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

by Angela Saini

The puzzle of why there are so few women in science is crucial to understanding why this bias exists. Not because it tells us something about what women are capable of, but because it explains why science has failed to rid us of the gender stereotypes and dangerous myths that we’ve been labouring under for centuries. Women are so grossly under-represented in modern science because, for most of history, they have been treated as intellectual inferiors and deliberately excluded from it.

‘The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.’ Prejudice is so steeped in the culture of science, their results suggested, that women are themselves discriminating against other women.

in 2014 the Bureau found that women spent about half an hour per day more than men doing household work. On an average day, a fifth of men did housework, compared with nearly half of women. In households with children under the age of six, men spent less than half as much time as women taking physical care of those children. At work, on the other hand, men spent fifty-two minutes a day longer on the job than women did.

‘For nearly three hundred years, the only permanent female presence at the Royal Society was a skeleton preserved in the society’s anatomical collection,’ writes Londa Schiebinger, professor of the history of science at Stanford University

‘From their beginnings European universities were, in principle, closed to women,’ writes Londa Schiebinger. They were designed to prepare men for careers in theology, law, government and medicine, which women were barred from entering. Doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system, harming her fertility. It was also thought that merely having women around might disrupt the serious intellectual work of men.

This doesn’t mean that female scientists didn’t exist. They did. Many even succeeded against the odds. But they were often treated as outsiders. The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless barred from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.

When the German mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, ‘What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?’

In 1944 the physicist Lise Meitner failed to win a Nobel Prize despite her vital contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission. Her life story is a lesson in persistence. At the time when she was growing up in Austria, girls weren’t educated beyond the age of fourteen. Meitner was privately tutored so she could pursue her passion for physics. When she finally secured a research position at the University of Berlin, she was given a small basement room and no salary. She wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs to the levels where the male scientists worked.

Rosalind Franklin’s enormous part in decoding the structure of DNA was all but ignored when James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize after her death in 1962. And as recently as 1974 the Nobel for the discovery of pulsars wasn’t given to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who actually made the breakthrough, but to her male supervisor.

The study you read about in the newspaper telling you that men are better at reading maps or parking than women, for example, may be entirely contradicted by another study on a different population, in which women happen to be better map-readers or parkers. The beautiful brain scan is not the photograph of our thoughts that it claims to be. And in some branches of science, such as evolutionary psychology, theories may be little more than thin scraps of unreliable evidence strung into a narrative.

Fresh theories on sex difference, for example, suggest that the small gaps that have been found between the brains of women and men are merely statistical products of the fact that we are all unique.

Research into our evolutionary past shows that male domination and patriarchy are not biologically hardwired into human society, as some have claimed, but that we were once an egalitarian species. Even the age-old myth about women being less promiscuous than men is being shown the door. Here too, society plays a greater role in our behaviour than does our biology.

‘Where are all the women scientists? Where are the women Nobel Prize-winners?’ he asked, sneering. ‘Women just aren’t as good at science as men are. They’ve been shown to be less intelligent.’ He pressed up so close to my face that I was backed into a corner. What was a sexist rant rapidly became racist, too. I tried to argue back. I listed the accomplished female scientists I knew. I hastily marshalled a few statistics about school-age girls being better at mathematics than boys. But in the end I gave up. There was nothing I could say that would make him think of me as his equal. How many of us haven’t known someone like him?

For women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds, they would have to become breadwinners like men. And this wouldn’t be a good idea, because it might damage young children and the happiness of households. Darwin is telling Mrs Kennard that not only are women intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes. It’s a rejection of everything Kennard and the women’s movement at the time were fighting for.

‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,’ Darwin explains in The Descent of Man.

‘It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.’ It’s only a stroke of biological luck, he implies, that has stopped women from being even more inferior to men than they are.

