Review of reviews: Books

playing up those that appear to show differences. What’s often missed, Rippon says, is that the differences can be attributed to the brain’s amazing malleability. In one study she cites, teenage girls who played Tetris regularly for just three months enlarged the areas of their brain associated with spatial processing—a capability often cited as a hallmark strength of the male brain.

“So has Rippon proved that it’s all nurture and no nature?” asked neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen in The Times (U.K.). Hardly. Plenty of research indicates there are measurable differences in the average male and female brain among newborns. A 2001 study that I co-led found that even among 24-hour-old infants, boys gazed longer at objects and girls at human faces. Because that finding “strikes at the heart of Rippon’s thesis,” she attacks it on technicalities. Such criticism of Rippon should be expected, said Sue Nelson in the Financial Times. For years, Rippon has been knocking down myths, and every time her motives are questioned. Instead, her case deserves a hearing. Because when the subject is myths about what women can’t do, “stereotypes are brain changers.”