Inferior

by Angela Saini

  This doesn’t mean that female scientists didn’t exist. They did. Many even succeeded against the odds. But they were often treated as outsiders and routinely overlooked for honors. The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless denied from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.

  Others are less well known. At the start of the twentieth century, American biologist Nettie Maria Stevens played a crucial part in identifying the chromosomes that determine sex, but her scientific contributions have been largely ignored by history. When mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years under a male colleague’s name and without pay. Albert Einstein described her in the New York Times after her death as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”

  Even by the Second World War, when more universities were opening up to female students and faculty, they continued to be treated as secondclass citizens. In 1944 the Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner failed to win a Nobel Prize despite her vital contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission. Her life story is a lesson in persistence. When she was growing up, girls weren’t educated beyond the age of fourteen. Meitner was privately tutored so she could pursue her passion for physics. When she finally secured a research position at the University of Berlin, she was given a small basement room and no salary. She wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs to the levels where the male scientists worked.

  Others, like Meitner, have been denied the recognition they deserve. Rosalind Franklin’s enormous part in decoding the structure of DNA was all but ignored when James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel after her death in 1962. And as recently as 1974 the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars wasn’t given to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who actually made the breakthrough, but to her male supervisor.

  In the history of science, we have to hunt for the women—not because they weren’t capable of doing research but because for such a large chunk of time they didn’t have the chance. We’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice.

  “I’ve noted that even the best male minds sometimes become obtuse when they start talking about women—that there is something about gender as a topic that dulls otherwise discerning intellects,” writes Mari Ruti, a professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, in her 2015 book The Age of Scientific Sexism.

  Sex difference is today one of the hottest topics in scientific research. An article in the New York Times in 2013 stated that scientific journals had published thirty thousand articles on sex differences since the turn of the millennium. Be it language, relationships, ways of reasoning, parenting, physical and mental abilities, no stone has gone unturned in the forensic search for gaps. And much of this published work seems to reinforce the myth that the gaps between women and men are huge.

  In this book, I unpack some of these studies and interview the people behind them. Some scientists claim that women are on average worse than men at mathematics, spatial reasoning, and anything that requires understanding how systems, such as cars and computers, work. Others say this is because women’s brains are structurally different from men’s brains. There are also those who insist that men played the dominant part in human evolutionary history because they hunted animals, while women had the apparently less challenging role of staying at home and caring for children. They’ve argued that males are responsible for humans evolving high intelligence and creativity. Still others say that women experience menopause because men don’t find older women attractive.

  It can be hard to question their motives. Words that sound deeply objectionable at a dinner party sound remarkably plausible when they’re falling from the mouth of someone in a lab coat. But we need to be skeptical. The study you read about in the newspaper telling you that men are better at reading maps than women, for example, may be entirely contradicted by another study on a different population of people, in which women happen to be better map readers. The beautiful brain scan is not the photograph of our thoughts that it sometimes claims to be. And in some branches of science, such as evolutionary psychology, theories can be little more than thin scraps of unreliable evidence strung into a narrative.

  If studies seem sexist, occasionally it’s because they are. But then, it’s impossible not to expect that the very bias that kept women out of science for centuries might have affected the very blood and bones of their work—that it might have prejudiced science’s objectivity.

  But there’s more to this story.

  Having more women in science is already changing how science is done. Questions are being asked that were never asked before. Assumptions are being challenged. Old ideas are giving way to new ones. The distorted, often negative picture that research has painted of women in the past has been powerfully challenged in recent decades by other researchers—many of whom are women. And this alternative portrait shows humans in a completely different light.

  Today, hidden among the barrage of questionable research on sex differences, we have a radically new way of thinking about women’s minds, bodies, and their role in evolutionary history. Fresh theories on sex difference, for example, suggest that the small gaps that have been found between the brains of women and men are statistical anomalies caused by the fact that we are all unique. Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology. Research into our evolutionary past shows that sexual division of labor and male domination are not biologically hardwired into human society, as some have claimed, but that we were once an egalitarian species. Even the age-old myth about women being less promiscuous than men is being overturned.

  This is well-evidenced, careful work that challenges old ideas about what it really means to be a woman. The picture they paint isn’t of someone who’s weak or subservient. She’s not less able to excel in science, nor is she any of the many other softly patronizing adjectives that have been used to mark her apart from men as the more empathic, gentler, fairer sex. This woman is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.

