Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

In her survey of the neuroscience of gender, Fine argues that scientists with a sexist preconception in mind will put their work through absurd contortions in order to uphold the status quo.

Fine traces neurosexism to the very beginnings of neuroscience as a discipline, examining the various measures that Victorian scientists took to prove that the brain of the white male was built to dominate. Scientists began with simple measures of brain size; when that measure didn’t consistently demonstrate white male superiority, they switched to length-width ratios, and so forth (132).

This kind of sophism persists to the present day. Through research on recent gender science, Fine uncovers myriad design failures in studies that purport to prove gender difference in the brain. Whole books have been written on the wobbly foundations of, for example, structural differences in the brain that in fact have a great deal more to do with the size of the brain in question than the gender of its possessor, or studies of babies’ gendered toy preferences that don’t present the babies with the test toys simultaneously, making conclusions about their real preferences shaky at best. Such books’ unsupported assumptions often pass unnoticed into popular discourse; a veneer of technicality combined with support for ideologies already deeply embedded in the public consciousness makes flawed science hard to shake.