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

by Angela Saini

In his 1982 review of Sarah Hrdy’s book The Woman That Never Evolved—which presents more evidence contradicting the image of the coy, chaste female—anthropologist Don Symons raised his eyebrows, especially at her suggestion that, like the female langurs at Mount Abu, evolution might favor females that are sexually assertive and competitive. “In promoting her view of women’s sexual nature, Hrdy provides dubious evidence that this nature exists,” Symons wrote, dismissively. According to Sarah Hrdy, this hostility toward viewpoints like hers hasn’t gone away. “It is impossible to understand this history without taking into account the background, including the gender, of the researchers involved,” she wrote in a chapter of Feminist Approaches to Science, published in 1986. In her own review of Don Symons’s book on human sexuality from 1979, she referred to this old-fashioned way of thinking as “a gentlemanly breeze from the nineteenth century.” She believes that, just like in Darwin’s time, scientists have twisted sexual selection theory in ways that are unfair not only to women but also to the truth.