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

by Angela Saini

The database included 128 males who were diagnosed with a condition on the autism spectrum. But Melissa Hines tells me that Baron-Cohen’s results didn’t show a direct link between them and high fetal testosterone levels. “That was like the ultimate test, and there was no correlation between testosterone and getting an autism spectrum diagnosis,” she says. “That’s just one study, but it doesn’t support it.” Without evidence of a clear connection between the “extreme male brain” and testosterone, when their findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry in 2014, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues instead claimed to see a correlation between autism and a mixture of hormones, including testosterone, but also the female sex hormones, progesterone and estrogen.

She believes that Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of male and female brains makes little sense. Connecting testosterone levels before birth to behavioral sex differences later on, she says, “is just this huge explanatory leap, and it leaves me uncomfortable because I don’t think it’s much of a scientific explanation when you make such a big leap. . . . We do see the differences, and I don’t disagree with that finding. What I disagree with is leaping to the idea that that this means it is something innate or inborn,” she adds.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

“The mothers of sons in my cohort are moving them around a lot more. They’re shifting them, they’re playing with them, and they’re talking to them less. They’re more affectionate to them when they’re moving them physically.” This could simply be because boys demand more physical movement from the start, but again, it’s another element of the development process that hasn’t been fully studied.

Today it’s well established that brain size is related to body size. Paul Matthews, the head of brain sciences at Imperial College London, tells me, “If you correct for skull size, there are very tiny differences between the two sexes, but their brains are much more similar than they are different.” The missing five ounces are accounted for.

In 2005 Craig Bennett, then a first year graduate student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, carried out an equipment test that inadvertently revealed how it might be possible to read just about anything into a brain scan. He and a colleague tried to find the most unusual objects they could fit inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, to help calibrate it before their serious scientific work began. It was a joke that started with a pumpkin and ended with a dead, eighteen-inch-long, mature Atlantic salmon wrapped in plastic.

The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she adds. But they’re not the ones that get published. “I describe this as an iceberg. You get the bit above the water, which is the smallest but most visible part, because it’s easy to get studies published in this area. But then there’s this huge amount under the water where people haven’t found any differences,” Rippon explains. People end up seeing only the tip of the iceberg—the studies that reinforce sex differences.

As someone outspoken about sexism in science, she occasionally receives misogynistic e-mails from men who disagree with her. The worst ones attach photos of their genitalia.

Rippon tells me that in her field it’s impossible not to see the scientific data politicized, especially when it enters the public realm. “Science doesn’t operate in a political vacuum,” she explains. “I think there are some sciences which can be more objective than others. But we are dealing with people, we’re not the Large Hadron Collider.” Unlike particle physics, neuroscience is about humans, and it has profound repercussions for how people see themselves.

Rippon, Fine, Jordan-Young, and Kaiser have argued that biology and society are “entangled”—that they work in concert with each other, through mechanisms like plasticity, to create the complicated picture we call “gender.”

Daphna Joel’s theory, published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the end of 2015, states that, rather than being distinctly male or female, the brain is a unique “mosaic” of characteristics. In any given person, you’re likely to find features in a form that’s more prevalent in men and also in a form that’s more prevalent in women.

“If you take any two brains, they are different, but how they differ between any two individuals, you cannot predict,” she explains. By this logic, there can’t be any such thing as an average male or average female brain. We are all, each one of us, a mix. Our brains are intersex.

I don't like her choice to say intersex here because that is a specific community and this usage dilutes the meaning of the word. She is using the word to be provocative at the expense of intersex ppl

Comparing males and females at any one time point is a complicated question to make meaningful, because it is actually so ill-defined as posed,” he says. “There’s a lot of variability in individual brains. In fact, the anatomical variability is much greater than we ever realized before. So the notion that all people of the male sex have a brain that has fixed characteristics that are invariant seems less likely to me. In fact, so much less likely that I think the notion of trying to characterize parts of the brain as more male-like or more female-like actually isn’t useful.”

Primatology is today a female-dominated field, guided by early pioneers like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. But when Hrdy started her career in the 1970s, not only did men rule the roost, the accepted wisdom was that human evolution had been shaped largely by male behavior. Males were the ones under pressure to attract as many mates as possible to increase their odds of having more offspring, males were aggressive and competitive in their quest for dominance, and males needed to be creative and intelligent when they hunted for meat.

Further work by Hrdy showed that female langurs were promiscuous, too, contrary to popular wisdom about females being sexually coy. Male langurs, she noticed, attacked only those infants being carried by an unfamiliar female—never by a female with which they’d mated. By having as many mates as possible, Hrdy suggested that female langurs might be strategically lowering the odds of a male killing her infant.

