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

by Angela Saini

In The Descent of Man he argues that males gained the advantage over females across thousands of years of evolution because of the pressure they were under to improve in order to win mates.

So this is the basis of this absurd argument?

In this vigorous competition for women over millennia, the logic goes, men have had to be warriors and thinkers. And this has honed them into finer physical specimens with sharper minds.

Get out

This all makes for astonishing reading now.

That's one way of putting it

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

Women are wanted as wives and girlfriends but not as daughters,”

They looked at how much work children are expected to do to support their families and found that girls worked twice as long as boys and that their work was also more physically demanding.

a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy. She’s naturally better built to live.

“If you have parity in your survival rates, it means you aren’t looking after girls,” says Lawn. “The biological risk is against the boy, but the social risk is against the girl.”

list online of all the people in the world who they have confirmed are living past the age of 110. I last checked the site in July 2016. Of all these “supercentenarians” in their catalogue, just two were men. Forty-six were women. Yet we don’t know why.

“Women have more plastic immune systems. They adapt in different ways,”

“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.

Today it’s well established that brain size is related to body size.

one big complication is that scientists are under enormous pressure to publish their work, and journals tend to publish results that are statistically significant. If there’s no big effect, a journal is less likely to be interested.

“If you take any two brains, they are different.”

On the flip side, exposing someone to bad stereotypes can impair their performance. In one controversial study that Miller and Halpern cite, women who are reminded of negative stereotypes about female abilities in math go on to perform worse on math tests.

This is certainly true for me

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.

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,

NOT MEEE

It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated. —Mary Wollstonecraft,

They spent more than two hundred hours observing the monkeys in captivity,

No thanks

By and large, animals live long enough to have children and maybe see them grow up, and then they die. If you can’t reproduce and your genes are no longer being passed along to another generation, then harsh as it seems, nature generally doesn’t want to know.

TFW you realize nature doesn't want to know you :'(

The problem for everyone in this field is that the data are both scarce and messy.

The summary of this book

The idea of women gaining power, Konner admits, “is threatening” to some.

Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different as we seem.