| THE SEXUAL PARADOX Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap Susan Pinker New York: Scribner, 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-8470-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-7432-8470-4 | 340p. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
| Page 7: | "If boys and girls, are on average, biologically and developmentally distinct from the start [. . .], wouldn't these differences affect their choices later?" |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "girls are, on average,". |
| Page 17: | "Men are more prone to developmental disabilities, to get sick, hurt, or kill others." |
| Missing word: S/B "or to kill others". |
| Page 21: | "Girls are also sheltered from male hormones that slow down and skew the development of boys' brains in utero..." |
| Latin term should be italicized. (See also page 216.) |
| Page 45: | "The Shaywitzes' own findings seem to contradict the notion that the high proportion of males diagnosed with dyslexia are due to teachers' biases." |
| Number: S/B "is due to". |
| Page 55: | "He compared it to sickle-cell anemia, a genetic mutation that makes red-blood cells crescent-shaped and sticky so they can't slide freely through blood vessels." |
| Poor description: S/B "through narrow blood vessels". (Or am I putting too much emphasis on "freely"?) |
| Page 74: | "What she and Donna expressed was how difficult it is to switch directions when everyone thinks you're they're darling." |
| transcription error: S/B "their" there. |
| Page 103: | "When Professor Baron-Cohen and his team used the EQ to test the levels of empathy in 197 healthy adults, they found that, as one might predict, women scored much higher than men." |
| The accompanying plot does not support this statement well, in my opinion. |
| Page 110: | "So they don't know that if it's past midnight and someone says, 'Please stay,' she really means 'Please go' . . ." |
| Maybe I'm more out of touch than I thought, but I don't accept this. |
| Page 122: | "Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was criticized for not having enough of it—for ruling according to the U.S. Constitution instead of acting on 'empathy to female victims of violence.' There is clearly a lot of ambivalence to empathy." |
| As Justice Sonia Sotomayor will attest, this is extremely true — although in the opposite sense. |
| Page 136: | "If you had to choose just such a world [where single-mindedness and egocentrism are welcomed], you could do no worse than academic science and math." |
| Unwanted word: S/B "you could do worse". |
| Page 137: | "Yet the iconoclast funder describes himself this way..." |
| Word form: S/B "iconoclastic". |
| Page 146: | "Tall, clean-shaven, and wearing wire-framed glasses, he turned out to be as genteel as his surroundings, and gently eliding dozens of studies, speculated about how the pieces might fit into the Asperger puzzle." |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "surroundings and, gently eliding". |
| Page 150: | "Men's performance on mental rotation tasks—imaging what three-dimensional objects look like as they move—is worst in early morning, when their testosterone levels are high." |
| Does this not contradict the standard claim that high testosterone improves male abilities like spatial visualization? |
| Page 155: | "Similarly, Georges hoped to dispatch with any uncertainty through his understanding of systems..." |
| S/B "dispatch". (Maybe this is an anglicism retained in Canada? Compare page 159.) |
| Page 159: | "In fact, they decamp law firms 60 percent more often than men do." |
| S/B "decamp from". (Compare page 155.) |
| Page 163: | All text in first section (above "Adaptive Women") is tilted to the left. |
| (Must be a misaligned master, methinks...) |
| Page 170: | "The hormone [oxytocin] is likely in breast milk as well, so the baby enjoys not only physical closeness but pleasure along with her meal in a compelling pas de deux." |
| Is this more than speculation? Is there any reason, given the state of medical science today, that it hasn't been nailed down? (Also, I think "pas de deux" should be italicized.) |
| Page 173: | "When Italian researchers at the University of Milan-Bicocca compared the brain activation of parents and nonparents..." |
| There's no citation for this study. That's unfortunate, for I'd like to look it up. |
| Page 180: | "Based on surveys of 25,000 female public service employees, Rose showed that British women's rates of job satisfaction have fallen since the early nineties, while men's work satisfaction has stayed the same. Thus, as women's work values and pressures approach the male standard, their satisfaction drops to the male level, too." |
| The second sentence does not follow from the first. |
| Page 188: | "A study of randomly selected American psychologists reported that 69 percent of them felt like imposters." |
| How many men? How many women? The whole point of this chapter is to illuminate the different rates of "imposter syndrome" among men and women. |
| Page 189: | "This is fiction, of course, but the conflict between Sandy's desire to take a risk to be the first up at bat, and Marion's guarded perfectionism captures a gender divide that seems to come from within." |
| Missing comma: S/B "Marion's guarded perfectionism, captures". |
| Page 197: | "Depression affects 9.5 percent of the population—12 million women in the United States alone—and is the most common mental health problem in women." |
| Again she omits the number of men affected. Perhaps we are supposed to assume she means "female population" because this chapter is mainly about women. But the addition of that one extra word would have removed that ambiguity: S/B "9.5 percent of the female population". |
| Page 200: | "Players pick up cards that prompted them to talk about themselves and learn about others' motives as they move their plastic pieces around the board." |
| Mixed tenses: S/B "that prompt them". |
| Page 216: | "...naturally occurring testosterone masculinizes the brain in utero..." |
| Latin term should be italicized. |
| Page 219: | "...especially among women who feel wrongly pegged by 'the biology is destiny' and 'must be her time of the month' assumptions of the past." |
| Misplaced quotation mark: S/B "the 'biology is destiny' ". |
| Page 223: | "If men's brains evolved millennia ago..." |
| IF??? |
| Page 234: | "One of them is to delegate to a clutch of trusted minions, whether or not they have the standard credentials. After all, when he started he didn't have any." |
| She means "have any standard credentials", not "trusted minions". |
| Page 242: | "Even in a sprint, such family histories reveal that most children with ADHD were fussy babies who didn't like to be cuddled or held and to the annoyance of their parents, didn't sleep much." |
| Missing comma: S/B "and, to the annoyance of their parents,". |
| Page 243: | "Men with ADHD are like Superman and Kryptonite. It can be their undoing. Yet under the right conditions ADHD seems to give them special powers." |
| I'd say this is a clumsy reference to pop culture. To the best of my recollection, kryptonite never gave Superman special powers — and it was never capitalized. (Of course, she may be referring to the Siegel & Shuster comics, rather than the movies.) |
| Page 251: | "One of the risks of studying psychological disorders is that you're more likely to identify its foibles in yourself." |
| Number error: Given the context, S/B "a psychological disorder" rather than the alternate of changing "its" to "their". |
| Page 259: | "Universities that put tenure clocks on hold after women give birth, or that grant dedicated maternity leaves to women (as opposed to generic parental leaves) are better at forestalling the women-come-back with a backlog, men-come-back-with-a-book phenomenon." |
| Missing three hyphens: S/B "the women-come-back-with-a-backlog". (See page 80 for the origin of this.) |
| Page 261: | "As long as a significant proportion of women have a different, or broader range of interests than most men, many women will be attracted to different occupations." |
| Missing comma: S/B "or broader, range of interests". (Alternatively, remove the comma after "different".) |
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