Do men and women have different brains? Could this be the cause of just about any gender gap you care to name, from pay inequalities to the vast imbalance in Nobel laureates? It’s an argument in which we all have an interest. The psychologist Cordelia Fine separates the neuronews from the neurotrash in Delusions of Gender, an eye-opening, forensic filleting of decades of research that has contributed to the various psychological gender myths. Women are good at words because both sides of their brain process language? Afraid not. Men are good at spatial tasks such as map reading because the right side of their brain is highly specialised? Nice idea that has certainly caught on, but a clear-eyed review of the research shows that it is yet another myth. This is a rigorous and highly readable book and in parts laugh-out-loud funny.
In The Mind Has No Sex?, Londa Schiebinger traces back through the centuries the idea that women just don’t have what it takes to do science. The philosopher François Poullain de la Barre bravely questioned whether there was any foundation to the inequality of the sexes in the 17th century, concluding that, as women’s brains were the same as men’s, they ought to be equally capable of success in any sphere. As Schiebinger demonstrates, this was not an idea that found popularity. She reveals the forgotten heritage of women in early science and charts their systematic exclusion as science became institutionalised and professionalised. Her book contains much valuable information for a world in which women are still viewed as intellectually inferior, where a scientist at CERN can stand up and publicly declare that women are not capable of the demands of physics.
The children’s author Frances Hardinge brings vividly to life the frustrations of intelligent women confronting the scientific establishment and society as a whole in her Costa-winning fantasy novel, The Lie Tree. It tells the story of a brave and bright 14‑year-old girl, who just wants to be a scientist like her father. Set in Victorian society, within the framework of debates about evolution and scientific fraud, it is full of the distorted beliefs of the time concerning what women can and should do – or, more particularly, can’t and shouldn’t do.
In the face of disagreement and abuse, sometimes humour is the best way to illustrate the absurdity of many gender myths. As Jacky Fleming shows in her collection of cartoons The Trouble With Women. She draws women with tiny heads to fit their tiny brains and wearing huge crinolines that make it impossible for them to reach any scientific apparatus. Her women lack “genius hair” and are too emotional to do anything outside the domestic sphere.
Gender myths are so entrenched it is hard to imagine what life might be like without them. Marge Piercy imagines just this in her classic science fiction novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. Trapped in the horrors of a 1970s mental hospital, the heroine escapes by intermittently time travelling to a utopian society set in the future, a key aspect of which is the successful achievement of gender neutrality, where biological sex is not a determinant of any kind of power or constraint on any kind of choice. It is a startlingly alternative view to today’s gender stratified societies, a thought-provoking vision of where we may be heading.
The Gendered Brain is published by Bodley Head (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
