Skewering theories of 'hard-wired' gender differences
By Kate Tuttle
Globe Correspondent / September 5, 2010
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/09/05/skewering_theories_of_hard_wired_gender_differences/"When I tell parents that I'm writing a book about gender," Cordelia Fine writes, "the most common response I get is an anecdote about how they tried gender-neutral parenting and it simply didn't work." Indeed, just as one sociologist whose research Fine describes discovers, many parents today feel certain that despite their best efforts to introduce trucks to their daughters and dolls to their sons, they come up against gender differences they see as "hard-wired," innate, immutable. But are they, really?
As Fine argues in this forceful, funny new book, the notion that gender accounts for differences in minds and behavior through some biological, brain-based process is an idea as popular as it is unproven. Promoted by popular science and pop psychology authors, nudged along by credulous newspaper and magazine editors looking for hot headlines, a cottage industry has emerged to convince us that men and women are, metaphorically at least, from other planets.