The difference between men and women wasn’t the amount of work they did, but the kind of work they were allowed to do. In the nineteenth century, women were barred from most professions, as well as from politics and higher education.

an ideal illustrated in a popular verse of the time, The Angel in the House, by the English poet Coventry Patmore: ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please/is woman’s pleasure.’ Many thought that women were naturally unsuited to careers in the professions. They didn’t need to have public lives. They didn’t need the vote. When these prejudices met evolutionary biology the result was a particularly toxic mix, which would poison scientific research for decades.

‘From her abiding sense of weakness and consequent dependence, there also arises in woman that deeply-rooted desire to please the opposite sex which, beginning in the terror of a slave, has ended in the devotion of a wife.’

Francis Galton, remembered by history as the father of eugenics, and for his devotion to measuring the physical differences between people. Among his quirkier projects was a ‘beauty map’ of Britain, produced around the end of the nineteenth century by secretly watching women in various regions and grading them from the ugliest to the most attractive. Brandishing their rulers and microscopes, men like Galton hardened sexism into something that couldn’t be challenged. By gauging and standardising they coated what might otherwise have been seen as ridiculous enterprises with the appearance of scientific respectability.

They were fighting for their fundamental rights. They weren’t even recognised as full citizens. It wasn’t until 1882 that married women in the United Kingdom were allowed to own and control property in their own right. And in 1887 only two-thirds of US states allowed a married woman to keep her own earnings.

American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the feminist short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, turned Darwinism around to put the case for reform. She thought that half the human race had been kept at a lower stage of evolution by the other half. With equality, women would finally have the chance to prove themselves equal to men. She was ahead of her time in many ways, arguing against a stereotyped division of toys for boys and girls, and foreseeing how a growing army of working women might change society in the future.

Evolution was an alternative to religious stories that painted woman as merely man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behaviour and virtue were challenged. ‘Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen … and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.’

Albert Wolfe saw the danger in scientists overstepping their expertise. ‘It is a fine illustration of the sort of mental pathology a scientist, especially a biologist, can exhibit when, with slight acquaintance with other fields than his own, he ventures to dictate from “natural law” (with which Mr Heape claims to be in most intimate acquaintance) what social and ethical relation shall

In the very early days of endocrinology, assumptions about what it meant to be masculine or feminine came from the Victorians. With the discovery of hormones, scientists had a new way to explain the stereotypes.

It took a while for scientists to accept the truth: that all these hormones really did work together in both sexes, in synergy.

The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead started writing at around the same time about masculine and feminine personalities, and how culture rather than biology might be influencing which ones people had. Studying Samoan communities in 1949, she wrote, ‘The Samoan boy is not over pressured into displays of manhood, and the girl who is ambitious and managing has plenty of outlets in the bustling, organised life of the women’s groups.’ The Mundugumor tribe of Papua New Guinea, she also noticed, created women with more of a typically male temperament.

The balance between nature and nurture is starting to be a little better understood. In academic circles at least, gender and sex are now recognised as two different things. Sex is something scientifically distinct for most people. It’s defined by a 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. It’s defined by what the world tells us is masculine or feminine, and this makes it potentially fluid. There are many for whom their biological sex and their gender aren’t the same.

The effects that society can have on gender differences are profound, and include the taking of life itself. What makes the mortality figures even more shocking is that, contrary to assumptions about women being the weaker sex, a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy. She’s naturally better built to live. As scientists explore the female body in fuller detail, they are learning just how powerful a girl’s survival edge is – even in a world that doesn’t always want her.

‘Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men,’ confirms Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who is an international expert on ageing. He describes women as being more ‘robust’. It’s a phenomenon so clear and undeniable that some scientists believe understanding it may hold the key to human longevity.

in the United States in 2010, women died at lower rates than men from twelve of the fifteen most common causes of death, including cancer and heart disease, when adjusted for age. Of the three exceptions, their likelihood of dying from Parkinson’s or stroke was about the same. And they were more likely than men to die of Alzheimer’s Disease. When it comes to fighting off infections from viruses and bacteria, women also seem to be tougher. ‘If there’s a really bad infection, they survive better.

