Editions

The Gendered Brain

The Gendered Brain

  • The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain

Barbie or Lego? Reading maps or reading emotions? Do you have a female brain or a male brain? Or is that the wrong question?

On a daily basis we face deeply ingrained beliefs that our sex determines our skills and preferences, from toys and colours to career choice and salaries. But what does this mean for our thoughts, decisions and behaviour?

Using the latest cutting-edge neuroscience, Gina Rippon unpacks the stereotypes that bombard us from our earliest moments and shows how these messages mould our ideas of ourselves and even shape our brains. Rigorous, timely and liberating, The Gendered Brain has huge repercussions for women and men, for parents and children, and for how we identify ourselves.

‘Highly accessible… Revolutionary to a glorious degree’ Observer

Reviews

  • A highly accessible book. It’s also an important one… it has the power to do vastly more for gender equality than any number of feminist “manifestos”… revolutionary to a gloriuos degree ... supremely clear-eyed … thought-provoking

    Observer

  • Essential reading

    Guardian

  • [An] excellent…book… it will reward those willing to put in the effort… [and] put weapons in the arsenal of those trying to tackle sexism

    Sunday Times

About the Author

Gina Rippon

Professor Gina Rippon is an international researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience based at the Aston Brain Centre at Aston University in Birmingham. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain-imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism. She is a regular contributor to events such as the British Science Festival, New Scientist Live and the Sceptics in the Pub series. In 2015 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association for her contributions to the public communication of science. She is also an advocate for initiatives to help overcome the under-representation of women in STEM subjects. As part of a European Union Gender Equality Network, she has addressed conferences all over the world. She belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and is a member of Robert Peston’s Speakers4Schools programme and the Inspiring the Future initiative. The Gendered Brain is her first book for the general reader.

Gina Rippon

Read more

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Features

When bigger isn’t always better: how history got the female brain wrong

Taking us back through centuries of sexism, Gina Rippon reveals how science has been misinterpreted or misused to ask the wrong questions and urges us to move beyond a binary view of the brain.
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Read women in 2019: VINTAGE classic and new female authors

Join us at VINTAGE in a year of challenging ourselves to listen, hear and respond to some of the greatest female writers history has to offer. From Margaret Atwood to Mary Wollstonecraft, revisit your favourites, discover new voices and fill your bookshelf and your year with women’s voices. They matter.

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