A review by elerireads
The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon

informative medium-paced

4.5

Excellent. Particularly good at eviscerating crappy studies, patiently pulling them apart and explaining why their conclusions are a load of rubbish. The title was quite clever - the core argument of the book being that there's no real evidence for hardwired, innate biological differences between male and female brains, but what IS demonstrated over and over is that brain plasticity means brains are "gendered" by the highly gendered world in which they develop and exist. i.e. whatever differences that can be found between male and female brains are often far better explained by gender-differentiated factors in upbringing etc., e.g. playing tetris or similar spatial problem-solving games. Rippon dug into a lot of the complexity around the way that attitudes and expectations influence abilities. Very young children have well-developed social perception are highly attuned to parental disaproval in particular, e.g. little boys will pick up on their dad's discomfort with them wearing a princess dress even if the dad doesn't say anything negative (and if asked would say he's fine with it). I think Rippon referred to children as "expert gender detectives" or something similar. I found the discussion around women in STEM particularly interesting and useful because it articulated and backed up a lot of the things that I had long thought/suspected but not been able to express as clearly or succinctly; the complex layering of factors from the types of toys young children play with, the association of maths and science with "genius", early beliefs about boys' vs girls' likelihood of being geniuses, and teachers' biases all feeding into maths anxiety in girls, then coupled with visibility of clear existing gender imbalance and blatantly hostile work/study environments... It's a hell of a lot more complicated than just needing to encourage more girls to do science.