One explanation for this gap is that higher levels of oestrogen and progesterone in women might be protecting them in some way. These hormones don’t just make the immune system stronger, but also more flexible, according to Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, a researcher at the Institute of Gender in Medicine at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. ‘This is related to the fact that women can bear children,’ she explains. A pregnancy is the same as foreign tissue growing inside a woman’s body that, if her immune system was in the wrong gear, would be rejected.

Researchers know that a certain type of T cell that’s crucial to managing the body’s response to infections becomes more active in the second half of a woman’s menstrual cycle, when she’s able to get pregnant.

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.

‘It’s kind of a double-edged sword with the immune system. 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.’

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 of her X chromosomes, one from each parent.

There are some well-known genetic traits to which men are more susceptible than women simply because they have one X chromosome. These X-linked disorders include red-green colour blindness, haemophilia, muscular dystrophy and IPEX syndrome, which affects immune function. Mental retardation, which affects 2 to 3 per cent of people in developed countries, and significantly more men than women, also has a strong link to the X chromosome.

Richardson warns against this focus on genetics as an umbrella explanation for sex difference because of how it blurs away the effects of society and culture, as well as other biological factors. Age, weight and race, for example, are known to have a huge impact on health. Hormones are important too.

‘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.’

‘It’s certainly a real possibility that the reason there are more adverse events in women than in men is because the whole process of drug discovery is tremendously biased towards the male,’ agrees Kathryn Sandberg.

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 most ways.

Again though, just as with digoxin, the finding needed to be unpicked a little further. In 2014, additional research exploring the effects of zolpidem, carried out by scientists at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, suggested that its lingering effect in women may be mostly down to the fact that they have a lower average body weight than men,

Once we start to assume that women have fundamentally different bodies from men, this quickly raises the question of how far the gaps stretch. Do sex chromosomes affect not just our health, but all aspects of our bodies and minds, for example? If every cell is affected by sex, does that include brain cells? Do oestrogen and progesterone not just prepare a women for pregnancy and boost her immunity, but also creep into her skull, affecting how she thinks and behaves? And does this mean that gender stereotypes, such as baby girls preferring dolls and the colour pink, are in fact rooted in biology?

American psychologist Diane Ruble and gender development expert Carol Lynn Martin have explained how, by the age of five, children already have in their heads a constellation of gender stereotypes. They describe one experiment in which children were shown pictures of people doing things like sewing and cooking. When a picture contradicted a traditional stereotype, the children were more likely to remember it incorrectly.

‘I don’t think that studying adults tells us anything about sex differences. It tells us something about the lives those people lived. It’s more about their experiences than about the biology of it,’ explains Teodora Gliga.

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 from women’s by testosterone. This is the very research that Simon Baron-Cohen called upon in developing his own theory about empathising female brains and systemising male brains.

According to McManus, the Geschwind–Behan–Galaburda theory simply tried to do too much. At the time, it became a grand theory of how the brain was organised, drawing big connections between things that weren’t necessarily connected, and between which the connections hadn’t been proven.

But that doesn’t mean it was utter hokum. Since the 1980s, detailed research on animals, using new techniques, does seem to suggest that sex hormones impact the brains of foetuses as they develop, leading to small differences in certain behaviours later on. It’s a phenomenon that now has enough evidence behind it for neuroscientists and psychologists to feel they cannot ignore it, even if it runs counter to their instincts.

Michael was born a man, but a rare genetic condition known as five-alpha-reductase deficiency meant that, at birth, his body didn’t reflect this. While he is a regular XY chromosome male, he lacks the enzyme that converts testosterone into a chemical that’s crucial to developing the sex organs before birth.

At the time Michael was born, experts believed that gender was so heavily shaped by society that this was a perfectly reasonable choice to make. If he were treated like a girl, he might feel like one. Some children in similar situations have adapted to their new gender identities. But for many, including Michael, decisions like this have led to personal tragedy.