Why are the sexes different? Is it because men and women are taught by society to think and behave in sex-typical ways? Or are the sexes different by nature? For a quarter of a century, the dominant view has been that if males and females were treated the same from the time they were born, most sex differences would disappear. In Eve's Rib, Robert Pool describes a new understanding of the sexes that has been emerging over the past decade. When little boys play with trucks and little girls with dolls, or when females talk of feelings and males of facts and rules, the reasons are deeper than the sexes being taught to behave differently by society. The roots of these differences lie in the womb. Scientists know that a person's physical sex is determined in the womb by sex hormones. But unlike the Biblical story of creation, in which God created Eve from Adam's rib, the female body plan is actually the "standard" human plan - a fetus will automatically become female unless it is exposed to

"It's the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important "hardwired" differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men's and women's brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men's brains aren't wired for empathy and women's brains aren't made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimi