3.5 stars I like Cordelia Fine and her work. Part of that, I’m willing to admit, may be confirmation bias — she clearly identifies herself as a feminist and is very upfront that her work is reflective of that viewpoint. But I was also trained as a scientist, and from that perspective my position is that many of her critics and detractors (and I’ll note here that for brevity’s sake I’m not including in this category people who have fundamentally sexist views and who probably […]
Biological imperative, my ass
Delusions of Gender is a truly interesting study of the (mostly flawed) studies in neurological science intended to explain gender differences between men and women that originate in the brain. It got a lot of press when it first came out a few years ago, and deservedly so — with nearly 100 out of 340 pages dedicated to footnotes and the bibliography, it’s impressively researched and satisfyingly comprehensive. Cordelia Fine’s main argument, after definitively surveying the field, is that neurological claims to identify and explain […]