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

by Angela Saini

the researchers concocted an elaborate ruse based on a dating study. Each person was shown ten photographs of strangers of the opposite sex and told that all these strangers wanted to go on a date or meet up for sex with the subject in particular. If they agreed to meet, they were given a safe environment, and Baranowski and Hecht’s research team would then film the first half of their encounter. All the men in the study agreed to go on a date and also have sex with at least one of the women in the photographs. For women, the figure was 97 percent agreeing to a date and, unlike the first experiment, “almost all women agreed to have sex,” says Baranowski. It was evidence, they noted in their paper, that gender differences are significantly smaller in a nonthreatening environment.

This is a much better study design