author: Cordelia Fine
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/23
date added: 2010/09/23
shelves: non-fiction, psychology, science, sociology, gender, favorites
review:
I happened to run across this book at the library having forgotten that it was in my "to-read" list. I’m SO glad I did, and given a certain pair of somewhat ranty posts a couple of months back, only wish I’d read it sooner! I literally could not put it down – as in: "no really, I need to go to bed/back to my desk from lunch/off the bus, I have to put the book away."
In short, social construction of gender: you’re soaking in it. (And especially, your brain is soaking in it.)
1) Priming & stereotype threat affect everything. Just checking gender on a form before taking a test changes womens’ performance, especially on math tests. More priming (being told that the test relates to gender, watching a gender-stereotyped commercial, etc) increases the effect.
2) Most of the "science" as it’s filtered through to the popular media is a disaster of half-baked assumptions, small and/or poorly-constructed experiments, and willful misunderstanding of the actual results. (She tears apart one popular writer; it’s kinda fun.)
3) Worse, those lame results create a feedback loop, combined with the impossibility of gender-neutral child-rearing, that increases the problem of stereotype threat, and makes genuine social change more difficult.
Le sigh. Not only is the feminist struggle not over, we may actually be hitting a really hard spot.
On the plus side, I’m fired up now. Not just that, but I’m thinking more about my own personal construction of gender identity, including my history with math and science.
There’s a post I wrote about my life with math a while back, and there I wrote about it as a choice between writing and math – now I’m seriously looking back and wondering about the effect of gender stereotypes, and whether I might have come to computing sooner given different circumstances. I think it’s worth noticing that choices exist in a constrained environment, constrained both by the external world, and by our own unexamined or incompletely-formed attitudes.
As for the writing style, it’s a delightful read. She’s got a sharp conversational tone that pulled me in; I even read the footnotes.
HIGHLY recommended, great in combination with Pink Brain Blue Brain.