Science is feminist, finally
Women are not inferior to men — writer Angela Saini proves it,
Charles Darwin believed women to be fundamentally, irrevocably inferior to men. Physicist Lise Meitner wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs from her small basement room at the University of Berlin to the levels where the male scientists worked. Menopause is “apparently” caused by older men no longer finding older women attractive.
Any right-thinking individual will find that reading British science journalist and writer Angela Saini’s Inferior is a challenging exercise in containing fury. How else to react when discovering how science — that supposedly pristine, unbiased realm — has systematically damaged the cause of the female of the species for hundreds of years?
Which is why Saini deserves respect for the measured way she researched and wrote about a subject that must have been extremely difficult to stomach. There’s a good reason for her objectivity, too, as she explained during a chat at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival: “I wrote this book for women, but also for those people that need to be convinced. There are a lot of sexist people out there who really do believe that such a thing as equality isn’t possible, because men and women are just too different. To convince them there’s no point in writing a polemic because they’re only going to think that you’re biased and trying to hit them over the head with an argument. There’s no value in that. I wanted this book to be airtight.”
The result of Saini’s approach is a wellresearched book that stands up to close scrutiny. It examines concepts such as sex differences when it comes to toy preferences, the “differences” between the male and female brain (on average, five ounces of weight — but does it matter? No.), whether it was inevitable that humans would end up with a patriarchal society, and whether women are naturally chaste. That last question makes interesting reading: research done with the Himba people, an indigenous society of partly nomadic livestock farmers in northern Namibia, shows what is possible when women live in a culture where choice and autonomy over sexual behaviour comes as a given. There’s a relaxed attitude to women having affairs with other men while they’re married, offering more freedom and choice over whom they have sex with than women almost anywhere else in the world.
It’s something to chew on: if women were naturally coy and chaste, why does their sexual behaviour need policing in the first place? And policing, or “mate guarding”, happens in many forms: female genital mutilation being just one (extreme) form of the practice discussed.
Saini has given all scientists mentioned a fair chance to defend their work, even when finding their views indefensible. Once or twice, there’s a turn of phrase in the text that can be described as “testy”, especially when it comes to scientists like Simon Baron-Cohen and his research into sex differences in the behaviour of babies, or Robert Trivers describing his rural estate in Jamaica as “Man Town”.
So, how did she deal with the anger?
Saini laughs. “Well, the book makes a lot of people angry. I think that’s because the anger is all in there, it’s just in the subtext.”
Writing the book has left her with some emotional memories. “[Scientist] Robert Trivers told [primatologist] Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to ‘stay at home and be a mother’. When I tell that story in talks I almost cry. How devastating for a woman of equal, if not superior, intellect to be told ‘your place is in the home, your work doesn’t fit in because you’re challenging what I’m doing’? Women still face that.”
While Saini feels her strict approach might have influenced the book’s readability by sacrificing narrative and personal details, she needn’t worry. Her experience as a science journalist shines, creating an absorbing work that will engross even the most unscientific of readers. It’s challenging but also chilling — a call to action for real change.
“I don’t think that science should steer how we live. It never has, and it shouldn’t in the future. As social creatures we have politics and laws to decide how we should live. Where the science does matter is when we have sexists who say equality is impossible because we are too different — and they claim to use science to make their case. That’s where you need science to argue back.”
If you need any more reasons to read it, even Margaret Atwood’s a fan. She tweeted: “In case you missed it: Inferior: How science got women wrong. (Hint: We are not Lobsters. Who knew?) (Other hint: Not Chimps either.) (Also: Not bad at math.)”