Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, And Neurosexism Create Difference Quotes
"The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly."
"If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself."
"No. You’d pick up your pencil and start writing."
"These, you will note, are ideal qualifications for someone who wishes to live to serve the needs of others."
"Social psychologists are finding that what we can consciously report about ourselves does not tell the whole story."
"The implicit associations of the mind can be thought of as a tangled but highly organized network of connections."
"The principle behind learning in associative memory is simple: what is picked up are associations in the environment."
"Researchers have shown that our implicit representations of social groups are often remarkably reactionary."
"Measures of implicit associations reveal that men, more than women, are implicitly associated with science, maths, career, hierarchy and high authority."
"The results of a series of experiments give us an indication of how the media, and life itself, can give rise to these associations."
"When gender is salient in the environment, or we categorise someone as male or female, gender stereotypes are automatically primed."
"But more recently, social psychologists have also become interested in the possibility that sometimes we might also perceive our own selves through the lens of an activated stereotype."
"The simple process of ticking a box had surprising effects."
"The point of this armchair experiment is not to try to deny the many other factors that, no doubt, contribute in complex ways to gender inequality in scientific domains."
"But this body of research reminds us, again, that everything we do – be it maths, chess, child care, or driving – we do with a mind that is exquisitely sensitive to the social environment around it."
"But choosing a career is not just about finding a place socially in which one can feel at home. It also entails finding a fit with one’s talents."
"Correll concludes that '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.’"
"Emily Pronin and her colleagues found that female undergraduates at Stanford University who had taken more than ten quantitative courses were less likely than other women to rate as important and applicable to them supposedly maths-incompatible behaviours such as wearing makeup, being emotional, and wanting children."
"‘MMMy opinions and reasoning are always questioned, "Are you sure about that?"’ complained one focus group participant, ‘whereas what the men say is taken as gospel.’"
"Echoing Emily Pronin and her colleagues’ discovery that mathematically inclined women shed the feminine attributes they perceived as a liability, the Athena report sketches a disquieting picture of the psychological changes that take place in women who remain in SET careers."
"As the arguments that women lack the necessary intrinsic talent to succeed in male-dominated occupations become less and less convincing, the argument that women are just less interested has grown and flourished."
"In her book Scientists Anonymous, Patricia Fara describes how, around the turn of the nineteenth century, botanist Jeanne Baret and mathematician Sophie Germain were obliged to present themselves as men to carry out their research."
"People who have transformed their identity in this way – namely, female-to-male transsexuals – report decidedly beneficial consequences in the workplace."
"Empirical research points to the same conclusion."
"When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as ‘competent but cold’."
"Motherhood, by the way, serves to upset an already delicate balance."
"Rutgers University psychologist Laurie Rudman and her colleagues have recently discovered that what people find particularly objectionable in professional women are status enhancing behaviours like being aggressive, dominating and intimidating."
"This is unintended sex discrimination at work."
"Many, although not all, studies of real employment contexts also find that men are preferred over women for traditionally masculine positions – but both positive and negative findings from such studies are hard to interpret."
"The prescriptions of the communal stereotype can of course continue to disadvantage women even once they are hired."
"At the end of the tightrope of impression management, should it be successfully navigated, is the glass cliff."
"Men aren’t always the winners; the lack-of-fit phenomenon can work against them, too."
"The unwitting sex discrimination that devalues women’s achievements and sets difficult standards for interpersonal behaviour perhaps explains why, in survey after survey, women consistently and reliably rate their jobs as simply harder work than do men."
"We can be prejudiced even when we don’t intend to be."
"S. and I have decided to get married next year when we get through medicine … I told him I didn’t know a thing about housekeeping, and he said why should I? That since our education has been precisely similar … there would be no justice at all in my having to do all the ‘dirty work’."
"The continual drip, drip, drip of gender stereotypes will, over time, really add up."
"Gendered paths and outcomes then become part of the social world that entangles minds."
"For two millennia, ‘impartial experts’ have given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat to boil the blood and purify the soul."
"The small biasing effects accumulate over careers and lifetimes to result in substantially different behavioral paths and social outcomes for men and women."
"But it happens imperceptibly. And so we look for answers elsewhere."
"This foetal testosterone certainly seems to be potent, sex-segregating stuff."
"Girls, it seems – at least for the time being until we take a closer look at the data – have not so much a deficiency of foetal testosterone as a lucky escape."
"It’s a good life. If I die tomorrow, I’ll die a happy woman, because I’ll feel like I’ve done a lot of good work."
"The girl brain directs not so much a female approach to the world as a flexible, context-sensitive one."
"The very point of the slur ‘birdbrain’ is to indicate that the thinking skills of the person in receipt of the insult are, in some important way worth commenting on, inadequate."
"The brain can get to the same outcome in more than one way."
"Most brain functions arise from distributed neural networks and that within any given region lies a daunting complexity of connections, neurotransmitter systems, and synaptic functions."
"Twenty years ago, my mother proposed a neuroscientific model to explain why some brains have an extraordinary capacity for deeply focused thought."
"Consider what’s involved in zooming in your attention on, say, a small aspect of the process of photosynthesis."
"The obscurity of the relationship between brain structure and psychological function means that just-so stories can be all too easily written and rewritten."
"Using fMRI to spy on neurons is something like using Cold War–era satellites to spy on people: Only large-scale activity is visible."
"Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant."
"We’re not locked into the obsolete hardware of our ancestors."
"The new neuroconstructivist perspective of brain development emphasises the sheer exhilarating tangle of a continuous interaction among genes, brain and environment."
"Our environment, our behaviour, even our thinking, can all change what genes are expressed."
"It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are moulded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless'."
"Girls and boys behave differently because their brains are wired differently."
"Parents raise girls and boys differently because girls and boys are so different from birth."
"Young boys and girls play differently, even if the contrast isn’t nearly as black-and-white as it’s often portrayed."
"Implicit attitudes play an important part in our psychology. They distort social perception, they leak out into our behavior, they influence our decisions – and all without us realizing."
"The obstacles to gender-neutral parenting begin well before a baby is born."
"A parent with a half-changed mind will not parent in a spotlessly gender-neutral fashion."
"Parents of boys expressed more pride in the news, while parents of girls expressed greater happiness."
"The gendered patterns of our lives can be so familiar that we no longer notice them."
"Children's views about gender differences reach 'peak rigidity' between five and seven years of age."