Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what's our topic today?

Massimo, today we have a guest joining us all the way from Melbourne, Australia.

Cordelia Fine is an academic psychologist at the University of

Melbourne, and the recent author of the book, Delusions of Gender, The Real Science Behind Sex Differences.

The book examines common beliefs about innate differences in the way men and women think,

especially differences in which women are held to have more empathetic minds and men

have more systematic minds, which in terms of used to explain why we find more men than men

in fields like math and science and engineering. So the book goes through all of the research

that allegedly shows these hardwired differences from developmental psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience,

and concludes that the vast majority of it is either poorly conducted or poorly interpreted

or simply ambiguous enough that we should really be much less certain than we seem to be

about whether these differences are in fact innate. Cordelia, welcome.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you to having all the program.

Cordelia, I read your book actually at the suggestion of a previous guest by a Russian speaking,

Carol Tamvers, who wrote, mistakes were made by not by me, which was a delightful book in and of itself.

And when she was here actually in our studio, at the time she was reading your book and she

gave such glowing reviews that I said, well, I got to read this thing. Now, would you mind,

...