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

by Angela Saini

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. By the time I reached my final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students.

Statistics collected by the Women’s Engineering Society in 2016 show that only 9 percent of the engineering workforce in the United Kingdom is female and just over 15 percent of engineering undergraduates are women.

The picture is similar in the United States: according to the National Science Foundation, although women make up nearly half the scientific workforce, they’re underrepresented in engineering, physics, and mathematics.

Girls stood among boys as the highest achievers at my school. According to the Women’s Engineering Society, there’s little gender difference in enrollment and achievement in the core science and math subjects at secondary level in UK schools. In fact, girls are now more likely than boys to get the highest grades in these subjects.

In the United States, women have earned around half of all undergraduate science and engineering degrees since as far back as the late 1990s.

Women are so grossly underrepresented in modern science because, for most of history, they were treated as intellectual inferiors and deliberately excluded from it. It should come as no surprise, then, that this same scientific establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex. This, in turn again, has skewed how science looks and what it says even now.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which keeps global figures on women in science, estimates that in 2013 just a little more than a quarter of all researchers in the world were women.

In North America and Western Europe, female researchers were 32 percent of the population. In Ethiopia, the proportion of female researchers was only 13 percent.

The common trend is for women to be around in high numbers at the undergraduate level but to thin out as they move up the ranks. This is best explained by the perennial problem of child care, which lifts women out of their jobs at precisely the moment ...

When researchers Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden published a book on this subject in 2013, titled Do Babies Matter: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, they found that married mothers of young children in the United States were a third less likely to receive tenure-track jobs than mar...

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs an annual Time Use Survey to pick apart how people spend their hours. 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. In households with children under the age of six, men spent less than half as much time as women taking physical care of these children. At work, on the other hand, men spent fifty-two minutes a day longer on the job than women did.

A man who’s able to commit more time to the office or laboratory is naturally more likely to do better in his career than a woman who can’t. When decisions are made over who should take maternity or paternity leave, it’s also almost always mothers who take time out.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the United States estimates that in 2015 women working full time earned only seventy-nine cents for every dollar that a man earned.

In the United Kingdom, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. But today, according to the Office for National Statistics, a gender pay gap of more than 18 percent still exists, although it’s falling. In the scientific and technical activities sector this gap is as big as 24 percent.

In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the possibility of gender bias in recruitment by sending out fake job applications for a vacancy of laboratory manager. Every application was identical except that half were given a female name and half a male name. When they were asked to comment on these potential employees, scientists rated women significantly lower in competence and hireability.

They were also less willing to mentor them and offered far lower starting salaries. The only difference, of course, was that these applicants appeared to be female.

Interestingly, the authors wrote in their paper, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.” Gender bias is so steeped in the culture...

Another study, published in 2016 in the world’s largest scientific journal, PLOS ONE, looked at how male biology students rated their female counterparts. Cultural anthropologist Dan Grunspan, biologist Sarah Eddy, and their colleagues asked hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Washington what they thought about how well others in their class were performing. “Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content,” they wrote. This didn’t reflect re...

Another problem in parts of the sciences, the extent of which is only now being laid bare, is sexual harassment.

In 2016 California Institute of Technology suspended a professor of theoretical astrophysics, Christian Ott, for also sexually harassing students. The same year two female students at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a legal complaint against assistant professor Blake Wentworth, who they claimed had sexually harassed them repeatedly, including inappropriate touching. This was not long after a prominent astronomer at the same university, Geoff Marcy, was found guilty of sexually harassing women over many years.

Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face.

The Royal Society of London, officially founded in 1663 and one of the oldest scientific institutions still around today, failed to elect any women to full membership until 1945. It took until the middle of the twentieth century, too, for the prestigious academies of Paris and Berlin.

Even assuming she was given the same schooling as a boy, it was unusual for a girl to be allowed into universities or granted degrees until the twentieth century.

“From their beginnings European universities were, in principle, closed to women,” writes Schiebinger. They were designed to prepare men for careers in theology, law, government, and medicine, which women were barred from entering. Doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system, harming her fertility.

Harvard Medical School refused to admit women until 1945. The first woman applied for a place almost a century earlier.

The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless denied from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.

When mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years under a male colleague’s name and without pay.

In 1944 the Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner failed to win a Nobel Prize despite her vital contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission. Her life story is a lesson in persistence. When she was growing up, girls weren’t educated beyond the age of fourteen. Meitner was privately tutored so she could pursue her passion for physics. When she finally secured a research position at the University of Berlin, she was given a small basement room and no salary. She wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs to the levels where the male scientists worked.

Rosalind Franklin’s enormous part in decoding the structure of DNA was all but ignored when James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel after her death in 1962.

And as recently as 1974 the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars wasn’t given to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who actually made the breakthrough, but to her male supervisor.

Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology.

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

woman had hardened into a widespread assumption. Society expected wives to be virtuous, passive, and submissive to their husbands.

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.

Their provocative message was that women had been cheated out of the lives they deserved, that equality was in fact their biological right.

In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote.

In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all fetuses start out physically female. “The default blueprint is female,” says Richard Quinton, consultant endocrinologist at hospitals in Newcastleupon-Tyne in northeast England.

Of the ten scientific fields they investigated, eight showed a male bias. In pharmacology, the study of medical drugs, the articles reporting only on males outnumbered those reporting only on females by five to one. In physiology, which explores how our bodies work, it was almost four to one.

In 1993 the US Congress introduced the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which includes a general requirement for all NIH-funded clinical studies to include women as test subjects, unless they have a good reason not to.

Male sexual jealousy, the fear of being cuckolded, and such vicious mate guarding suggest that females aren’t naturally chaste or passive at all. If they were, then why would their partners go to such extraordinary lengths to stop them getting anywhere near other males?