  This compelling body of work, rather than pulling women and men farther apart in the gender wars, affirms the importance of sexual equality. It draws us closer together.

  When I was promoting my first book, Geek Nation, I went to the city of Sheffield to give a talk. When I finished, a short, middle-aged man came over to ask some questions in private.

  “Where are all the women scientists? Where are the women Nobel Prize winners?” he asked, sneering. “Women just aren’t as good at science as men are. They’ve been shown to be less intelligent.” He walked up so close to my face that I was literally backed into a corner. What was a sexist rant quickly became racist, too. I tried to argue back. I listed the accomplished female scientists I knew. I hastily marshaled a few statistics about school-age girls being better at mathematics. But in the end, I gave up. There was nothing I could say for him to think of me as his equal.

  How many of us haven’t known someone like this? The patronizing boss, the chauvinistic boyfriend, the social media troll, the stranger who thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen? What I wish I had was a set of scientific arguments in my armory to show them that they are wrong. To reinforce that equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right.

  For everyone who has faced the same situation, the same angry confrontation with a person who tells you that women are inferior to men, the same desperate attempt to not lose control but have at han
d some real facts and a history to explain them, here they are. In this book I travel through the life stages of a woman, from birth through working life to menopause, to interrogate what science really tells us and the controversies around what remains uncertain.

  Despite my personal experience, I didn’t set out to write this book with an axe to grind. As a journalist, I have a commitment to the facts. And as someone with an academic background in science and engineering, I wanted to better understand the research. The research I examine spans neuroscience, psychology, medicine, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Starting in the nineteenth century and running all the way to today, I’ve tried to find out why so much of what we think of as true is actually unreliable. I investigate the studies that have hit the headlines, claiming to show us that harmful stereotypes about women are backed by science. And at the same time I explore the beautiful, empowering new portrait of women that looks so different from the old one.

  This doesn’t always make for comfortable reading. The facts are often grayer than people might want them to be. This is simply an account of the science and its controversies as they stand now, chronicling the bitter scientific struggle for the heart and soul of women.

  For me, this struggle represents the final frontier for feminism. It has the potential to knock down the greatest barrier that stands between women and full equality—the one in our minds. As anthropologist Kristen Hawkes at the University of Utah put it to me when I interviewed her about her work on menopause for the final chapter of this book, “If you’re really paying attention to biology, how can you not be a feminist? If you’re a serious feminist and want to understand what the underpinnings of these things are, and where they come from, then biology—more science, not less science.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Woman’s Inferiority to Man

  To prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology and so forth.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

  The University of Cambridge at the end of summer with the leaves going dry is as beautiful as it must have been when the great evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin was an undergraduate here in the early nineteenth century. Up in the quiet and high northwest corner of the university’s library, traces of him still exist. On a leather-topped table in the manuscripts room, I’m holding three letters, all yellowing, the ink faded and the creases brown. Together, they tell a story of how women were viewed in one of the most crucial moments of modern scientific history, when the foundations of biology were mapped out.

  The first letter, addressed to Darwin, is written in an impeccably neat script on a small sheet of thick cream paper. It’s dated December 1881 and it’s from a Mrs. Caroline Kennard, who lives in Brookline, a wealthy town outside Boston. Kennard was prominent in her local women’s movement, pushing to raise the status of women (once making a case for police departments to hire female agents). She also had an interest in science. In her note to Darwin, she had one simple request. It was based on a shocking encounter she’d had at a meeting of women in Boston. Someone had taken the position of arguing that “the inferiority of women; past, present and future” was “based upon scientific principles,” Kennard writes. The authority that allowed this person to make such an outrageous statement apparently came from no less than one of Darwin’s own books.

  By the time Kennard’s letter arrived, Darwin was only a few months away from death. He had long ago published his most important works, On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man, which came out twelve years later. They laid out how modern-day humans could have evolved slowly from simpler forms of life by developing characteristics that made it easier to survive and have more children. This was the bedrock of his theories of evolution based on natural selection and sexual selection. And they blasted through Victorian society like dynamite, transforming how people thought about human history. His legacy was assured.

  In her letter Kennard naturally assumes that a genius like Darwin couldn’t possibly believe that women are naturally inferior to men. Surely his work had been misinterpreted? “If a mistake has been made, the great weight of your opinion and authority should be righted,” she entreats.

