A study Rippon cites in her book has participants doing a simple card-sorting task, but the test giver tells the group “Males usually do better on this test,” or vice versa. It’s a helpful metaphor because gender stereotyping that tells us how we’re supposed to be can be undermining. They’re pink and blue, what Daphna Joel, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, calls a mosaic.
There are differences in the brains of the sexes, Rippon writes, but they’re also remarkably similar and the differences don’t influence what we are capable of. This is “the best example of the ludicrous ‘size matters’ genre,” says Gina Rippon, author of “ Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myth of Male and Female Minds,” in which the author tackles the centuries-old view of the brain as binary, hard-wired for “male” or “female” traits and abilities.Ī cognitive neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, England, Rippon explores in her book, in part, “neurosexism.” Coined by author Cordelia Fine, neurosexism is the long-held idea that male and female brains have differences that dictate our abilities and behavior, like being better at math or languages, and focusing on these differences in research to explain us along sex lines.
Such findings would “prove” women inferior, confining them to domestic roles, leaving scholarship, earning power and professional achievement to men. Male brains came up as bigger than women’s, outweighing the ladies by 5 ounces (a comparison Caucasians always seemed to win at, as well). At the time, it was thought that the bigger the brain the smarter the owner, and men of science would fill up skulls with buckshot or birdseed to test brain weight. Perhaps he had never met any who were given a chance.ĭarwin was certainly well-adapted to his environment (Victorian England) where such views were standard. Isn’t it a bummer when you find out something you don’t like about someone you do?ĭid you know Charles Darwin was sexist? The father of evolutionary theory thought women were naturally inferior and could never measure up to male intellect or achievement. The brains of transgender people are often different than cisgender people, but that may be largely due to different experiences.In reality, our brains aren’t pink or blue.Scientists have often argued that men are inherently smarter than women, but newer research smashes that belief.
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