Gina Rippon

Excellent book, though one that moves far beyond gender into the methods of science and of different sciences: social science, cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, psychology and more... It is quite a technical read but worth its diligence because it sheds light on how we establish evidence, and how frequently this evidence is manipulated or transformed.

Spoiler: in essence there is no clear gendered brain, their individual variability is larger than any gender signal. The author however does not get to this till the end of the book and as such she works through many details which are fascinating in their process technology and perverse in their manipulation of tools.

The one big issue I have is that the author did not include philosophy as part of an investigation that is very close to problems of what is knowledge, truth, fact, measurement, definition etc... so that in many parts of the book the author takes as evidence a measure in the brain that may well not mean anything even if tightly correlated to its label. The reader remains exposed to neurojunk because they are not led through what we mean by knowledge, which sure,
would be a huge discussion but could be resolved quite simply with ideas of scientific consensus.

Frances Edwards who I was lucky enough to learn some Neuroscience from explained that something in these fields is only true when you have three corroborating studies where at least one is an independently funded population stufy with 1000s of subjects. Then it is true... everything else is still speculative evidence.… (mais)

While I would not recommend this as the first book on this topic to read, it is a very wide-ranging look at the current state of understanding on brain differences between males and females. The main take home is that male and female brains are likely more alike than they are different, and many of the differences that exist in adult brains between the sexes are probably caused more by past experience (environment) than biology. The author is not attempting to show that male and female brains do not differ, but rather that we have not yet been able to identify significant differences, or at least not significant biologically based differences. The brain is very plastic and adaptive, so that adult male and female brains do differ, but how much of that is inborn is an open question. She also suggests that gender differences in the brain are more appropriately described as a continuum from male to female gendered, and based on current evidence I would have to agree.

Another large part of the book deals with the reasons that there are so few women in STEM professions. Although there are no comprehensive explanations the author outlines a lot of plausible reasons. Since women clearly have the same ability to perform well in STEM skills, it is not ability that is keeping them out. Rippon suggests it is a combination of "stereotype threat" and the discomfort of dealing with the chilly, misogynist environment they are presented with in higher education in STEM fields. Stereotype threat, the reduction in performance due to awareness of the stereotype that women cannot manage the tasks required in STEM fields, lowers women's performance, and when this is combined with the general tendency to require higher performance from women than men, many women simply give up. The chilly environment can also lower their self-esteem and cause them to self-silence, thus making it less likely they will succeed. Unless things change a lot in STEM higher education, women will likely continue to be underrepresented in STEM professions.… (mais)

This is interesting enough but doesn't add anything to previous books on the topic--effectively, that much research on sex/gender differences is poorly done or poorly reported; that differences do not appear to be innate from birth; and that our brains are plastic and that differences develop over time. At least some of those differences are due to socialization or life experience.

Given the rise in gender-critical/transphobic feminism in the UK I was a little apprehensive that it might make its way in, since this research has potential implications for trans people. Instead, she mostly avoids the topic until the end. Her summary on the topic is a little weaselly, unnecessarily so--even if we presume that there are few innate biological differences in male and female brains, all that does is suggest that it isn't the source of gender identity, since we all develop one, not that gender identity is not real or has no meaning.… (mais)