The Gendered Brain
GINA RIPPON
(BODLEY HEAD, 448 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In the summer of 2017, a peeved ­engineer at Google, James Damore, ­circulated a memo in which he explained why the company’s efforts to hire more female engineers were misguided. “The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,” he wrote. “These differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

The memo led to Damore’s dismissal from Google, but it resonated with many. The idea that the sexes have different abilities, behaviour and interests thanks to their distinct biologies has a long history. Victorian scientists tried to prove that women were intellectually inferior to men by demonstrating that their brains were smaller. Modern scientists have discarded the outright sexism of their forebears, but many have held fast to the premise behind their skull measurements: that the male brain is wired differently from the female brain.