by LIBRARIAN
The ideological patriarchal model of gender and sex according to scientism.
Everyone’s talking about the #GoogleMemo, but unfortunately it raises a number of difficult questions that require focused study. In this post, we are going to give you a detailed guide to all of the research that speaks against the idea of biological sex differences in men and women. That is a common, sexist, and ultimately false ideological notion that we need to get rid of through rigorous learning and education. Below is our Syllabus on Sex and Gender Differences to Disprove Sexist Science.
First on our list is the book called Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. This is a major catalog of sexist myths, which Cordelia fine disposes of with ease. Fine sets out to disapprove the widespread belief that men and women are biologically hardwired with different interests, so this is one of the key books that needs to be on any syllabus about sex and gender differences. She engages thoroughly with the scientific literature, not rejecting the biological sex differences out of hand but rather showing how the assumptions are questionable and the scientific testing is fragile. Interestingly, fine does not venture a strong statement on the possibility that men and women have different interests due to biology, but she focuses on all of the myriad ways in which cultural and social beliefs exaggerate and amplify sex differences. In the first part, she outlines in detail all the ways in which, overt time, gender stereotypes have been reified as reality. She also makes a good point, which is crucial, that science is always been used to justify sexism. This is filled with information that disproves sexist science.
Disproving biological sex differences
So what are the problems with the current research that supposedly shows biological differences in the psychology of men and women? One problem that Fine points out is that the studies often have small samples, which lead to untrustworthy conclusions. These weak and under-supported inferences then get played up in the media far beyond what is warranted by the data. Her main strategy for disproving sexist science is therefore to highlight its overwhelming shortcomings, perhaps more so than any other book on our syllabus on sex and gender differences.
“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.” ? Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Another crucial book that disproves biological sex differences in the brain is Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. In this book, the author Rebecca Jordan–Young destroys the previous research which purports to show that men and women are born with different brains. In particular, of all the authors on our syllabus on sex and gender differences, this author most ferociously zeroes in on “human brain organization theory,” which suggests that men and women have brains that are differently organized because of evolutionary factors.
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