Maria Konnikova Quotes

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

History suggests that opposite gender debates, unfortunately, are accompanied by a host of expectations. Each candidate must tread carefully or risk running afoul of the gender stereotype they are subconsciously expected to conform to.

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets.

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.

Both men and women are really vast and boundless and yet in many films we're told that they're not. We're told they can only be one thing - like handsome and charming and that's it. Nothing more.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

A woman who places a high priority on performance and excellence is seen as imperial. A man is seen as demanding and tough.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

I guess people have this image of women being more compassionate, being the mother, being caring, but I don't know if that's true. I think it's an image we've all carried over the years. I never want to attribute certain qualities to gender.

There are certain expectations placed on writers if other people have put a value on their gender. I'm aware of the hundreds of tiny differences that happen when people are seeing your gender before they see something else.

We're really taught to be followers from a very young age - men lead and women follow.

There's still a narrower band of acceptable behavior for women than men.

The majority of the film industry is, like, obsessed with a ridiculous gender binary and keeping with this stupid social binary. Like, who cares?

I am far more pragmatic than the stereotype of the sex permits.

I'm saying the excessive focus on what gender a person is, rather than what they do, does a disservice to women.

One of the main problems of our time is that men are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called feminine, and women are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called masculine.

The way the world sees women vs. men is a subject that really interests me.

I also think it's still easy for us - as women, as writers and as directors and producers - to let it fall into the same patterns. Like, "and then the woman brings in the food, because the woman's the one who makes food." It's easy for that to happen, because that's what we've always known.

Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.

We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.