It's the twenty-first century and although we tried to rear unisex children-boys who play with
dolls and girls who like trucks-we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked most women
stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important hardwired
differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines
newspaper articles books and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of
two brains and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women it
seems are just too intuitive for math men too focused for housework. Drawing on the latest
research in neuroscience and psychology Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired
differences between men's and women's brains unraveling the evidence behind such claims as
men's brains aren't wired for empathy and women's brains aren't made to fix cars. She then goes
one step further offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men's
and women's behavior. Instead of a male brain and a female brain Fine gives us a glimpse of
plastic mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.
Passionately argued and unfailingly astute Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed
corrective to the belief that men's and women's brains are intrinsically different-a belief
that as Fine shows with insight and humor all too often works to the detriment of ourselves
and our society.
