Read for: The F-Word’s March Non-Fiction Selection
Rating: 5/5
This is a fantastic book. Cordelia makes the case for gender being a social construct; something that’s learned rather than hard-wired. She is articulate, intelligent and very funny throughout the whole book, which was expertly researched (the bibliography could be published as it’s own book). There were so many things that made me go Ah-ha! She begins by presenting a number of studies that have shown that women and men have the ability to perform at the same skill level in areas of study that are predominantly considered “male” (ie. math), the only factor causing women to fall behind being when participants were fed gender related information that gave them the impression that men outperformed women on such exams. She then goes into illustrating how sexism is still alive and very well these days, citing many statistics on workplace sexism, particularly when it came to females applying for jobs, and especially if that woman also happened to be a mother. Moving beyond these infuriating sections, Cordelia dives into gender-neutral parenting, the marketing of gender-specific baby-EVERYTHING, and why society shouldn’t be teaching children that gender is important above all else, all the while providing the reader with a whole host of data from studies that attempted (and succeeded) in de-bunking the “gender is hardwired” concept. Seriously, I learned so much by reading this. And you, too, can absorb all this necessary knowledge by reading this bad boy (or girl).