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

by Angela Saini

Writing in 1939 at the end of what he described as this “epoch of confusion,” Herbert Evans at the Institute of Experimental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, admitted, “It would appear that maleness or femaleness can not be looked upon as implying the presence of one hormone and the absence of the other. . . . Though much has been learned it is only fair to state that these differences are still incompletely known.”

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.

Gender, meanwhile, is a social identity, influenced not only by biology but also by external factors such as upbringing, culture, and the effect of stereotypes. It’s defined by what the world tells us is masculine or feminine, and this makes it potentially fluid. For many people their biological sex and their gender aren’t the same.

In 2000 a brief scientific article was published in the international journal Infant Behavior and Development describing an experiment that would shape the way people around the world thought about sex differences at birth. It was written by a team from the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry at Cambridge University, which included Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist, neuroscientist, and famous expert on the medical condition autism. The paper claimed to prove for the first time that there were noticeable and important sex differences in the way newborn babies behaved.

empathizing-systemizing theory.

Jennifer Connellan was a twenty-two-year-old American postgraduate student.

In the published paper, Jennifer Connellan, Simon Baron-Cohen, and their colleagues argued that this was overwhelming evidence that boys are born with

a stronger interest in mechanical objects, while girls tend to have naturally better social skills and more emotional sensitivity. “Here we demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that these differences are, in part, biological in origin,” they wrote.

boys and girls really are born different.

In 2003 he published The Essential Difference, a book written for the general public that lays bare what he sees as fundamental gaps between how men and women think.

The clear implication is that the sexes don’t appear to behave differently because of society or culture, but because of something profoundly innate and biological.

Professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University Anne Fausto-Sterling, however, is wary of research that claims to see sex differences in such young children.

Goy and McEwen’s book Sexual Differentiation of the Brain claimed that testosterone has a lasting impact on future sexual behavior. But research like theirs couldn’t be divorced from the age in which it was being done.

Peter Behan

Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda

higher than normal levels of testosterone slowed development on the left side of the brain, making ...

In 1984 Geschwind and Galaburda published a book titled Cerebral Dominance, spelling out how their evidence supported the concept that men’s brains were profoundly steered in a different direction by testosterone.

Researchers have known this for a long time. In their 1974 book The Psychology of Sex Differences, American researchers Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin picked through an enormous mass of studies looking at similarities and differences between boys and girls. They concluded that the psychological gaps between women and men were far smaller than the differences that existed in society among women and among men.

Psychologist and author Cordelia Fine, who in 2010 published Delusions of Gender, a book about the problems with brain research that includes Nash and Grossi’s findings, adds that, even if their findings were right, Connellan, Baron-Cohen, and their colleagues made too big a leap when speculating about what they might mean. “One assumption is that these visual preferences predict a child’s later empathizing versus systemizing interests, for which there is no evidence either way,” she tells me.