The influential evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, a colleague of Hrdy’s, once told a reporter that Hrdy should concentrate on being a mother instead of on her work She forgives him now, she tells me. (Trivers, meanwhile, tells me that he intended the remark to be a secret, and admits he’s sorry it was made public.)

He's Sorry™ he got caught lol

“Mothers carrying dead infants is not uncommon in the primate world,” confirms Dawn Starin, a London-based anthropologist who has spent decades studying primates in Africa, Asia, and South America. In her research on red colobus monkeys in Gambia, one female “carried her maggot-riddled infant around with her for days, grooming it, sticking it in the crotches of trees so that she could feed without it slipping to the ground, and never letting any of the others touch it.” Encounters like these left her with the impression that an infant is treated like an extension of the mother’s body, a real part of her, and not a separate being.

Anthropologists Wenda Trevathan at New Mexico State University and Karen Rosenberg at the University of Delaware have noted that childbirth is a lonely activity in few human cultures. Helpers are so important that women may even have evolved to expect them, they’ve argued. Their theory is that the awkward style of delivery of human births and the emotional need that mothers have to seek support during birth may be adaptations to the fact that our ancestors had people aiding them when they delivered their babies.

Anthropologist Dawn Starin tells me, “When I studied a group of titi monkeys in Peru, the infant was usually carried by the father and spent most of its time with him. The father is completely involved with the rearing of the young. The mother was really just a dairy bar, a pair of milk-secreting nipples.” Like humans, titi monkeys are cooperative breeders. Some captive studies on this species, she says, have even suggested that the infant may be primarily attached to the father rather than the mother.

The maternal instinct in humans is not an automatic switch, which is flicked on the moment a baby is born. This is Sarah Hrdy’s radical proposition. All over the world, mothers are known to admit that it takes time for them to fall in love with their babies, while some never do. In some unfortunate cases, mothers deliberately neglect and even kill their newborns. This may seem utterly unnatural. After all, we assume the maternal instinct is as strong and immediate in humans as it is in any other creature. It’s considered a fundamental part of being a woman. So much so that those who don’t want children or reject their own are sometimes considered odd. But the reality, observes Hrdy, is that it’s more common for mothers not to form an immediate attachment to their offspring than we like to believe.

Hrdy’s hypothesis about the profound importance of cooperative breeding is a difficult one to prove, especially given the myriad pressures that pregnant women experience in the modern world. But it also has the power to release women of the guilt they may feel when they’re unable to cope alone. If we are natural cooperative breeders—a species in which alloparents are part of the fabric of families—it’s unreasonable to expect women to manage without any help.

Evolutionary biologists have often assumed in the past that, of all the people providing support to mothers, fathers would have been front and center. In his 2006 book, Men: Evolutionary and Life History, Richard Bribiescas suggests exactly this. And from the perspective of how we’ve lived for centuries, often in monogamous marriages and nuclear families, this seems to make sense.

Except the nuclear family is a recent invention

Older siblings had a more positive effect than anyone besides the mother. After this came grandmothers, then fathers, followed far behind them all by grandfathers. “Fathers were rather less important: in just over a third of all cases did they improve child survival,” Sear and Coall note in their paper.

“We see a huge range of plasticity in how much engagement there is in human males,” admits Richard Bribiescas, from “the most doting and caring father, and everything is great and lovely, to a father that’s sort of engaged and maybe just brings food and resources home, to the ultimate, very horrific cases of things like infanticide.” If society expects men to be involved in child care, they are, and they can do it well. If society expects them to be hands-off, they can do that, too.

In a few societies, for example, children even have more than one “father.” In Amazonian South America, there are communities that accept affairs outside marriage and hold a belief that when a woman has sex with more than one man in the run-up to her pregnancy, all their sperm help build the fetus. This is known by academics as “partible paternity.”

The language of accepting affairs is a very awkward way to describe this norm. An affair implies lack of consent of all parties

The symposium they were all a part of was headlined “Man the Hunter.” And they would help shape the way a generation of scientists thought about human evolution. The gathering was appropriately titled. The “man” in the title, as anyone attending would have guessed, really did refer to men, not to all humans.

As seen in Dennis Baron's What's Your Pronoun, when the generic masculine isn't used generically

Gathering was arguably a more important source of calories than hunting. In 1979 Lee noted that among the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa, women’s gathering provided as much as two-thirds of food in the group’s diet. As well as feeding their families, women were often also responsible for cooking, setting up shelter, and helping with hunts. And they did all this at the same time as being pregnant and raising children.

