Angela Saini. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—And the Science that’s Rewriting the Story. Beacon Press, Boston, 2017.
Reviewed by Wes McCoy, SciTech† Editorial Board
State legislatures across the US are attempting to redefine “male” and “female” for schools and sports teams. Legislatures are also struggling to define many legal issues concerning the rights of LGBTQ+ and intersex individuals and their families. There are many efforts being made to legally restrict young people to “gender assigned at birth,” to legally limit gender affirming care by physicians, and to restrict any number of medical procedures for women, whether pregnant or not. It seems to me that legislatures are not up to the task of deciding such issues for other people. Let it be said that churches also are confronted with divisive issues concerning who should be ordained, married, buried, baptized, or receive communion, based on their gender identity.
I was therefore led to re-read Angela Saini’s 2017 book Inferior. I found that she had been on the receiving end of sexism at her school in England. A self-described “science geek,” she was disillusioned when teachers steered her away from science and math courses that she was sure she would love. Saini’s work is testimony to the fact that this sexism is not only found among the uneducated, but among the very top-most ranks of educated scientists throughout much of the world. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to her book:
“In January, 2005, the president of Harvard University, economist Lawrence Summers gave voice to one controversial explanation for the gap (between male and female Nobel Prize winners). At a private conference he suggested that ‘the unfortunate truth’ behind why there are so few top women scientists at elite universities might in some part have to do with ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude,’ that a biological difference exists between the minds of women and men. … Summers may have dared to say it, but how many people haven’t thought the same?” (2)
Saini states “Only science has the power to resolve this dark, niggling feeling that never seems to go away no matter how much equality legislation is passed…. The problem is that answers in science aren’t everything they seem. When we turn to scientists for resolution, we assume they will be neutral. We think the scientific method can’t be biased or loaded against women. But we’re wrong” (3).
Before her “Introduction” has ended, she includes some awful realizations that the faults are not in our stars but in ourselves. “In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the possibility of gender bias in recruitment by sending out fake job applications for a vacancy of laboratory manager. Every application was identical except that half were given a female name and half a male name. When they were asked to comment on these potential employees, scientists rated women significantly lower in competence and hireability. They were also less willing to mentor them and offered far lower starting salaries … [t]he authors wrote in their paper, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ‘The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.’ Gender bias is so steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves discriminating against other women” (5).
This gender bias has been around a while, but even so, I was personally stunned to read that even though Marie Curie was the first person to win TWO Nobel Prizes, she was denied membership in France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.
Saini weaves a thorough historical guide to where we were, where we are now and where we see glimmers of new hope in the future. In her eight chapters, she deals with the “old ways” of thinking to set the stage for new ideas, which may be uncomfortable for some people to adopt. I find her narrative frank and honest, particularly when she shows what we do NOT yet know about gender bias and human neurobiology. She also confesses to not knowing all the answers.
Chapter 1, “Women’s Inferiority to Man.” Here Saini tackles the common misperception that social rules and roles are the result of inherent biological differences between men and women. She points out the effects of reading the biblical story of Adam and Eve as a scientific story rather than a religious one. The discovery of sex hormones in the 19th century led to many errant hypotheses and simplifications. One example is the common misperception that only females produce estrogen and that only males produce testosterone.
Chapter 2, “Females Get Sicker but Males Die Quicker,” quiets the misperception that men are stronger than women in every way. In fact, children’s health clinics around the world note that in a whole ward of children with illnesses, the majority of them are boys, often because girls are not brought to the clinics at all. They are expected to continue working at home, often doing work that is more physically demanding than that assigned to boys. Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, summarizes his data like this: “Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men.”
Chapter 3, “A Difference at Birth,” tackles research investigating the “nature vs. nurture” debate. That is, are there specific behaviors or skills or abilities that are somehow encoded into female brains that make them measurably different from male brains? Are our notions of “female preferences” and “male preferences” actually learned by individual babies based on the stimuli they experience in their own cultural environment? What is the biological basis for “intersex” human beings? Saini diligently probes research conducted over the past century, asking detailed questions about the thousands of experiments that have been done. This chapter is a masterful summary of the methods used in cognitive psychology, neurobiology and genetics.
