She remembers chatting to one of the other mums when they heard a loud din approaching. It was a nurse bringing their two screaming babies. The nurse handed her neighbour a “blue-wrapped Gary” with approval – he had “a cracking pair of lungs”. Rippon’s own daughter (making exactly the same sound) was passed over with an audible tutting. “She’s the noisiest of the lot – not very ladylike,” the nurse told her.

“And so, at 10 minutes old, my tiny daughter had a very early experience of how gendered our world is,” Rippon says.

Rippon has spent decades questioning ideas that the brains of men and women are somehow fundamentally different – work that she compellingly presents in her new book, The Gendered Brain. The title is slightly misleading, since her argument hinges on the fact that it’s not the human brain that is inherently “gendered”, but the world in which we are raised. Subtle cues about “manly” and “ladylike” behaviours, from the moment of birth, mould our behaviours and abilities, which other scientists have then read as inherent, innate differences.

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Rippon’s writing bristles with frustration that this argument still needs to be stated in 2019. She describes many of the theories about gender differences as “whack-a-mole” myths that keep on arising, in another guise, no matter how often they are debunked.

“We've been looking at this whole issue of whether male brains are different from female brains for about 200 years,” she says. “And every now and then there's a new breakthrough in science or technology, which allows us to revisit this question, and make us realise that some of the past certainties are clearly wrong. And you think that, as a scientist, you might have addressed them and put them right, and people will move on and not use those terms or conclusions anymore. But the next time you look at the popular press you find that the old myth has returned.”