One important myth to be cracked was that males were always the main inventors and tool users in our past. Zihlman is convinced this is wrong. While chimpanzees tend to pick and eat their food alone and on the spot, at some point in history humans began to gather and bring it back home to share. They would have needed containers to hold all this food, as well as slings to carry their babies while they gathered—and both probably before anyone created stone hunting tools. These are likely to have been the earliest human inventions, she says, and they would have been used by women. One of the earliest tools, meanwhile, would have been the “digging stick.”

The primatologist Jane Goodall has shown through her intimate observations of chimpanzees that females are more skilled at using simple tools and cracking nuts with hard shells than males are. This is partly because they spend more time doing it.

The other myth around the hunting hypothesis is the question of language and intelligence. Were anthropologists right in thinking that male hunters drove forward the development of human communication and brain size? Sarah Hrdy’s work on infants and mothers has supported Sally Linton’s suggestion that language probably evolved, not through hunting, but more likely through the complex and subtle interactions between babies and their caregivers.

“When you see pictures of what these women can do, they’re pretty strong,” Adrienne Zihlman tells me. In her chapter in the 1981 book Woman the Gatherer, she includes a striking image, shot by anthropologist Richard Lee, showing a seven-month pregnant !Kung woman striding through the Kalahari like an athlete. She’s supporting a three-year-old child on her shoulders, brandishing a digging stick in one hand, and hauling the food she’s gathered on her back to take home.

In her 2013 book Paleofantasy, she writes that women’s running abilities decline extremely slowly into old age. They’ve been known to go long distances even while pregnant. One example is Amber Miller, an experienced runner who in 2011 ran the Chicago marathon before giving birth seven hours later. English runner and world record holder Paula Radcliffe has also trained through two pregnancies.

That is impressive but also their OBs must have been having heart attacks. Being athletically conditioned before pregnancy is definitely a prerequisite.

Agnes Estioko-Griffin published some of these findings in a paper in 1985. She noted that every able-bodied Agta, male or female, knew how to spearfish. Of twenty-one women above the age of fourteen in the group, fifteen were hunters, four had hunted in the past, and only two didn’t know how to hunt. In half of all the hunting trips she observed, men and women hunted together. If there were differences, they were in the way women tended to hunt. For instance, a woman never went alone, to avoid the risk of people suspecting that she was having a secret tryst with a lover. Women hunters were also more likely to use dogs to help with the kill.

Even as their old way of life disappears, the Nanadukan Agta have shown that, beyond the biological fact that women give birth and lactate, culture can dictate almost every aspect of what women and men do. The way lives are divided when it comes to child care, cooking, getting food, hunting, and other work is a moveable feast. There’s no biological commandment that says women are natural homemakers and unnatural hunters or that hand-son fathers are breaking some eternal code of the sexes.

“It’s not that individuals don’t want to live with kin,” Dyble explains. “It’s just that if everyone tried to live with as many kin as possible, this places a constraint on how closely related communities can be.” And this in turn means that neither men nor women have greater control over whom they live with. There must be sexual equality in decision making. “It has this transformative effect on social organization,” he says. If this arrangement was normal in our evolutionary history, Dyble believes it could explain some aspects of human development. “We have the ability to cooperate with unrelated individuals, which is different from what we see in primates, which are very wary of interacting with individuals they haven’t met before,” he says. This is crucial to complex society. If people couldn’t cooperate with people they weren’t related to, civilization as we know it simply couldn’t exist.

Michael Gurven and Kim Hill, who have catalogued the reasons women don’t hunt, suggest that women avoid hunting as the risk of death rises. This is important to a group’s overall survival, because losing a mother is far more dangerous for a child than losing a father. In some societies and environments, hunting isn’t just dangerous; it can also take women far away from their home base for days at a time. If the culture does not provide enough support for women in terms of child care or other work, a woman may simply be unable to put in as many hours as a man to perfect her skills, making her a less useful killer.

Another example from the same continent is the Martu, an aboriginal tribe in Western Australia for whom hunting is a sport. Outrunning animals is a skill perfected by women in particular. “When Martu women hunt, one of their favorite prey are feral cats. It’s not a very productive activity, but it’s a chance for women to show off their skill acquisition. Women gain huge notoriety going after these cats,” Bliege Bird tells me. The hunting is done in scorching summer heat. “Women chase after these cats. They run to tire them out. It’s just tremendous the amount of effort that goes into it.”

