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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Saini
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September 20 - October 17, 2021
The Fields medal, the world’s greatest honor in mathematics, has been won by a woman only once, in 2014 by the Iranian-born mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.
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.
married mothers of young children in the United States were a third less likely to receive tenure-track jobs than married fathers of young children.
Unmarried, childless women are 4 percent more likely to get these jobs than unmarried, childless men.
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.
“The sexism of science coincided with the professionalization of science. Women increasingly had
The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless denied from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.
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.
“If you’re really paying attention to biology, how can you not be a feminist? If you’re a serious feminist and want to understand what the underpinnings of these things are, and where they come from, then biology—more science, not less science.”
“Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”
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.
He proved his hypothesis the hard and fast way, by repeatedly injecting himself with a concoction made out of the blood, semen, and juices from the crushed testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. He claimed (although his findings were never replicated) that this cocktail increased his strength, stamina, and mental clarity.
About seven weeks after the egg has been fertilized, testosterone produced by the testes begins physically turning the male fetuses into boys. “Testosterone says: ‘Make me externally male.’”
Testosterone became associated with what were believed to be manly qualities, such as aggression, physical power, high intellect, and virility.
At that time, this meant being a wife and mother. If she stepped outside these social boundaries, scientists like him implied it must be because her hormone levels were out of whack.
“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.”
Women with slightly higher than usual levels of testosterone, he says, “don’t actually feel or appear any less feminine.”
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.
Sex is something scientifically distinct for most people. It’s defined by a certain package of genes and hormones as well as more obvious physical features, including a person’s genitals and gonads (although a small proportion of people are biologically intersex). 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.
India’s 2011 census had already revealed that there were more than seven million fewer girls than boys age six and under. The overall sex ratio was more skewed in favor of boys than it had been a decade ago.
And that discovery helped launch a legal case against both him and the clinic, which is still making its way through the notoriously slow Indian courts by the time I interview her, ten years since the birth of her daughters.
Women are wanted as wives and girlfriends but not as daughters,” she says. “What my husband did was part of social conditioning. I don’t blame him anymore. He’s a by-product of society, and society has to change.”
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.
When it comes to the most basic instinct of all—survival—women’s bodies tend to be better equipped than men’s.
“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.”
The Gerontology Research Group keeps a 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.
“If you look across all the different types of infections, women have a more robust immune response.” It isn’t that women don’t get sick. They do. They just don’t die from these sicknesses as easily or as quickly as men do.
“You need an immune system that’s able to switch from proinflammatory reactions to anti-inflammatory reactions in order to avoid having an abortion pretty much every time you get pregnant. The immune system needs to have mechanisms that can, on one side, trigger all these cells to come together in one spot and attack whatever agent is making you sick. But then you also need to be able to stop this response when the agent is not there anymore, in order to prevent tissues and organs from being harmed.”
In some ways it’s better to have a female immune system if you’re fighting off infection of any kind, but on the other hand, we are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, which are very problematic,”
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.
If a man happens to have a genetic mutation on one of his X chromosomes that causes an illness or disability, he has no way of avoiding it. A woman, on the other hand, will have an extra X chromosome to counteract it, unless she’s unlucky enough to have the same genetic mutation on both X chromosomes, one from each parent.
Men are more susceptible to some well-known genetic traits simply because they have one X chromosome. They’re known as “X-linked disorders.” They include red-green color blindness, hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, and IPEX syndrome, which affects immune function. Mental retardation, which affects 2 to 3 percent of people in developed countries and significantly more men than women, also has a strong link to the X chromosome.
“You don’t want to give the experimental drug to a pregnant woman, and you don’t want to give the experimental drug to a woman who doesn’t know she’s pregnant but actually is,”
“It is much cheaper to study one sex. So if you’re going to choose one sex, most people avoid females because they have these messy hormones. . . . So people migrate to the study of males.
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.
“I think you end up having a theory that gives you permission to limit both boys and girls to certain kinds of behaviors or longer term interests, eventually vocations,”
“Between twelve and twenty-four months, children were already showing preferences for sex-typed toys. So, the girls were looking longer at the dolls than at the car, and the boys were looking longer at the car than at the doll,” she says. But at twelve months, both boys and girls spent longer looking at the doll than the car.
In a study by Hines exploring color preferences, for example, she found infant girls also had no more of a love of pink than boys did.
Those with the very lowest intelligence scores tend to be male. This is partly genetic. X-linked mental retardation, for instance, affects far more men than women.
relationship between the boy and footballs is strengthened as he sees how happy they make his mother, and also because the toy is already so familiar to him.
Hormonal effects on the brain or other deep-seated biological gaps aren’t necessarily the most powerful reason for the gaps we see between the sexes. Culture and upbringing could better explain why boys and girls grow up to seem different from each other.
females having a higher percent of gray matter and men having higher percent of white matter,”
men have more connections within the left and right halves of their brain, while women have more connections between the two of halves of their brain.
scientists were being pressured to do bad research, including using small samples of people or magnifying real effects, so they could appear to have sexy results.
People end up seeing only the tip of the iceberg—the studies that reinforce sex differences.
Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent. Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Hines and others have repeatedly demonstrated that boys and girls have little, if any, noticeable gaps between them when it comes to fine motor skills, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, and verbal fluency.
As the brain gets bigger, other areas have to get bigger too, in different proportions depending on what’s important to keep the brain functioning normally.
this analysis has shown that there’s also no difference in the size of the corpus callosum—the very region of white matter that Ruben Gur claims is on average bigger in women.
“Science doesn’t operate in a political vacuum.”
