The Myth of Mars and Venus
A great read; concise and well-written, it nevertheless thoroughly audits the prevailing misconceptions about the "different" ways in which men and women supposedly talk, listen, learn language and process it in their brain.
I particularly liked the fact that Deborah Cameron, in keeping with her academic stature, draws on an incredibly wide and varied body of work to debunk everything from "women talk more than men" to "men don't listen". Unlike many of the operators on the other side of this debate (some of whom, especially at the self-help end of the spectrum, simply make up the facts to support their assertions, or brush the need for evidence away with insouciant myths about men and women originating from different planets), she doesn't need to rely on one or two well publicized pieces of controversial research, but is able to utilise a decade and a half of solid academic work, approaching the issues from many different angles and providing a solidly multi faceted basis for her thesis.
There were two things I found slightly disappointing about the book, and one that really got up my nose. First there is Cameron's shying away from robustly supporting the counter-claim to the Mars and Venus myth of different communication styles or abilities between males and females; namely, that if the myth of difference cannot be substantiated, then there is no difference. I was also a little let down by the relatively scant treatment she gives to the evolutionary psychology disseminators of the "hard-wired" fairytale. On that last one I can't really be too severe - she's not a biologist or an evolutionary scientist, so while she can easily dispel any misunderstandings about the effects of so-called "evolved" differences, she understandably doesn't want to expose herself by going into too much detail about the underlying science.
The one thing that really pissed me off though was not Prof. Cameron's doing, but an uncharacteristically unprofessional misstep on the part of the OUP; for some unaccountable reason they saw fit to set the book to a chick-lit aesthetic, with a cutesy cover picture, cutesy fonts for the chapter headings and cutesy little stars separating the segments. Idiots.