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

by Angela Saini

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.

In 2010, Hines repeated this exercise using more recent research. She found that only the tiniest gaps, if any, existed between boys’ and girls’ fine motor skills, ability to perform mental rotations, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, verbal fluency, and vocabulary. On all these measures, boys and girls performed almost the same.

Paul Matthews, the head of brain sciences at Imperial College London, tells me, “If you correct for skull size, there are very tiny differences between the two sexes, but their brains are much more similar than they are different.”

“The whole brain volume is in keeping with the body size, but the composition of tissue within the brain is different, with females having a higher percent of gray matter and men having higher percent of white matter,” he tells me. Upon this observation lies the latest battleground in the gender wars. Having failed to show that brain size makes any difference, scientists like the Gurs have instead turned their attention to composition.