Cordelia Fine Quotes

Our sexuality is body, culture, age, learning, habit, fantasies, worries, passions, and the relationships in which all these elements combine. That's why sexuality can change with age, partner, experience, emotions, and sense of perspective.

As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.

When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think and what you do.

Blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

Both women and computer science are the losers when a geeky stereotype serves as an unnecessary gatekeeper to the profession.

Here's another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who produces
the sperm doesn't dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with most
mammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it for
granted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn't "in" their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn't in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat's developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male "mothering" the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.

A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.

So far, the items on that list of brain differences that are thought to explain the gender status quo have always, in the end been crossed off. But before this happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our minds, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.

Male rats don't experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behavior in female rats. They never normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He'll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted, and even build a comfy nest for it.29 The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn't normally exist.30 If a male rat, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good.

the greater the gender equity of a country, the smaller the gender gap in the importance of the financial resources of a partner (as well as in the importance of other preferences, like chastity and good looks).36

The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behavior. The maxim "fake it till you make it" gains empirical support.

While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial "motherhood penalty". Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts.

Boys do not pursue mathematical activities at a higher rate than girls do because they are better at mathematics. They do so, at least partially, because they think they are better.

My husband would probably like you to know that, for the sake of my research for this chapter, he has had to put up with an awful lot of contemptuous snorting.

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced,they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.

In response to an article in the New York times that claimed from an fMRI study that 'a mother's impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain' one neuro-curmudgeon put out a plea to 'take experience and learning seriously. Just because you see a response [in the brain] - you don't get to claim it's hard-wired.

Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.

Unlike men in the same position, women leaders have to continue to walk the fine line between appearing incompetent and nice and competent but cold. Experimental studies find that, unlike men, when they try to negotiate greater compensation they are disliked. When they try out intimidation tactics they are disliked. When they succeed in a male occupation they are disliked. When they fail to perform the altruistic acts that are optional for men, they are disliked. When they do go beyond the call of duty they are not, as men are, liked more for it. When they criticize, they are disparaged . Even when they merely offer an opinion, people look displeased. The perceptive reader will notice a certain pattern emerging. The same behavior that enhances his status simply makes her less popular. It's not hard to see that this makes the goal of getting ahead in the workplace distinctly more challenging for a woman.

0Cross-gender behaviour is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term 'tomboy' there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the 'sissy'.

Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability - whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed - makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed - as a gift - are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts - who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort - pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task - grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions).

Neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes. Three years ago, I discovered my son's kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. And so I decided to write this book.