Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds
(Pantheon, $30)
“Can it be that our culture still wants little girls to stay in their lane?” asked Karen Sandstrom in The Washington Post. In a book “dense with research and point of view,” cognitive researcher Gina Rippon argues that her field is littered with suspect findings about the supposed differences between the brains of men and women. A study can always be found to support the ideas, say, that boys excel at mechanical tasks and girls are more empathetic. Because Rippon, a British professor emeritus, has long been a critic of what she calls neurosexism, she has accumulated many detractors. But she isn’t denying that there are observable differences between the brains of men and women; “she just wants us to accurately understand whatever differences do exist.” Don’t let the science here intimidate you, said Laura Miller in Slate.com. Rippon is an “irascible but very down-to-earth guide” to brain research, and her withering assault on some of the sloppy work of her peers “reads like a secretly recorded trash-talking session in a lab break room.” She also revisits the 19th century, when male researchers weren’t pondering if women might be inferior intellectually; they were merely hoping to understand why. Today, subtler prejudices are alive and well. The media, meanwhile, tends to ignore studies that highlight commonalities between the genders while