Five of the best books exposing gender myths

Gina Rippon is a professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Her new book is Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds.

At the Guardian she tagged five of the best books exposing gender myths, including:

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.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue