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

by Angela Saini

The puzzling thing about female genital mutilation is that there seem to be no winners. Not men, not women. Wives have reported depression and domestic abuse because their husbands can’t accept that they don’t want to have sex. One young man admitted to her that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation and he was scared of hurting her. If men would accept brides who weren’t mutilated, she notes, the stigma might go away. Yet, however damaging it might be to their wives and their marriages, few men stand up against the practice.

Female genital mutilation is only one way in which a woman’s sexual agency is repressed. There have been countless others throughout history.

As old forms of torture disappear, new ones swiftly roll in. In Cameroon and some parts of West Africa, girls between the ages of eight and twelve today suffer a procedure, often at the hands of their mothers, known as breast “ironing.” A grinding stone, broom, belt, or another object is heated, then used to press a girl’s budding breasts flat. The goal is to keep her looking like a child for as long as possible, so people assume she hasn’t yet entered puberty. Aside from the psychological impact and immediate pain, breast ironing can cause long-term medical problems including scarring and difficulty breast-feeding,

Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that all this—the systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia—is what really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female. She raised this, somewhat controversially, in her 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolved.

When this standard isn’t enough to limit her behavior, humans have gone to elaborate lengths to enforce it. The most aggressive include forced marriage, domestic violence, and rape. One member of the gang who violently raped and killed

“Couched in superstitious, religious and rationalized terms, behind the subjugation of women’s sexuality lay the inexorable economics of cultural evolution which finally forced men to impose it and women to endure it,” she wrote in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. “Generally, men have never accepted strict monogamy except in principle. Women have been forced to accept it.” From the smallest laws to the most sweeping religious doctrines, she argued, cultures everywhere had tried to burn away every last scrap of female sexual freedom. This subjugation was the root of the moral double standard, the punishments, and the violent brutality that women continue to live with today.

when hunter-gatherers began to settle down and abandon their nomadic ways of living, between ten and twelve thousand years ago, things would have changed for women. With the domestication of animals and agriculture, as well as denser societies, specialized groups emerged. “For the first time you had a critical mass of men who could exclude women,” explains Konner. Systems of male control—patriarchies—emerged that exist to this day.

In her 1995 paper on the evolutionary origins of patriarchy, she points out that, despite all the male aggression we see in the primate world, females aren’t helpless victims. They rarely submit willingly to male control. They actually have their own clever ways of exerting power over males. “Although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females,” she writes. And there’s one particularly strong example of this. It’s the other primate with which we share as close a relationship as we do with chimpanzees. The bonobo

Bonobos are unusual in the ape world for being a species in which females dominate, with the oldest females appearing to be highest in the pecking order. Attacks by females on males are quite common.

“In bonobos it’s very important for males to have their mothers with them for life,” explains Parish. “We have this pejorative idea that when males are especially close to their mothers, that they’re momma’s boys and that’s a bad thing. But in this case, unlike chimps—where males separate really clearly from their mothers at adolescence in order to join the male dominance hierarchy—in bonobos, males maintain their relationship with their mother for life. She intervenes in his fights, protects him from violence; he gets to mate with her friends; he gets access to otherwise exclusive female feeding circles. So there’s a really big upside for males.”

Female elephants are another more well-known example. They make up stable, core groups into and out of which males move transiently, depending on the breeding season. Spotted hyenas also live in clans ruled by an alpha female. Adult males rank lowest and eat last and are smaller and less aggressive than the females. Aside from dominance, another way in which bonobos mark themselves apart from chimpanzees is in their sexual behavior.

Bonobos seem to use sex as a kind of everyday social glue. Males have sex with males, females have sex with females.

bonobos also engage in oral sex, tongue kissing, and genital massage.

“Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee.

A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.”

One more difference is hunting. Female bonobos are usually the ones who hunt for mea...

According to Parish, bonobo society works the way it does because females form powerful bonds with each other, even if they aren’t related. “The males can be friendly. They have sex with each other. But it’s nothing like the intensity or the scope that we see in the females.

The focus on dominance in primate behavior makes it easy to forget that there are also species out there in which the sexes coexist and cooperate relatively peacefully. Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share child care between males and females.

other monogamous species, such as gibbons and simiangs, male coercion of females is hardly seen.

“Females are larger than males in more species of mammals than is generally supposed.”

for a variety of species, size doesn’t seem to correlate reliably with which sex is dominant. The African water chevrotain, which is a type of deer, and many small antelopes, for example, have larger females who aren’t dominant. Meanwhile, the Chinese hamster, ring-tailed lemur, and pygmy marmoset all have smaller females that dominate the males. Bonobo females, too, are generally smaller than the males. “Their larger size is balanced by the fact that females cooperate against males, whereas males seldom cooperate against females,” notes Barbara Smuts.

In patriarchal societies, a woman will almost always leave her own family when she gets married and go live with her husband’s. Losing the support of her relatives makes her especially weak in the face of violence and repression. And this weakness is exacerbated when men form alliances with each other and control resources, such as food and property.

male domination isn’t inevitable when females work together to establish their interests—the way that bonobos do.

females can be in charge. They can control the resources. They don’t need to go through males to get them. They don’t have to be subjected to sexual violence or infanticide, all because they have the upper hand. And they do that by staying loyal to their female friends.”

If fertility represented youth and health, society assumed, then infertility was exactly the opposite. It wiped out the entire point of being female. It turned a woman into something else. And this was reflected in the ways older women were treated, especially by science and the medical profession.

In 1966 a sensational new health book was published in the United States, promising women that they had nothing to fear from growing old, because science could make them young again. It became an instant hit, selling a hundred thousand copies in just seven months. Its title was as seductive as its contents: Feminine Forever.

the answer to women’s (and husbands’) prayers came in the shape of sex hormones. With a youth-restoring blend of hormones including estrogen, he claimed, a woman’s “breasts and genital organs will not shrivel. She will be much more pleasant to live with and will not become dull and unattractive.”

