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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Saini
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May 29 - June 10, 2018
If you were the geek growing up, you’ll recognize how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, you’ll know it’s far lonelier.
although women make up nearly half the scientific workforce, they’re underrepresented in engineering, physics, and mathematics.
That hushed uncertainty is what lies at the heart of this book. It’s the question mark hanging over us, raising the possibility that women are destined never to achieve parity with men because their bodies and minds simply aren’t capable of it.
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.
Gender bias is so steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves discriminating against other women.
Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face.
We’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice.
there is something about gender as a topic that dulls otherwise discerning intellects,”
in some branches of science, such as evolutionary psychology, theories can be little more than thin scraps of unreliable evidence strung into a narrative.
This doesn’t always make for comfortable reading. The facts are often grayer than people might want them to be.
For Darwin, the evidence appeared to be all around him. Leading writers, artists, and scientists were almost all men. He assumed this inequality reflected a biological fact.
“Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”
Brandishing their rulers and microscopes, men like Galton hardened sexism into something that couldn’t even be challenged.
They weren’t even recognized as full citizens by their own countries. By 1887 only two-thirds of US states allowed a married woman to keep her own earnings. And it wasn’t until 1882 that married women in the United Kingdom were allowed to own and control property in their own right.
Evolutionary theory, despite what Charles Darwin had written about women, actually offered great promise to the women’s movement.
“Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen. . .and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.”
In evolutionary terms, drawing assumptions about women’s abilities from the way they happened to be treated by society at that moment was narrow-minded and dangerous.
writing style was generally praised, but the scientific
The Evolution of Woman was quite widely reviewed in newspapers and academic journals, but scarcely left a dent on science. “They were just like, ‘Those silly women and their silly ideas.’”
In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all fetuses start out physically female.
In fact, a male horse’s testes turned out to be one of the richest sources of estrogen ever found.
This revolution in scientific notions of what it meant to be a woman also came in time for the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s,
no link between testosterone and aggression
girls worked twice as long as boys and that their work was also more physically demanding.
The first month following birth is the window in which humans are at their greatest risk of death. A million babies die on the day of their birth every year.
“Women live about five or six years longer than men across almost every society and
understand just how widespread these gaps are. “I
then you also need to be able to stop this response
period pain hasn’t been given the attention it deserves, partly because men don’t suffer from it.
The terrible legacy of women being given thalidomide for morning sickness in the 1950s proved to scientists how careful they need to be before giving drugs to expectant mothers.
But as science enters this new era, scientists need to be careful. Research into sex differences has an ugly and dangerous history.
Cute though babies are, studying them this way is not as much fun as it might seem. It’s almost like working with animals.
by the age of five, children already have in their heads a constellation of gender stereotypes.
He is also living evidence that at least some aspects of gender identity must be rooted in biology.
when it comes to children raised under normal conditions, without unusual medical conditions, large gaps between girls and boys haven’t been found.
infant girls also had no more of a love of pink than boys did.
the biggest effect is seen at the bottom end of the scale. Those with the very lowest intelligence scores tend to be male.
in those disciplines in which people thought you did need to have an innate gift or talent to succeed, there were fewer female PhDs. The subjects that instead valued hard work tended to have more women.
“Studies have to be replicated,” comments Teodora Gliga, “especially if it’s a new idea. It needs to be replicated, otherwise it’s not believable. It’s an interesting idea, but not a fact.”
every individual should be thought of as a developmental system—a unique and ever-changing product of upbringing, culture, history, and experience, as well as biology.
Neuroscience is a field in its infancy when judged by the task it has ahead of it. The brain is as dense and complex a thing as anyone has ever studied, with billions of nerve cells and an impossibly sophisticated web of connections between them.
coins the term “neurosexism” to describe scientific studies that fall back on gender stereotypes, even when these underlying stereotypes are themselves unproven.
Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent.
As someone outspoken about sexism in science, she occasionally receives misogynistic e-mails from men who disagree with her.
Rippon tells me that in her field it’s impossible not to see the scientific data politicized, especially when it enters the public realm.
“I go into schools and talk to girls, and their whole expectation is far more gendered than it used to be. These are toxic stereotypes and these girls’ futures are being affected by this.”
“No matter how neutral the initial presentation of information, people do tend to gradually recruit the stereotypes and the associations that are prevalent in a culture and then project that,” she explains.
plasticity is a phenomena that has been oddly ignored when people talk about sex differences in neuroscience.
What looks like a biological difference in one particular place and time can turn out to be a cultural difference after all.
With all these effects on the brain, in a world as gendered as ours, says Rippon, it’s actually surprising that we don’t see more sex differences in the brain than we do.
