2 July 2008

Cordelia Fine speaking at University of Canterbury

Some of you will know that I sat and seethed through parts of Allan Pease’s presentation last year, especially the bits where he more or less said that women’s brains aren’t set up to do engineering, unless they are lesbian (I summarise).

Although he is a consummate showman, and gave his audience what they wanted to hear, he was way off on his depiction of the different brains of men and women, and misrepresented the science.

Cordelia Fine is one of my hero/heroines and wrote the book “A mind of its own, how our brain distorts and deceives”, in which she looked at how the brain tricks us, and why we are prone to bias and prejudice.

She is currently writing a book on “Neurosexism” (such as that practiced by Allan Pease) where neuroscience study results are twisted and taken out of context to support the biases of the speaker.

She’s speaking tomorrow as part of the University of Canterbury outreach program. The web-link is http://www.outreach.canterbury.ac.nz/neurosexism.shtml. It's a free session.

I’m going – and hope you will too, if you're in Christchurhc.

Whatever the case, remember:

Girls can do maths! And be engineers! And wear fabulous shoes! All at the same time! *

* except when wearing steel-capped boots.

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