Judging by my friends’ reviews on Goodreads, I just really need to give it a break, and then pick this up again some time down the road when my brain is being more amenable.

I can’t emphasize how much my brain did not retain any of the information I read, though, so this is really just a useless review. I remember it being a lot of, this isn’t proven, we actually don’t “know” as much as we think we do. Dr Cordelia Fines new book, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, and Professor Rebecca Jordan-Youngs latest, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference, have. The book is very heavy on cautioning the reader about these types of studies, since gender is so hard to study, and really just instills a healthy amount of scientific skepticism. Which is enjoyable in its own way, but not quite what I was expecting. Cognitive bias plays a huge role not only in the behavior of test subjects, but in the minds of the scientists performing the studies. Unless someone can point me in the direction of a book on the same subject that is more recent that I should read first (this was published in 2010).Īside from that issue, this book is also less of a thing on its own than it is the author debunking other scientific studies or books, things that people take as a given, or as “proven” by science. Language is so weird.) I will be trying it again maybe in a couple of years by audio.

I just googled that phrase, and it evolved from something Pliny the Elder wrote in 77 A.D. So take this review with a grain of salt. If I had read this in audio, a format my brain can handle for serious subjects, I probably would have rated it much higher, and gotten through it much faster (and I’ll be honest, retained more than 10% of it). I tried to read this book near the beginning of quarantine, in hard copy, and my poor overloaded brain just couldn’t handle it.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine