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

by Angela Saini

Noticing how competitive and sexually assertive females could be in the rest of the primate world prompted her to question why women in her own society should be thought of as any different.

We share roughly 99 percent of our genomes with chimpanzees and bonobos.

when she was asked to define what feminism meant to her, Hrdy recalls saying, “A feminist is just someone who advocates equal opportunities for both sexes. In other words, it’s being democratic. And we’re all feminists, or you should be ashamed not to be.”

“In science, paying equal attention to selection pressure on both males and females, that’s just good science. That’s just good evolutionary theory,”

Human motherhood is rarely the single-handed job that it is for chimpanzees and bonobos.

“Under natural conditions, an orangutan, chimpanzee, or gorilla baby nurses for four to seven years and at the outset is inseparable from his mother, remaining in intimate front-to-front contact a hundred percent of the day and night. The earliest a wild chimpanzee mother has ever been observed to voluntarily let a baby out her grasp is three and a half months,” Hrdy notes in her 2009 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. She includes a picture she once took of a female langur who was so attached to her baby that she faithfully carried around its corpse after it died. Others have made similar observations.

Some of the most studied hunter-gatherer groups are in Africa, the continent from where all humans originally migrated. This makes them arguably the most reliable source of data for evolutionary researchers. They include the !Kung, bushmen and bushwomen living in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the Hadza who live in the Lake Eyasi region of northern Tanzania, and the Efé in the Ituri Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy notes that all three of these societies have people who play parental roles to other people’s children—known as “alloparents.” She describes this system as “cooperative breeding.”

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.

For the babies killed soon after birth, the most common perpetrators are teenage mothers, especially those who are single and living at home with parents who might be disapproving of their pregnancies. Most of them aren’t killing their babies because they’re psychotic or mentally ill, says Craig, but because of the desperate positions they find themselves in.

society influences how they respond to a birth.

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. For Hrdy, a feminist, this line of research also has obvious political implications. It reinforces why lawmakers shouldn’t outlaw abortion and force women to have babies they feel they cannot raise or do not want. It also highlights how important it is that governments provide better welfare and child care for mothers, especially those who don’t have support at home.

They found that other family members were so valuable that, once a child passed the age of two, they could even cushion the impact of an absent mother. Where this help came from, though, was more of a surprise. 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.

This doesn’t mean that hands-on fathering isn’t important. Just that it isn’t always there.

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 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.”

This all points to the possibility that living arrangements among early humans could have taken any number of permutations.

“A theory that leaves out half of the human species is unbalanced.”

in 1970 anthropologist Sally Linton (later publishing under the name Sally Slocum) presented a provocative retort at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. It was titled “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology.”

Linton passionately condemned her field as one that had been “developed primarily by white Western males, during a specific period in history.” Given this bias, she said, it wasn’t surprising that anthropologists had failed to ask just what it was females were doing while the males were out hunting.

Experts at the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference already knew this wasn’t true. In fact, one organizer, Richard Lee, had been the very anthropologist to establish the immense importance of women in sourcing food.

Gathering was arguably a more important source of calories than hunting.

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.

The title of Linton’s passionate talk, “Woman the Gatherer,” was seen as the female counterpoint to “Man the Hunter.” And it became a rallying cry for other researchers who were determined to bring women to the heart of the human evolutionary story.

Through detailed research like this, living with hunter-gatherers, and dissecting their lives, anthropologists and ethnologists like her now finally understand just how mobile, active, and hard working women really are.

Other species provide clues, too, that suggest hunting and toolmaking are not exclusively male domains. 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.

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.

Our sedentary lifestyles and beauty ideals that prize skinniness and fragility in women over size and strength can blind us to what women’s bodies are capable of.

Women are also known to be particularly good at endurance running,

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

Amber Miller, an experienced runner who in 2011 ran the Chicago marathon before giving birth seven hours later.

For a large chunk of early human history, when humans migrated out of Africa to the rest of the world, women would have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. If they were pregnant or carrying infants, the daily physical pressures on them would have been far greater than those faced by men.

“There is something about the female form, the female psyche, just the whole package, that was honed over thousands and thousands, even millions of years to survive and spread around the world,” says Zihlman.

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.

We sometimes imagine sexual equality to be a modern invention, a product of our enlightened, liberal societies. In actual fact, anthropologists have long known that the way women are treated throughout the world wasn’t always like this.

His research reveals a connection between the social structure of hunter-gatherer communities and high levels of sexual equality. It’s evidence, he suggests, that equality was a feature of early human society before the advent of agriculture and farming.

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.

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.

When it comes to family and working life, the biological rule seems to be that there were never any rules. While the realities of childbirth and lactation are fixed, culture and environment can dictate how women live just as much as their bodies do.

If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it,. . .the force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world. —Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1990

Today there is a huge body of research that flies in the face of Bateman’s principles. It has been building up for many decades. Anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy’s research on the Hanuman langurs of Mount Abu forty years ago showed that a female monkey can benefit from mating with more than one male because it confuses them all over their possible paternity of her children, making them less likely to commit infanticide.

London-based anthropologist Dawn Starin also describes how sexually confident female primates can be. “When it came to sex, she was nothing if not assertive,”

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.

Similarly, in other small-scale societies where women contribute more to the family plate, women tend to have more sexual freedom. In the United States, notes Scelza, “in sub-populations in which reliability on male resources is low as a result of high incarceration rates and unemployment, female kin provide critical instrumental and emotional support, and patterns of serial monogamy are common.”

As more evidence rolls in, researchers have started to further question the scientific orthodoxy that females are generally more passive and chaste than males. Even the famous 1978 experiment on the campus of Florida State University—which found that men were overwhelmingly more open than women to casual sex with strangers—has been repeated, with surprising results.

One sex difference they did notice in the laboratory setting, though, was that women tended to pick out fewer partners from the photographs they were offered. Like Brooke Scelza found with the Himba in Namibia, they were choosier than the men, but not less chaste.

think one of the things that Bateman’s principles do is they obfuscate variation in females. So suddenly, there’s nothing interesting about females. That’s one of the things that bothers me about it. There’s embedded sexism there, I think,” she says. “They may as well be tenets of the faith.”

Bateman counted mothers as parents less often than fathers, which is a biological impossibility, since it takes two to make a baby.

In this case, though, the reaction to her findings has been mixed. “A lot of people were very excited about it, other people were pissed about it. . . . It was like they were mad,” she tells me. When I e-mail Don Symons, who wrote The Evolution of Human Sexuality in 1979, to ask his opinion on Gowaty’s failure to replicate Bateman’s findings, he tells me he hasn’t read her paper. When I ask instead for his broader thoughts on the evidence of multiple mating in females, he tells me that he’s no longer available to answer my questions for personal reasons.

The countries with the worst records include Egypt, Sudan, Mali, and Ethiopia, along with Somalia, where barely a girl escapes the knife. The United Nations World Health Organization estimates that more than 125 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation in the countries where it’s most concentrated, and almost all became victims before the age of fifteen.