Robert Wilson chose to send his own message with a sledgehammer rather than with flowers. He argued that menopause should be recognized as a “serious, painful and often crippling disease,” turning its sufferers into what he disdainfully described as “castrates.” Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University, who has written about his work, describes his disparaging depictions of “estrogen-starved women.” They are portrayed as existing rather than living, she says. Pictures that he includes in one of his published papers show elderly women walking along in public dressed in black and hunched over. “They pass unnoticed and, in turn, notice little,” he warns his readers.

After Robert Wilson died, a scandal in 1981 revealed that his pockets had been lined all along by pharmaceutical companies who were trying to sell more hormone replacement drugs. His best-selling book Feminine Forever had been bankrolled by Wyeth Ayerst, one of the therapy’s biggest manufacturers.

The focus on grandmothering also casts menopause in a new light, suggesting that it isn’t some biological blip or routine curse of old age, but that it’s there for a distinct evolutionary purpose: to allow women to safely continue caring for their children as they grow older and perhaps also be there for their grandchildren. The old image of the useless crone is replaced by a useful woman. Rather than being a burden on society, retreating into a quieter life, she is front and center. She is propping up her family.

Hawkes spent the 1980s doing fieldwork with the Aché, nomadic hunter-gatherers in Eastern Paraguay. And she soon realized, like anthropologists before her, that men weren’t providing all the food for their families. Hunting by men alone simply didn’t put enough on the table for women and children to survive. “The things that they were foraging for were the things that went around to everybody.

Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. The Hadza are particularly special to anthropologists because they arguably live a life as close to how humans lived before agriculture as anyone is likely to find today.

More work by Hawkes and her team has since revealed just how industrious they are. Women in their sixties and seventies are described as working long hours in all seasons, bringing back as much food or even more than younger women in their families.

Thomas describes a group of people who fell ill during an epidemic. One young widow and her two children were too sick to leave with the group when it decided to shift camp in search of more food. “But her mother was there,” she writes. “This small, rather elderly woman took her daughter on her back, her infant grandchild in a sling across her chest, and her four year old grandchild on her hip. She carried them thirty-five miles, to her people’s new camp.” The superhuman efforts of this grandmother meant her daughter and two grandchildren recovered from their illness and weren’t left behind.

According to the latest findings, it is almost certain that some women would have experienced menopause in our ancient past. The earliest recorded mention is often attributed to Aristotle in the fourth century BC, when he is supposed to have noted that women stopped giving birth around the ages of forty or fifty.

Hard data, too, have backed up Hawkes’s findings. Studies in Gambia have found that the presence of a grandmother increases a child’s chance of survival. Similar results have been found in historical data from Japan and Germany. One study of three thousand Finnish and Canadian women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found that women had two extra grandchildren for every ten years they survived beyond menopause.

Watching the whales led them to believe that it’s the wisdom gathered over their lifetimes that makes the older females so invaluable. “They are more likely than the males to lead a group of orcas, especially in times of short food supply,” says Croft. “For killer whales, what’s really crucial is when and where salmon is going to be,” and the older females seem to have this knowledge.

Chimps actually prefer older females as their mates,” Virpi Lummaa, at the University of Sheffield, tells me.

“I had no notion that what old ladies were doing was going to turn out to be so important,” she tells me. “It really highlights the extremely important effects that postfertile females have had on the direction of evolution in our lineage.”

As far back as the 1970s American anthropologist Marcha Flint studied communities in Rajasthan in India, where women saw old age very differently. They told her it was a good thing, giving them a new social standing in their communities and more equality with men. Flint described negative American attitudes to menopause, in contrast, as a “syndrome.” When menopause is seen as a curse rather than a blessing, women feel naturally less happy about it and also seem to report more symptoms.

ancient grandmothers weren’t just powerhouses in their families but vehicles for enormous change as humans migrated across the globe, tens of thousands of years ago. Age was no barrier to exercising their strength. With the hard work of these women, everything was possible.

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained. —Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963

But Montagu is also clear that men have everything to gain from embracing change. He calls for flexible working patterns, in which parents can split child care evenly between them so both can enjoy the benefits of raising their kids. He asks husbands not to leave housework to stay-at-home wives, however much they dislike it. “Man is himself a problem in search of a solution,” he writes. “When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution. . . . The truth will make men free as well as women.” It’s a message as timely then as it is now.

In 2015 Melvin Konner, who’s based at Emory University, took inspiration from Montagu’s book and wrote his own, titled Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy. He argues that some qualities common to women make them natural leaders in the modern age. “I happen to think it’s superior to be less violent,” Konner tells me,

When suffragists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fought for the right to vote, they faced enormous opposition. It was a bitter, bloody battle. Thousands were imprisoned and some were tortured. Every wave for change in women’s lives has brought with it the same kind of resistance. And today, as women across the world fight for more freedoms and equality, there are again violent efforts to hold them back.

A phenomenon known as the “Nordic Paradox” shows that equality under the law doesn’t always guarantee women will be treated better. Iceland has among the highest levels of female participation in the labor market anywhere in the world, with heavily subsidized child care and equal parental leave for mothers and fathers. In Norway, since 2006, the law has required that at least 40 percent of listed company board members are women. Yet a report in May 2016 published in Social Science and Medicine reveals that Nordic countries have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence against women.

For decades feminism has been a lens that illuminated biases in science. It made science better.

Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived, and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities.

We’ve entered the epoch that scientists call the “anthropocene,” in which humans are recognized to have had a profound impact on global ecosystems. We control our environments in ways that no other animal can. What’s more, we control ourselves.