2011 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture - coming to a city near you!

The 2011 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture is touring Australian capital cities in October and November.  This year, Dr Cordelia Fine, will speak on:

"How the New Neurosexism Helps Sustain the Status Quo: 

Charting the journey from scanner to sound bite to society".  

It sounds fascinating and brain-bending!

For details of Dr Fine's lecture, read on...

For as long as there has been brain science there have been - in retrospect - misguided explanations and justifications of sex inequality: women's skulls are the wrong shape; their brains are too small; their hemispheres too unspecialised. These hypotheses eventually find themselves hurled on the scientific scrap heap - but not before they become part of cultural lore, and reinforce social attitudes about men and women in ways that hinder progress towards greater sex equality.

It is still happening.

In this lecture Cordelia will show how contemporary social attitudes about gender subtly shape the neuroscience of sex differences and, less subtly, its popularisation. These over-confident claims about 'his brain' and 'her brain' then reinforce old-fashioned gender stereotypes.  Evidence is growing that these stereotypes, invigorated by neurosexism, can influence attitudes and behaviours in the workplace in self-fulfiling ways. Neurosexism, in other words, helps to sustain the very differences it is supposed to explain.

About the speaker...

Dr Cordelia Fine is an academic psychologist and writer. Cordelia studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by a M.Phil in Criminology at Cambridge University. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University College London. She is currently based at the University of Melbourne, as an Associate Professor in the Centre for Ethical Leadership at the Melbourne Business School.

If you want to read up before the lecture...


Cordelia has authored two books - her latest book Delusions of gender: How minds, society, and neurosexism create difference was short-listed for the Best Book of Ideas Prize 2011, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction 2011 and the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2010.
Cordelia is also the author of A Mind of Its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives.

Dates around Australia

• Wednesday 26th October - Melbourne
• Thursday 27th October - Sydney
• Monday 31st October - Adelaide
• Friday 4th November - Brisbane
• Friday 11th November - Perth

For details of these events, please visit the ATN WEXDEV site