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

by Angela Saini

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science.

merely having women around might disrupt the serious intellectual work of men,

Still relevant today: ie, dress code issues in lower level schools

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.”

On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man,

For a while, some scientists thought that female sex hormones might be turning up in men because they had eaten them.

Studying Samoan communities in 1949, she wrote, “The Samoan boy is not over pressured into displays of manhood, and the girl who is ambitious and managing has plenty of outlets in the bustling, organised life of the women’s groups.”

Sex is something scientifically distinct for most people. It’s defined by a certain package of genes and hormones as well as more obvious physical features, including a person’s genitals and gonads (although a small proportion of people are biologically intersex). Gender, meanwhile, is a social identity, influenced not only by biology but also by external factors such as upbringing, culture, and the effect of stereotypes.

Mitu Khurana,

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a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy.

For why?

When it comes to the most basic instinct of all—survival—women’s bodies tend to be better equipped than men’s. The difference exists from the moment a child is born.

For why?

Steven Austad, international expert on aging and chair of the biology department at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

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robust

[They] keep using [this] word. I do not think [they] know what it means.

women died at lower rates than men from twelve of the fifteen most common causes of death, including cancer and heart disease, when adjusted for age. Of the three exceptions, their likelihood of dying from Parkinson’s or stroke was about the same. And they were more likely than men to die of Alzheimer’s disease.

a certain type of T cell that’s crucial to managing the body’s response to infections becomes more active in the second half of a woman’s menstrual cycle, when she’s able to get pregnant.

Affects of childhood t-cell lymphoma in females?

women seem proportionally sicker than men.

“Part of the reason that there are more women than men around in ill health is to do with the fact that women have survived events that would kill men, and so the equivalent men are no longer with us.”

Research on DNA and women being carriers of previous plagues or iradicated diseases?

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword with the immune system. In some ways it’s better to have a female immune system if you’re fighting off infection of any kind, but on the other hand, we are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, which are very problematic,”

levels drop through the years following the start of menopause, a woman’s immunity advantage starts to drop away as well.

while women are generally hit by fewer viruses during an infection, they tend to suffer more severe flu symptoms than men do.

X and Y don’t have the same genes in the same locations. In fact, the Y is far smaller than the X.

If a man happens to have a genetic mutation on one of his X chromosomes that causes an illness or disability, he has no way of avoiding it. A woman, on the other hand, will have an extra X chromosome to counteract it, unless she’s unlucky enough to have the same genetic mutation on both X chromosomes, one from each parent.

Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome,

It has been fueled most recently by anger over exactly the opposite problem: the habit of medical researchers to leave women out of tests for new drugs, because their bodies were thought to be so similar to men’s. “It is much cheaper to study one sex.”

“You don’t want to give the experimental drug to a pregnant woman, and you don’t want to give the experimental drug to a woman who doesn’t know she’s pregnant but actually is,”

Men’s hormone levels are more consistent.

“It is much cheaper to study one sex. So if you’re going to choose one sex, most people avoid females because they have these messy hormones. . . . So people migrate to the study of males. In some disciplines it really is an embarrassing male bias,” he adds.

“Given the well-documented history of methodological problems with sex difference research, as well as harmful abuses of sex difference claims by those who would limit women’s opportunities, it is remarkable to find women’s health activists promoting, with little qualification, sex-based biology’s expansive picture of sex differences,”

Sarah Richardson in her book Sex Itself.

Delusions of Gender,

Facts and Fictions of Life

Ruben Gur and Raquel Gur, along with a large team of colleagues, used in an important study, published in the January 2014 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looking at how women’s brains are wired differently from men’s.

Feminine Forever.

After Robert Wilson died, a scandal in 1981 revealed that his pockets had been lined all along by pharmaceutical companies who were trying to sell more hormone replacement drugs. His best-selling book Feminine Forever had been bankrolled by Wyeth Ayerst, one of the therapy’s biggest manufacturers.