Different gender, same brain

With the coming of new advances in biology and especially genetics, conservatives of all stripes have latched on to biology as a way to prove their deeply held beliefs. We've already seen the return of "scientific" racism with people claiming that differences between "races" have a biological origin; similarly, the last few years have seen an unprecedented, at least in my time, backlash against feminism, with conservatives blithely asserting that men and women are irrevocably different and grasping at science to prove it.

I've had quite enough of the race debate, but here's a link on the gender one.

Newsweek: Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart

For her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people.

Go read the article. Then we can stop this idiocy about men and women being so fundamentally different that they need to be treated differently. They will be if their parents make them.

In short, gender is a social construct. It comes about not because it's there to begin with, but because of how we bring up our children. Just like feminists have been saying all along. Funny, huh?