Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini

Things haven’t changed much since then. Statistics collected by the Women’s Engineering Society in 2016 show that only 9 percent of the engineering workforce in the United Kingdom is female and just over 15 percent of engineering undergraduates are women.

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.

Meanwhile, in the popular 1889 book The Evolution of Sex, Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes and naturalist John Arthur Thomson argue that women and men are as different from each other as passive eggs and energetic sperm.