I found this book to be highly interesting and well written. I thought that the book was very accessible for the most part, I have no education in any areas of science and was still able to follow the book and understand the content relatively easily, I also thought that the book was structured very well and made easy to read and understand.

Men come from Mars and women from Venus. Men can read maps, while women are better at language. Men can't listen and women have the innate urge to hoard shoes.

This book is about the question if men and women have a biological difference nobody can't help which would explain why different people, whom you can sort by genitalia, are better at different things.

Gina Rippon explores the history of brain research and presents different studies that have been conducted, while giving examples of the repercussion this has on people's lifes and weird things that happened in consequence, like an infamous memo by a Google headperson in 2017.

No prior knowledge is assumed, which makes this book very accessible. I'm an archaeologist in training, natural sciences is something we let other people do, but I was able to follow her reasoning. At least, most of the times. You see, I started this book back in summer, only read the introduction and quit as we got a heatwave which made words with more than three syllables tricky on my concentration. So I am very glad to finally have caught up.

Spoiler: As you can assume from the title, the brain differences between men and women are a myth. The author even goes so far as to ask if men and women in a binary is a sensible way of categorizing people, mentioning both non binary people and different attempts in science to put people in the box, adding men with female traits, women with male traits, and intersex people.

Now I feel equipped to go out and inform myself on the topic, to question studies and what I have to look for in new data that is presented to me. Also, the author urges you to look up the claims people make in their studies, reading the footnotes and looking up the stuff they refer to.
Or, as a friend put it: Don't trust a statistic you haven't forged yourself.

The arc was provided by publisher.

Powerful and compelling account of the myth of the gendered brain. esential reading for any feminist at this time. Highly recommended

A very important and interesting book looking at sexual dimorphism in the brain, and to what extent the idea of a male/female brain is valid. As a woman who has always been told that I have a 'more masculine brain', it was enlightening and refreshing to read a book that examines other possible causes of sexual differences (i.e. the framework we raise our girls in vs our boys). Very well thought out and researched, a pleasure to read.

An extremely important book, not to say fundamental, to take stock of the situation on the subject of studies on neurophysiology of the brain, in particular with regard to sexual dimorphism. The conclusion? As I already suspected, having often been classified a woman with a male brain, is that the real difference is the environment in which the individual grows up and the stimuli he/she is subjected to. Even today too little is done to stimulate girls to express their potential, and still (unfortunately) rare are the cases in which parents and educators - especially mothers, I regret to say - apply stereotypes to the frame of reference in which their daughters have to move. In the meantime, nonsense continues to have resonance boxes in the form of magazine headlines and today, with social media, posts that carry on a social stigma towards women.