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

by Angela Saini

Women now make up almost half the labor force, yet in 2014 the bureau found that women spent about half an hour more every day than men doing household work. On an average day, a fifth of men did housework, compared with nearly half of women. In households with children under the age of six, men spent less than half as much time as women taking physical care of these children. At work, on the other hand, men spent fifty-two minutes a day longer on the job than women did.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the United States estimates that in 2015 women working full time earned only seventy-nine cents for every dollar that a man earned. In the United Kingdom, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. But today, according to the Office for National Statistics, a gender pay gap of more than 18 percent still exists, although it’s falling.

In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote.

Research published by scientists at the University of Adelaide in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction in 2014 showed that newborn girls may be healthier on average because a mother’s placenta behaves differently depending on the sex of the baby. With female fetuses, the placenta does more to maintain the pregnancy and increase immunity against infections. Why this is, nobody understands. It could be because, before birth, the normal human sex ratio is slightly more skewed toward boys. The difference after birth might simply be nature’s way of correcting the sex balance.

a baby girl’s natural survival edge stays with her throughout her entire life. Girls aren’t just born survivors, they grow up to be better survivors, too.

of the roughly 8 percent of Americans who suffer from autoimmune diseases, estimates suggest that at least three-quarters are women.

research has shown that women who are going to have a myocardial infarction [heart attack] are more likely to have symptoms like insomnia, increasing fatigue, pain anywhere in the head all the way down to the chest, the weeks before they have a heart attack.

“A feminist is just someone who advocates equal opportunities for both sexes. In other words, it’s being democratic. And we’re all feminists, or you should be ashamed not to be.”

“When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution. . . . The truth will make men free as well as women.”