Angela Saini grew up in an egalitarian Indian-Punjabi household in London — a lonely female geek, who showed an early propensity for building things. Her latest book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong — and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story , attempts to redress the gender imbalances and stereotypes that have been propagated by science for hundreds of years. By revisiting experiments and interviewing leading scientists, Saini picks apart the old myths and ultimately suggests a break from the binary categories we have now. “In the history of science,” she writes, “we have to hunt for women.” Despite centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice, the story of women in science, she insists, is a story of persistence.
Saini begins with the big daddy of evolutionary theory, Darwin, who believed women were intellectually inferior to men; reminds us of a time when doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system; takes a stab at cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who tried to use evolutionary psychology in his article ‘Boys Will be Boys,’ to defend Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky; and brings us up to speed about what the function of menopause might be. Along the way she offers tantalising facts — how all foetuses start out as physically female, how horse testes are one of the richest sources of oestrogen, how we share 99% of our genomes with chimpanzees and baboons. All of which lead to larger debates about identity and beg the question: what does it mean to be born male or female? Excerpts:
What was your motivation to write Inferior ?
I read a lot of contradictory information in the press about women. Sometimes it says women aren’t as good as parking or map reading, or men aren’t as emotional or intuitive as women, and I wanted to understand what the sex differences really are and what it can tell us about ourselves. Also, how this research gets interpreted once it’s out there in the public domain. It turns out that biases exist in research all the way through — whether you’re looking at neuroscience or evolutionary biology or anthropology. Social sciences have been saying it for a long time, but the extent of it did surprise me.
Here’s a science that has got women wrong for hundreds of years and it’s only in the last 30 to 40 years that the story is starting to be rewritten. Scientists are going back and replicating experiments and realising they were wrong and new theories are coming out. I thought this needs to be told, because we as women want to know more about ourselves, and science isn’t giving us that story. I wanted that story to be available.
Part of your point is that gender bias is inherent in science because there are more men in science, and now that balance is changing and the lens is somewhat different?
Especially since the 1950s and 60s, when women entered the sciences in much larger numbers, when they became professors and heads of department and they started to revisit these old questions, for example that Darwin put, that women were intellectually inferior to men. These are the exact words he used, and he believed that right until he died, and of course it didn’t chime with their experience, so they went back and tried to pick the research apart and found that the ideas were flawed. But as better research is being done with an understanding of the historical and social context, we’re getting a radically new picture, and it’s so empowering.
Really, for me, writing this book has changed my life. I think of the world completely differently now. I’d read feminist literature throughout my life, but it was really the science that awakened that feminism in me because it made me see just what gross injustice had been done against women. For all intents and purposes, we have the same capabilities as men, intellectually and cognitively, and yet we’ve been held back for thousands of years.
What does it mean to have the book come out at this remarkable moment for women, a revolution of sorts — removing the centuries-old gag from the mouth?
The current wave of feminism was already on the rise when I started writing it. I couldn’t have predicted what would have happened. I think the election of [U.S. President Donald] Trump really spurred women on. It’s been a moment in history where women have realised that we have to come together… it’s a crucial time for women to assert their rights for fear of losing them. In the U.S. the kind of constraints happening around abortion are really scary.
We forget how hard women have already fought for the rights we have. I’m reading this book, A Lab of One’s Own, looking at women scientists during World War I, during the same time as the Suffragist Movement. You fought the struggle at home, at work, in the streets, and now women are going through the same struggles. We’re facing pushback, so I do hope this book is ammunition for the women who need it.
What’s interesting about sexual stereotypes is that men’s desires and libidos are always considered stronger, but this doesn’t take into account how for years women have had to deal with the fear of unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, all of which influence sexual decision-making, right?
The sexual repression story is crucial in understanding the dynamic we see in today’s society. It’s such a common misconception that women are naturally monogamous and men are naturally promiscuous. If you look at FGM (female genital mutilation) and ask if women are naturally monogamous, why do we have to commit such brutal acts to keep them monogamous? Why do we have chastity belts? Why do religions take such pains to dictate how women should behave sexually if women are naturally monogamous? These two things don’t tally. If you don’t understand that for thousands of years women have been sexually oppressed, then how on earth are you going to understand human sexual behaviour today? This is a point evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy made, and when you look at it through that lens, of course women behave sexually differently, because for thousands of years we’ve been sexually contained.
Can you speak about making science writing accessible? I know many people feel locked out of science because of the jargon.
I started my career not as a science journalist, but as a regular reporter. I wanted to cover science not because I’m particularly enthused about new discoveries — whiz bang we discovered this dinosaur puzzle — although it interests me. What I think was lacking and what I’m really interested in is how science is crucial to our lives. It shapes the way we think about everything, yet we have little coverage of what science has done. Without science, warfare would be a different game. I’ve studied war studies in context of this... For me, the important thing is how science shapes what we think of the world.
Also, what are the motivations, and who’s funding this? I’m writing a book on race at the moment, and eugenics research in the 1920s was funded by the Rockefellers and Carnegies, big philanthropists in the U.S. What was their motivation? Why were the scientists doing it? And with gender, where people like Darwin throughout the 20th century and all the biologists who have followed him have fundamentally impacted how we think of female sexual behaviour, women’s work, and experiences of pain.
Period pain — the fact that it’s understudied is the reason so many women still struggle with period pain, the reason so many women still die in childbirth. So, these are crucial questions. They don’t belong just in the science pages. They belong in the mainstream.
After a failed career in scuba diving, the writer-dancer moved to a beach to grow vegetables. Her latest book is Girls Are Coming Out Of The Woods .
