Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It

by Angela Saini

the traditional stereotype of the breadwinning father and the stay-at-home mother really part of our biological make-up, as Darwin assumed, or is it an elaborate social construction that’s unique to humans? Studies into sex differences are as powerful as they are controversial. In the same way that research on hormones challenged popular wisdom about masculinity and femininity in the twentieth century, science is now forcing us to question all aspects of ourselves.

In a world in which so many women continue to suffer sexism, inequality and violence, they can transform the way we see each other. With good research and reliable data – with real facts – the strong can become weak, and the weak strong.

The Gerontology Research Group in the United States keeps a list online of all the people in the world that it has 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.

This problem runs all the way through research into women’s health. If a phenomenon affects women, and only women, it’s all too often misunderstood. And this is compounded by the fact that even though they’re better at surviving, women aren’t healthier than men. In fact, quite the opposite.

Of the ten scientific fields they investigated, eight showed a male bias. In pharmacology, the study of medical drugs, the articles reporting only on males outnumbered those reporting only on females by five to one. In physiology, which explores how our bodies work, it was almost four to one.

Men’s hormone levels are more consistent. ‘It’s 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. In some disciplines it really is an embarrassing male bias.’

Since the start of 2016 the law in the USA has been broadened to include females in vertebrate animal and tissue experiments. The European Union now also requires the researchers it funds to consider gender as part of their work.

Even he, the father of evolutionary biology, was so affected by a culture of sexism that he believed women to be the inferior sex. It’s taken more than a century for researchers to overturn these old ideas and rewrite this flawed tale.

This isn’t something that’s only true of modern parents in big cities, but everywhere across the world. It really does take a village to raise a child.

This is anthropologist 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. This may seem utterly unnatural. After all, we assume that the maternal instinct is as strong and immediate in humans as it is in any other creature. It’s considered a fundamental part of being a woman. So much so that those who don’t want children or reject their own are often considered odd, or even evil. 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.

But it also has the power to release women from the guilt they may feel when they’re unable to cope alone. 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 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 childcare for mothers, especially those who don’t have support at home.

The key to making this possible was cooperative breeding. Agta women would take nursing infants with them on the hunt, and leave older children in the care of other family members.

In a 2013 paper published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, ‘Choosy But Not Chaste: Multiple Mating in Human Females’, Scelza lists a few other places in which women have more than one partner. The Mosuo of China, one of the few societies in the world in which women head households and property is passed down the female line, practise what is known as ‘walking marriage’. This allows a woman to have as many sexual partners as she likes. The lover of her choice simply comes to her room at night and leaves the next morning. What sets the Mosuo apart is that men traditionally don’t provide much economic or social support to their children.

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

Historian Amanda Foreman has described how footbinding became a symbol of chastity and devotion in a society that prized obedience to men, centred around the teachings of Confucius.

Today, in Cameroon and some parts of West Africa, girls aged between eight and twelve suffer a procedure, often at the hands of their mothers, known as breast ‘ironing’.

Women in traditional Dogon communities in Mali use ‘menstrual huts’ to seclude themselves during their periods.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that it is this systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia that really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female.

One more difference is hunting. Female bonobos are usually the ones that hunt for meat, often forest antelope, Parish tells me. ‘They flush the young ones out amongst the tall grass, while the mums are off feeding, and they eat them.

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.

With the dawn of endocrinology in the early twentieth century, scientists had finally got a grip on what was actually happening during the menopause. The biological mechanism turned out to be quite simple. Every month or so, ball-shaped pockets called follicles grow inside a woman’s ovaries. They release the eggs that are needed to make babies, and secrete oestrogen and progesterone. Girls are usually born with somewhere between one and two million follicles, although most of these are gone by the time they hit puberty. Over decades, all of the follicles eventually disappear, and it’s their loss that spells the start of the menopause. This means no more baby-making eggs, and also a drop in hormone levels.

In some parts of the world it was no longer seen as a normal, natural part of ageing. Within a few decades it became almost routine for women to take oestrogen pills or injections when they reached menopausal age.