This medal is awarded to "men and women of science and technology whose professional achievements are judged to have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity.

She also challenges the common assumption that a gender-egalitarian society means that differences in social outcomes and interests must be due to biology.

However, as Fine pointed out in The Psychologist, the book is concerned with scientific evidence presented as support for the idea that males and females are, on average, 'hardwired' to 'systemise' versus 'empathise', rather than the question of the extent to which core gender identity is 'hardwired'; and that she does not subscribe to a behaviourist or social determinist view of development, but rather "one in which the developmental path is constructed, step by step, out of the continuous and dynamic interaction between brain, genes and environment.

The neuroscientists Margaret McCarthy and Gregory Ball have said that Fine presents a one-sided picture of the study of sex differences, and that Delusions of Gender threatened to "severely hamper" progress in this field.

[25] Together with Barnard College sociomedical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young, Fine has rejected the claim,[26] based on quotations of her criticisms of popular misrepresentations of science, that she is "anti-sex differences".

[28][29] Fine's third book, Testosterone Rex, critiques an account of sex differences and their evolutionary, neural and hormonal basis that is the prominent view in the scientific literature and research.

[30] Harriet Hall, who often critiques alternative medicine and quackery for their lack of a scientific basis, argued in the Skeptical Inquirer: "Cordelia Fine's book provides compelling evidence that men and women aren't really very different other than in their anatomy.