  Over the last three decades, the human brain, and its role in determining
behavior have been receiving a growing amount of attention in academia as well
as in society more generally. Neuroscientific explanations of human behavior or
other phenomena are often especially appealing to lay people. Therefore,
neuroscientific explanations that can affect individuals, groups, or social
relations in general should be formulated in a careful and responsible way. One
field in which especially feminist scholars request more caution is the
neuroscientific examination of sex or gender differences. Feminist scholars
have described various ways in which sexist bias might be present in
neuroscientific research on sex or gender differences. In this context, they
coined the term "neurosexism" to describe the entanglement between
neuroscientific work and sexist ideology, and "neurofeminism" as a response to
that. Here, we aim to give an overview over the contemporary neurofeminist
literature. In the first part, common levels of analysis in the neurofeminist
literature are presented and the research level is explored in more detail. In
the second part, some common developments in more recent neurofeminist
scholarship are discussed. For this, we review recent publications with the aim
to provide neuroscientists with a solid understanding of neurofeminist
criticism so that they may evaluate neuroscientific claims about on sex or
gender differences from this critical perspective.
