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

Fine begins her argument with a history of what she calls “neurosexism”: the practice of back-engineering explanations of gender roles through comparisons of the “male” and “female” brains. Neurosexism, Fine observes, has been used to explain everything from women’s exclusion from managerial professions to men’s emotional cluelessness. Drawing examples from both recent pop psychology and Enlightenment-era tracts, Fine notes that as long as we’ve been making judgments about the differences between the male and female mind, those judgments have been inflected by whatever ideas of manhood and womanhood are culturally dominant—and that a great deal of the “science” that’s been conducted around sex differences in the brain has gone out of its way to support those predetermined conclusions.

In short, much thought about sex differences in the brain has taken insufficient note of its own cultural context. Fine writes:

When we confidently compare the “female mind” and the “male mind,” we think of something stable inside the head of the person, the product of a “female” or “male” brain. But such a tidily isolate data processor is not the mind that social and cultural psychologists are getting to know […] (xxvi).