Customer Reviews

Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science is Redefining What Makes Us Female

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I read this book because I read an excerpted article from it in Reader's Digest, an article on differences between the male and female brain. I enjoyed the book, with its broader scope, even more than the article. I read the whole thing in a few days. The foundation of Dianne Hales book, as it claims, is science. Extensive notes in the back give the sources for all the research studies she cites. But the book is hardly a cold recitation of facts. She interprets the results through her own experiences as a woman (daughter, wife, mother), and the experiences of people she knows. The book is very personal, very readable, and, in my opinion, entertaining. She covers a wide range of topics that influence a woman's experience. Her premise is that neither men nor women are superior, just different, and we need to understand those differences. Usually, however I get a sense from her pages that she thinks being female is something special. I found myself time and again feeling proud to be a member of this sisterhood of women.

I enjoyed this book, much more than I did Natalie Angier's "Women:An Intimate Geography". It brought up many issues facing the new role science must play in caring for women as our society sheds many notions of what women are "really" like. As science learns more and more about women, she rightly takes the approach that men and women ARE different, and need to be cared for, and understood in different ways. This is neither good or bad, just different, and the way things are. The only problem I have with the book, and it is a small but very nagging one, is that Hales, like many other writters suppose that most research was done on/for men because women were considered less important. While the feeling may have been true throughout the history of humankind, much of the research we have has come from studies done from two very male dominated areas: prisons and the military. If all you have are pretty much all men to do research on, most of your research is going to be male orientated. I do agree though that it is surely time for science to get past that and realize that it needs to make more progress in helping women.