Gina Rippon is a professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Her new book is Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds.At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books exposing gender myths, including:
Do men and women have different brains? Could this be the cause of just about any gender gap you care to name, from pay inequalities to the vast imbalance in Nobel laureates? It’s an argument in which we allRead about another entry on the list.have an interest. The psychologist Cordelia Fine separates the neuronews from the neurotrash in Delusions of Gender, an eye-opening, forensic filleting of decades of research that has contributed to the various psychological gender myths. Women are good at words because both sides of their brain process language? Afraid not. Men are good at spatial tasks such as map reading because the right side of their brain is highly specialised? Nice idea that has certainly caught on, but a clear-eyed review of the research shows that it is yet another myth. This is a rigorous and highly readable book and in parts laugh-out-loud funny.
--Marshal Zeringue
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