some physical brain difference they observed caused the characteristics.  But, Fine explains, it’s all speculation and hand-waving.  There may be no causal connection at all.  Or causality may go the other direction–the repeated performance of certain behaviors may result in brain changes.  We don’t and can’t know, no matter what the researchers claim.

Finally, Fine deconstructs the claim of many well-intentioned parents that their efforts at “gender-neutral” parenting failed and their children stubbornly asserted gender-typical traits anyway.  The problem: gender messages and expectations are inescapable.  In one study, pregnant women were asked to describe the activity of their babies.  Those who knew they were carrying boys described their movements in the womb as “vigorous” and “strong,” while women with female babies used phrases like “not violent” and “not terribly active.”  No particular pattern was observed when women did not know the gender of the baby.  Once children are born, there is a continuous deluge of gender-related inputs, from the clothes they wear to the way adults speak to and interact with them to the overwhelmingly male cast of storybook characters to the intensely gender-delineated toy industry.  Buying a few trucks for your daughter and some dolls for your son doesn’t counteract everything else in the child’s experience.

It is not Fine’s contention that there are definitely no innate differences between the sexes, but that so-called brain research has been used for centuries to justify and perpetuate inequality.  While much has changed, “Neurosexism reflects and reinforces cultural beliefs about gender—and it may do so in a particularly powerful way.  Dubious ‘brain facts’ about the sexes become part of the cultural lore.”  Caveat emptor.

© 2011 Jodi Forschmiedt

Jodi Forschmiedt is a freelance writer and book reviewer in Seattle, Washington.