You’re at university and a stranger of the opposite sex sidles up to you. “I’ve been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive,” they say. Before you know it, the mysterious person is inviting you back to their room to sleep with them. It may be the least creative way of picking someone up, but if it works on you, then research suggests you’re almost certainly a man. This scenario was part of a real experiment at Florida State University conducted in 1978 and designed by psychology professors Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield to settle a classroom dispute over whether, compared to women, men are more open to casual sex.

Today an ethics board would not have approved this. Because a strange man propositioning you when you are a woman is terrifying. You must obtain informed consent from all research participants and disclose potential harms

Even though men and women were equally likely to go on a date with a stranger, none of the women would sleep with one. Three-quarters of the men, on the other hand, were willing to have sex with a woman they didn’t know.

Because men don't generally fear that a strange woman will kill them or assault them

When it finally came out in 1989 in the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality under the title “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” it became a classic. After all, it neatly confirmed what everyone thought they already knew about sex and the sexes. Men are naturally polygamous and just fighting nature when they become tied into long-term relationships. Women are monogamous and always looking for the perfect partner.

I'm glad this is about to be dismantled in the following paragraphs. In a world where women are taught to be on high alert for strange men for their safety, the data is not surprising but the interpretation is so awful. Men generally don't feel in danger when a strange woman approaches them (ceterus paribus)

This would explain why the males of certain species, including our own, tend to be bigger and stronger than the females. It explains, too, such marvels of nature as the lion’s giant mane and the peacock’s flamboyant blue and green plumage. There don’t seem to be any reasons why lions need manes or peacocks need such cumbersome, fancy feathers except to attract the opposite sex.

When peacocks display, they look bigger and I wonder if this could frighten predators

His website, which promotes his autobiography—appropriately titled Wild Life—says that he’s spent time behind bars, that he founded an armed group to protect gay men in Jamaica from violence, and that he once drove a getaway car for a founder of the Black Panthers, the black nationalist organization active in the sixties and seventies. He was also the biologist who once told a reporter that biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy should focus on being a mother rather than on her career.

He told a reporter and was sorry it got out. Excuse me a moment to play the world's tiniest violin

Trivers was just a young researcher at Harvard University, studying mating pigeons outside his window, when one of his tutors suggested he look up Bateman’s work. And he remembers it with graphic clarity. He went to the museum to photocopy it, “with my testicles firmly pressed against the side of the Xerox machine,” he tells me, with a throaty laugh.

Ewwwww

“When I lecture to students I sometimes point out that, during the last hour, every testicle in the room has generated a hundred million sperm. That’s a lot of sperm with nowhere to go.”

Please don't draw your students' attention to their genitals.

A female, he suggests, gains nothing from adding extra notches to her belt. One male is enough to get her pregnant, and once pregnant, she can’t be any more pregnant. “Most females were uninterested in copulating more than once or twice.”

Except cats aren't like that. Every kitten in a litter is from a different encounter.

The August 1978 issue of Playboy magazine carried a sensational story. “Do Men Need to Cheat on Their Women? A New Science Says Yes,” boasted the cover. The photograph next to the provocative headline coincidentally featured a model in white suspenders and strappy heels for an item on sexy secretaries. Her pad and pen were carelessly tossed to the floor while she stood pressed against her boss. The publication of Robert Trivers’s paper marked a watershed not only in the way scientists understood sexual behavior but also in how the everyday woman and man in the street understood it. Sexual selection theory, revamped for the twentieth century, rapidly became a tool to explain women’s and men’s relationship habits.

Trivers has most definitely cheated

This idea popped up again in a 1998 New Yorker article by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Under the title “Boys Will Be Boys,” he used evolutionary psychology to defend US president Bill Clinton, whose affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky had just been made public. “Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales,” he writes. “A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who shared his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one.” Pinker has described Don Symons’s book as “groundbreaking” and Robert Trivers’s work as “monumental.”

Pinker has almost certainly cheated imo

“Male nightingales sing more and male peacocks display more impressive visual ornaments. Male humans sing and talk more in public gatherings, and produce more paintings and architecture,” he writes. Later he adds, “Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions.” Men are better at all these things, he implies, because they have evolved to be better.

Barf

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.

The reason the Himba are vital to understanding the true breadth of female sexuality is because on the spectrum of sexual freedom, Himba women are at a far end. Their culture has a relaxed attitude to women having affairs with other men while they’re married, offering them more autonomy and choice over who they have sex with than women in almost any other part of the world.

The word affairs is inappropriate when you're talking about it being a cultural norm to have multipe partners

Although there’s no reason to think men and women don’t feel jealous, adds Scelza, the cultural norm among the Himba is that it’s as acceptable for women to have affairs as it is for men, and husbands simply have to accept them.