  “The question to which you refer is a very difficult one,” Darwin replies the following month from his home in Downe, in Kent. His letter is in a scrawling hand that’s so difficult to read that someone had to copy the entire thing word for word onto another sheet of paper, kept alongside the original in the Cambridge University archives. But the handwriting isn’t the most objectionable thing about his letter. It’s what Darwin actually writes. If polite Mrs. Kennard was expecting the great scientist to reassure her that women aren’t really inferior to men, she was about to be disappointed. “I certainly think that women though generally superior to men [in] moral qualities are inferior intellectually,” he tells her, “and there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance, (if I understand these laws rightly) in their becoming the intellectual equals of man.”

  It doesn’t end there. For women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds, they would have to become breadwinners like men. And this wouldn’t be a good idea because it might damage young children and the happiness of households. Darwin is telling Kennard that women aren’t just intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes. It’s a rejection of everything Kennard and the women’s movement at the time were fighting for.

  Darwin’s personal correspondence echoes what’s expressed quite plainly in his published work. In The Descent of Man he argues that males gained the advantage over females across thousands of years of evolution because of the pressure they were under to improve in order to win mates. Male peacocks, for instance, evolved bright, fancy plumage to attract sober-looking peahens. And male lions evolved their glorious manes. In evolutionary terms, he implies, females can happily reproduce no matter how dull they are because they’re the ones that give birth. They have the luxury of sitting back and choosing a mate, while males have to work hard to impress them and compete with other males for their attention. In this vigorous competition for women over millennia, the logic goes, men have had to be warriors and thinkers. And this has honed them into finer physical specimens with sharper minds. Women are literally less evolved than men.

  “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,” he explains in The Descent of Man. For Darwin, the evidence appeared to be all around him. Leading writers, artists, and scientists were almost all men. He assumed this inequality reflected a biological fact. Thus, his argument goes, “man has ultimately become superior to woman.”

  This all makes for astonishing reading now. Darwin writes that if women had somehow managed to develop some of the same remarkable qualities as men, it may have been because they were dragged along on men’s coattails by the fact that children happen to inherit a bit of everything from both parents in the womb. Girls, by this process, manage to steal some of the superior qualities of their fathers. “It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.” It’s only a stroke of biological luck, he implies, that has stopped women from being even more inferior to men than they already are. Trying to catch up is a losing game—nothing less than a fight against nature.

  To be fair to Darwin, he was a man of his time. His traditional views on a woman’s place in society don’t run through just his own scientific works but also those of many other prominent biologists of the age. His ideas may have bee
n revolutionary, but his attitudes to women were solidly Victorian.

  We can guess how Caroline Kennard must have felt about Darwin’s comments from the fiery, long response she sent back. Her second letter is not nearly as neat as her first. She argues that, far from being housebound, women contribute just as much to society as men do. It was, after all, only in wealthier middle-class circles that women tended not to work. For many Victorians, women’s incomes were vital to keeping families afloat. The difference between men and women wasn’t the amount of work they did, but the kind of work they were allowed to do. In the nineteenth century, women were barred from most professions as well as politics and higher education.

  As a result, when women worked, it was generally in lower-paid jobs such as domestic labor, laundry, the textile industries, and factory work. “Which of the partners in a family is the breadwinner,” Kennard writes, “when the husband works a certain number of hours in the week and brings home a pittance of his earnings. . .to his wife; who early and late with no end of self sacrifice in scrimping for her loved ones, toils to make each penny.”

  She ends on a furious note. “Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”

  I don’t know what Darwin made of Kennard’s reply. There’s no more correspondence between them in the library’s archives.

  What we do know is that she was right—his scientific ideas mirrored how society felt at the time, and this was coloring his judgment of what women were capable of doing. Darwin’s attitude belonged to a train of scientific thinking that stretched back at least as far as the Enlightenment, when the spread of reason and rationalism through Europe changed the way people thought about the human mind and body. “Science was privileged as the knower of nature,” Londa Schiebinger, historian at Stanford University, explains to me. “For women, that nature was described as the characteristics that belong to the private sphere of the home. The nurturing mothers and their job in the state was to educate new citizens, presumably males.” Men were portrayed as belonging to the public sphere, where science also happened to live.