Chapter 4, “The Missing Five Ounces of the Human Brain,” derives its title from a letter written in 1887 by William Alexander Hammond, then Surgeon General of the Army, claiming that male brains are always heavier than female brains, and that this difference explains the superiority of the male brain in creative and scientific fields. Since that time, multiple forms of evidence have been proposed for the sexual dimorphism of the human brain. There are, however, quite a few neurologists who are presenting evidence that rather than a brain being “male” or “female,” each brain seems to present a mosaic of thousands of different traits, making each human being a unique individual.
Chapter 5, “Women’s Work,” presents a lively discussion of the evolution of differences in male and female behaviors. Saini combines observations of current hunter-gatherer societies on Earth today and observations of social behavior among varieties of primate species with fossil discoveries over millions of years. There is obviously an effort to use the present to explain the past and vice versa. It is also notable that paleontologists recognize that quite a few tools that men and women might have used (digging sticks, animal skins used to carry food or perhaps babies) are unlikely to be fossilized. Stone and metal tools are more likely to be found and identified. But even then, it is not always possible to tell whether the tools were made or used by women. To me, the most fascinating parts of this chapter are the many descriptions of behaviors in human societies on Earth today, indicating that there is more than one way to successfully gather food, raise infants, and protect families from harm.
Chapter 6, “Choosy, Not Chaste,” is a chapter concerning what can be referred to as “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” which also happens to be the title of a journal article published in 1989 (Russell D. Clark and Elaine Hatfield, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 2:1, 39–55). Is it really a fact that men and women want fundamentally different things? Charles Darwin argued that males are eager to mate with any female while females, though more passive, exerted choice. Were these ideas based on social norms of 19th Century England or on actual observations? Saini explains the evolution of sexual selection theory: Darwin to Angus Bateman to Robert Trivers to Geoffrey Miller. But then, she notes, biologists began to note observations that did not line up with these earlier notions. Those observed exceptions to the rule are the most fascinating part of this chapter.
Chapter 7, “Why Men Dominate,” shines a very bright light on horrific cultural practices related to “mate guarding,” methods used to prevent girls from engaging in sexual activity. These practices include the torturous female genital manipulation (Egypt, Somalia, Sudan) and foot binding (China). They also include more subtle forms of domination such as the use of menstrual huts to seclude women during their periods, which actually allow men to track their wife’s fertility more easily. All these methods are forms of male control over women. A variety of legal strategies have also enabled male domination over women, especially control of property, education and the freedom to travel. We learn that anthropologist Sarah Hardy confessed that she was forced to elope because her conservative Texas family disapproved of her choice of a fiancé. What other strategies have females used to evade such male-dominated societies?
Do men and women want different things?
Chapter 8, “The Old Women Who Wouldn’t Die”, points to the awful history of mistreatment of menopausal and post-menopausal women. These “estrogen-starved” women were often asked to retreat from normal life and go into seclusion or a mental hospital such as “Bedlam” Hospital in London. Why were post-menopausal women so often poorly treated? It turns out that menopause is a very rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Why do humans have such a striking “change of life” and become infertile? Millions of post-menopausal women are active and healthy and engaged in running a business, teaching, caregiving and enjoying athletic pursuits. Is that the point? Is childbirth so significantly life-threatening that women live longer when they can no longer bear children? Are these dynamically busy and capable older women a real boost to the survival of the community? Do we know the answer to these questions?
I highly recommend this book to both men and women, because Saini delves into questions that we all need to investigate and comprehend. Better understanding these eight topics could go a long way toward making sure that legislators and church leaders are very careful when they make decisions about how we devise rules for our social systems in government, schools and churches. “As I have learned,” Saini concludes, “science is far from perfect. That’s not the fault of the method but of us. We imperfect creatures crash its home and dirty its carpets with our feet. We throw our weight around when we should instead be its respectful guests. With us in charge, science can only be a self-correcting journey toward the truth…. none of this research I’ve written about represents the end of the story. Theories are only theories, waiting for more evidence” (180).
