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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Saini
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January 2 - January 14, 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.
The problem is that answers in science aren’t everything they seem. When we turn to scientists for resolution, we assume they will be neutral. We think the scientific method can’t be biased or loaded against women. But we’re wrong.
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.
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.
In Bolivia, women account for 63 percent of all scientific researchers. In central Asia they are almost half. In India, where my family originate from (my dad studied engineering there), women make up a third of all students in engineering courses. Iran, similarly, has high proportions of female scientists and engineers. Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman to have won the prestigious Fields medal, was born in Tehran. If women were less capable of doing science than men, we wouldn’t see these variations,
“The sexism of science coincided with the professionalization of science. Women increasingly had less and less access,”
Sex difference is today one of the hottest topics in scientific research. An article in the New York Times in 2013 stated that scientific journals had published thirty thousand articles on sex differences since the turn of the millennium. Be it language, relationships, ways of reasoning, parenting, physical and mental abilities, no stone has gone unturned in the forensic search for gaps. And much of this published work seems to reinforce the myth that the gaps between women and men are huge.
If studies seem sexist, occasionally it’s because they are. But then, it’s impossible not to expect that the very bias that kept women out of science for centuries might have affected the very blood and bones of their work—that it might have prejudiced science’s objectivity.
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.
equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right.
She argues that, far from being housebound, women contribute just as much to society as men do. It was, after all, only in wealthier middle-class circles that women tended not to work. For many Victorians, women’s incomes were vital to keeping families afloat. The difference between men and women wasn’t the amount of work they did, but the kind of work they were allowed to do. In the nineteenth century, women were barred from most professions as well as politics and higher education.
Taking on this male scientific establishment wasn’t easy, of course. But for Victorian women—women like Caroline Kennard—everything was at stake. They were fighting for their fundamental rights. 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.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who authored the feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” turned Darwinism around to argue for reform. She thought that half the human race had been kept down at a lower stage of evolution by the other half. With equality, women would finally have the chance to prove themselves equal to men. She was ahead of her time in many ways, arguing against a stereotyped division of toys for boys and girls and foreseeing how a growing army of working women might change society in the future.
published in 1894 called The Evolution of Woman, an Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. “It was shocking,” says Hamlin. Marshalling history, statistics, and science, this was Gamble’s piercing counterargument to Darwin and other evolutionary biologists.
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. Women had been systematically suppressed over the course of human history by men and their power structures, Gamble argued. They weren’t naturally inferior.
Gamble suggested that Darwin hadn’t accounted for the existence of powerful women in some tribal societies either, which might prove that the supremacy of men now was not how it had always been.
In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote. The battle would take until 1918 in Britain, although only for women over the age of thirty. And when Gamble died in Detroit in 1920, it was just a month after the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited citizens from being denied the right to vote because of their sex.
In the century after Gamble’s death, researchers became only more obsessed by sex differences, how they might pick them out, measure and catalogue them, enforcing the dogma that men are somehow better than women.
In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all fetuses start out physically female.
About seven weeks after the egg has been fertilized, testosterone produced by the testes begins physically turning the male fetuses into boys.
In the early days of endocrinology, assumptions about what it meant to be masculine or feminine came from the Victorians. With the discovery of hormones, scientists had a new way to explain the stereotypes.
Later, to their shock, scientists began to realize that significant levels of androgens were present in women and of estrogen in men. In 1934, the German-born gynecologist Bernhard Zondek, while studying stallion urine, reported on “the paradox that the male sex is recognised by a high oestrogenic hormone content.” In fact, a male horse’s testes turned out to be one of the richest sources of estrogen ever found.
It took a while for scientists to accept the truth: that all these hormones really did work together in both sexes, in synergy. Oudshoorn has described how important a shift this was in the way that science understood the sexes.
Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, started writing at about the same time about masculine and feminine personalities, and how culture rather than biology might be influencing which ones people had.
Femaleness and maleness, femininity and masculinity, were turning into fluid descriptions, which might be as much shaped by nurture as by nature.
