W.W. NORTON, JANUARY 2017Sometimes these days I’m introduced to people as an academic who wrote a book about how the brains of women and men aren’t that different. Disappointingly, the wide range of reactions to this brief biography has yet to include You must be Cordelia Fine! Would you sign this copy of your book that I carry around with me? Instead, people often shoot me a startled look, and then ask whether I’d also deny that there are other basic physiological differences between the sexes. Whenever this happens, I’m always tempted to fix my interrogator in the grip of a steely gaze and pronounce briskly, “Certainly! Testes are merely a social construction,” then see how the conversation flows from there.
Needless to say, this would be especially mischievous given the presumed role of the testes as the biological well-spring of the hormonal essence of masculinity–that steroid tsunami that destroys all hopes of sex equality. As Wayne State University law professor Kingsley Browne recently put it:
Despite the frequent assertion that the gaps that favor men (although not those that favor women) are results of invidious social forces, the truth seems to be somewhat more basic. If the various workplace and non-workplace gaps could be distilled down to a single word, that word would not be “discrimination” but “testosterone.”
In much the same way, economists who suggest that inherent sex differences in risk-taking play a major role in economic and occupational inequalities sometimes finger testosterone as ...
