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Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps — And What We Can Do About It (2009)

by Lise Eliot(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0618393110 (ISBN13: 9780618393114)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: This was a good book overall, though I had a few issues with parts of the book. I liked the way she made science accessible for the average person without sounding like she was dumbing anything down. She includes a lot of research and explains it in a way that makes a lot of sense. I also enjoyed how she reviewed other people's talk of studies and pointed out how they could reach different conclusions than she did. Of course, it's easy to like a book when you agree with the conclusion. I loved that all of the research shows that there are only tiny gaps between male and female babies, that most of our differences appear after we've been alive for a while. This proves my theory that most of the differences are only present because of the way we condition people from birth t... moreo behave in stereotypical ways. As long as we are aware of the small differences that appear at birth, we can work on those to make sure they don't become the giant differences we see as people age. I wish more people would read this book and stop acting like all our differences are a result of "nature" and not "nurture."
review 2: This was one of several books I picked up after I decided that I was just getting too uncomfortable with the discussion about boys and girls innate differences. Discovering feminism in the 80s, for me feminism was in large part defined by the idea that girls could do everything that boys could. Over the last 30 years, it felt insidiously as if the nature vs nuture debate pendulum had swung back in the opposite direction.Of the books I picked up, this was easily, easily my favourite. I wish I could get every parent I know to read it (but I'm respectful enough I don't suggest it). Eliot goes in with an evidence centered approach - she's genuinely trying to work out what we know, not trying to prove a theory or justify a social program. Unsurprisingly, the book leaves lots of unknowns. But it largely strengthens the idea that little of the gender differences we see are hormonal or genetic, but are rather the result of small differences, combined with various social and developmental pressures (including the desire from children to define gender and identity clearly in binary terms), turning into more noticeable tendencies. The book is an encouragement to see children as individuals, not avatars of a gender. It's also packed with research about strategies to increase core skills. As such, I found it more useful in the end just a good book explaining childhood development than anything else.It's not alight read, but for a scholarly book it is very engagingly written. I suspect it suffers from being too practical for the serious research crowd, and too factual for the parenting crowd, but for me was a perfect mix. less

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