Lingering stereotypes about sex hormones remain. But they are being constantly challenged by new evidence. According to endocrinologist Richard Quinton, common assumptions about testosterone have already been shown to be way off the mark. Women with slightly higher than usual levels of testosterone, he says, “don’t actually feel or appear any less feminine.” In 2008,
Quinton similarly claims to have seen no link between testosterone and aggression among his own patients, despite the stereotype that it makes people more violent. “I’m not sure where it comes from,” he tells me. “Urban myth?”
The balance between nature and nurture is starting to be a little better understood. In academic circles at least, gender and sex are now recognized as two different things.
The evidence is clear: from the constitutional standpoint woman is the stronger sex. —Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women, 1953
Women are wanted as wives and girlfriends but not as daughters,” she says.
the countrywide statistics don’t lie. Reality is laid bare in the grotesquely uneven sex ratios. The United Nations report The World’s Women 2015 says, “For those countries in which the sex ratio falls close to or below the parity line, it can be assumed that discrimination against girls exists.”
“You go to hospitals in South Asia and there can be whole wards of kids with illnesses, and you will find 80 percent of them are boys because the girls aren’t being brought to the hospital,”
What makes the mortality figures even more shocking is that, contrary to assumptions about women being the weaker sex, a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy. She’s naturally better built to live.
“Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men.”
“The biological risk is against the boy, but the social risk is against the girl.”
This problem runs all the way through research into women’s health. If a phenomenon affects women and only women, it’s all too often misunderstood. And this is compounded by the fact that even though they’re good at surviving, women aren’t healthier than men. In fact, quite the opposite. “If you could add up all the pain in the world, all the physical pain, I suspect that women have way, way more of it. This is one of the penalties of being a better survivor. You survive, but maybe not quite as intact as you were before,” says Steven Austad. Statistically, it could even explain why women seem
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Research on influenza by Sabra Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has shown that while women are generally hit by fewer viruses during an infection, they tend to suffer more severe flu symptoms than men do.
Women also tend to get more painful joint and muscle diseases in general, observes Austad.
The physical toll of childbearing and the hormonal changes of menopause may also leave women with more physical problems and disabilities, especially in later life.
Society and the environment can sometimes affect illness more than a person’s underlying biology. “Women are less likely to go to the hospital when they’re feeling chest pain than men,”
Oertelt-Prigione points out that where families eat collectively and food is scarce, women are sometimes the last to eat and the most likely to give up food, which can raise their risk of malnutrition. This in turn can affect their susceptibility to disease.
Not only a woman’s own behavior but that of others around her can also affect her health. From the second a girl is born, she’s placed in a different box. She may be handled differently, fed differently, and treated differently. This marks the beginning of a lifetime of differences in the way doctors and medical researchers approach her as well. Only recently, for instance, have doctors begun to acknowledge the severity of some women’s experience of period pain.
In 2015 a team of British researchers studying cancer diagnosis in the United Kingdom found that for six of the cancers that affect both men and women, including bladder and lung, it took longer for women to be diagnosed after going to doctors with their symptoms. For gastric cancer, a woman waited on average a full two weeks longer for a diagnosis.
University of California, San Francisco, and biologist Irving Zucker at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study looking into sex biases in animal research in one sample year: 2009. Of the ten scientific fields they investigated, eight showed a male bias.
This tendency to focus on males, researchers now realize, may have harmed women’s health.
In 2001 New Zealand–based dermatologist Marius Rademaker estimated that women are around one-and-a-half times as likely to develop an adverse reaction to a drug as men are.
Our research has shown that women who are going to have a myocardial infarction [heart attack] are more likely to have symptoms like insomnia, increasing fatigue, pain anywhere in the head all the way down to the chest, the weeks before they have a heart attack. Whereas men are less likely to have those symptoms and are more likely to present with the classic crushing chest pain.”
As more detailed research is done, it’s becoming clear that seeing some variation between women and men when it comes to health and survival doesn’t mean we should ditch the notion that our bodies are in fact similar in many ways, too.
In medicine, just having a way to change paradigms and look at things differently can open up whole arrays of possibilities.
