Do women win the battle of the sexes?

Angela Saini takes on a provocative case for female biological superiority that skates on thin scientific ice

ITHE BETTER HALF by Sharon Moalem 288pp, Allen Lane, £20, ebook £9.99

’ve always been wary of those who insist on the superiority of one group over another, even when they appear well-intentioned. I once spoke at a women’s festival at which the men on my panel were keen to stress how grateful they were to their selfless, superhuman mothers. Women were to be worshipped, they told the audience. My response was that I, for one, wasn’t interested in being placed on a pedestal. All I wanted was a fair shake at the same opportunities as men, to be treated on equal terms, accepted with my individual skills and flaws.

When I saw the title of American doctor and geneticist Sharon Moalem’s latest book, The Better Half, recalling that tired phrase used joshingly by husbands – usually while enjoying better jobs, privileges and pay than their wives – I was hoping for something tongue-incheek. Perhaps poking fun at our gender stereotypes and appealing for us to remember that women as a group are not biologically inferior, as anthropologist

Ashley Montagu did in his clever 1952 book, The Natural Superiority of Women.

I found instead an entirely straight-faced investigation into what Moalem sees as the immutable biological features conferring survival, health and mental advantages on all women. He outlines why he thinks we have quite literally “evolved to be the better half.” His simple argument rests on a single genetic difference: most women’s XX sex chromosomes in contrast to most men’s XY. That extra X, he claims, confers a suite of benefits from birth. “My wife’s genetic superiority began long before we ever met,” he writes.

Moalem covers much the same ground as I did in the opening chapters of my 2017 book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong. For instance, that women tend to outlive men, evidenced most clearly by the fact that they are the vast majority of people alive over the age of 100. Women also have, on average, stronger immune systems. Scientists are still figuring out the biological reasons behind these differences, but Moalem casts aside doubt for the sweeping assertion that such gaps are genetic.

He is certainly correct that scientists have identified a small number of X-linked conditions, including intellectual disabilities, to which men are on average more prone than women. The greater apparent robustness of female bodies is thought by some to be an evolved protection against the rigours of pregnancy and childbirth. As we know from anthropological data, the survival of mothers and grandmothers matters to the survival of their children and grandchildren, meaning that researchers can point to an identifiable evolutionary mechanism behind the genetics.

Beyond this, however, Moalem veers into territory for which the scientific evidence is so thin that he appears to be relying on just-so stories to prop up his overall thesis that women are naturally superior set of people. In explaining, for instance, why the birth rate in the United States is slightly skewed towards boys (105 for every 100 girls), he says “it’s because women are so much more difficult to build.”

One might ask, if we’re quite so difficult to build, why there are as many girls as there are. In the countries where we see the most lopsided birth rates of all, such as India and China, it is not because of any developmental complexity hampering girls in the womb, but because girls are being selectively aborted in enormous numbers in service of a patriarchal preference for sons.

In his chapter on the “disadvantaged” male brain, he speculates, based on 2018 figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing

Moalem claims the extra X chromosome confers a whole suite of benefits on women

that males are three to four times more likely than females to be identified with an autism spectrum disorder, that this may be down to the lack of the extra X chromosome in boys. We simply don’t have the evidence for this, and to enter into such guesswork as baldly as he does is reckless. Indeed, parents of girls have had to fight for correct autism diagnoses over recent years partly because of a biased and flawed assumption on the part of the medical profession that it is an intrinsically male condition.

The problem with Moalem’s approach is that it has a tendency to view differences not only simplistically but also through the lens of his own field. This isn’t unusual among scientists. For certain neuroscientists I’ve met, the secret to who we are sits in our brains. For some endocrinologists, explanations for sex differences are always hormonal. And for a few geneticists, we can be explained by our DNA.

Despite Moalem’s insistent focus on the X chromosome, this is just one of 46 chromosomes in our cells. There are many other sources of individual genetic variation than the single chromosome that differs between most men and women. Furthermore, sifting people into two simple biological buckets, as the brilliant American biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling explains in her classic book Sexing the Body, rarely gives us the clear-cut answers we want.

Focusing on group differences glosses over the significance of individual differences. It may be true that women on average have an immune advantage, but this means little in my marriage, where I’m always the one struck by bugs and my husband rarely gets sick. Men may on average have twice the upper-body strength of women, but there are also plenty of women physically stronger than most men. We are not homogeneous within our categories.

The more fatal issue with this book is what Moalem chooses to omit. In his chapter on medicine, he suggests that women have been dangerously compromised by the historical habit for clinical trials to be carried out on men rather than women (partly because of the understandable risks associated with giving experimental drugs to someone who might be pregnant). He points to the one example where this kind of sex difference was seen to matter enough to lead to change in treatment guidelines. In the United States in 2013, the dosage for the insomnia drug zolpidem was lowered for women because they seemed to clear it from their systems more slowly.

Yet he fails to alert the reader that research published by experts in May 2019 has shown that the dosage change was unsupported by the scientific evidence, and that some women are in fact disadvantaged by the smaller dose because it isn’t high enough to treat their insomnia.

As much as some scientists may crave one, there is no grand unifying theory to explain all the differences between the sexes. Humans are complex beings in which endless biological, social and environmental factors interact. If we can ever be explained (and this is no small “if ”) it can only be by examining these factors in their entirety. And we are desperately far from having all the scientific and social data we need.

It is tempting to build essentialist narratives about who we are, peppered with neat supporting anecdotes, but erasing away the true complexity offers only literary clickbait. What we need from scientists is reliable information responsibly caveated and placed in context. The Better Half may appeal to those who want some feel-good affirmations about female power, but they will not get all the facts. And we deserve better than that.

Scientists crave a grand unifying theory to explain all malefemale differences

Angela Saini is author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and Superior: The Return of Race Science (both Fourth Estate)