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

by Angela Saini

for the heart and soul of women. For me, this struggle represents the final frontier for feminism. It has the potential to knock down the greatest barrier that stands between women and full equality—the one in our minds.

“Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”

As scientists start to explore the female body in truer detail, they are learning just how powerful a girl’s survival edge is—even in a world that doesn’t always want her.

Only recently, for instance, have doctors begun to acknowledge the severity of some women’s experience of period pain. In 2016, a professor of reproductive health at University College London, John Guillebaud, told a reporter that it can be “almost as bad as having a heart attack,” while admitting that period pain hasn’t been given the attention it deserves, partly because men don’t suffer from it.

by the age of five, children already have in their heads a constellation of gender stereotypes.

The failure of prominent scientists such as Symons and Trivers to read her work when it was published makes it even more difficult for Gowaty to make the wider scientific community aware of her findings.

Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s.

At the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692, sixteen accused women were executed or died as a result of their incarceration, and from what we know, at least thirteen of them were menopausal.

If fertility represented youth and health, society assumed, then infertility was exactly the opposite. It wiped out the entire point of being female. It turned a woman into something else. And this was reflected in the ways older women were treated, especially by science and the medical profession.

When menopause is seen as a curse rather than a blessing, women feel naturally less happy about it and also seem to report more symptoms.

what science tells us about women profoundly shapes how society thinks about the sexes. The battle for minds in the fight for equality has to include the biological facts.