Cordelia Fine's Delusions Of Gender

Throughout much of mainstream American culture runs certain assumptions about gender and sex. Often these assumptions are left unacknowledged and unaddressed even as we continue to use them as a framework upon which to build our knowledge of the world. Sexism and sexual inequality are supported for example by a wide variety of "popular" beliefs, such as ideas about the natural and universal differences between the sexes and their therefore rightful duties or "spheres"—including gendered parenting roles and the dichotomy between the public world of men and the domestic world of women. Using examples from authors Cordelia Fine, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Louise Lamphere to illustrate these assumptions, I will further identify a few of the social,

The assumption is that men and women are fundamentally different, that women are for example naturally more empathetic or emotionally-centered. In particular the belief she questions is that differences between the sexes can be easily explained by "natural" sex differences in the brain. One example of this that she lambasts involved researchers examining brain activity while men and women performed an emotion-matching test and subsequently taking the findings as concrete support for the idea that men are naturally more rational and women more emotional2. Brain activity during these tests was at least partially present in different regions of the brain depending on the sex of the participant, but the use of these minor differences to reverse inference a psychological state from brain activity is fundamentally flawed.3 Less activation in an area can actually mean that the connections have become more "streamlined" as expertise has increased and the activation of different regions of the brain is also highly context