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

by Angela Saini

in 2013, titled Do Babies Matter?: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, they found that married mothers of young children in the US were a third less likely to get tenure-track jobs than married fathers of young children. This isn’t a matter of women being less talented. Unmarried, childless women are 4 per cent more likely to get these jobs than unmarried, childless men.

‘Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content,’ they wrote. This didn’t reflect reality. Male grades were overestimated – by men – by 0.57 points on a four-point grade scale. Female students didn’t show the same gender bias.

The reason for gender imbalance in the sciences is at least partly that women face a web of pressures throughout their lives which men often don’t face.

If women were truly less capable of doing science than men, we wouldn’t see these variations – proving again that the story is more complicated than it appears.

‘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 and author of The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.

‘The sexism of science coincided with the professionalisation of science. Women increasingly had less and less access.’

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. The celibate male tradition of medieval monasteries continued at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge until the late nineteenth century.

She ends on a furious note: ‘Let the “environment” of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.’

Another example is Darwin’s cousin 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.

Women had been systematically suppressed over the course of human history by men and their power structures, Gamble argued. They weren’t naturally inferior; they just seemed that way because they hadn’t been allowed the chance to develop their talents.

Femaleness and maleness, femininity and masculinity, were turning into fluid descriptions, which might be shaped as much by nurture as by nature. This revolution in scientific notions of what it meant to be a woman came in time for the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, following the pioneering movement decades earlier that had earned women the vote.

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.

‘You go to hospitals in South Asia and there can be whole wards of kids with illnesses, and you will find 80 per cent of them are boys, because the girls aren’t being brought to the hospital,’

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 heavier.

Thus, in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, the mortality figures should be in favour of girls. The fact that they’re not even equal, but are skewed in favour of boys, means that girls’ natural power to survive is being forcibly degraded by the societies they are born into. ‘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.’

For more than a century, scientists have painstakingly studied our anatomy, even collected thousands of litres of horse urine in their attempts to isolate the chemicals that make men more masculine and women more feminine. Their search for sex differences has had no boundaries. But when it comes to why women might be more physically robust than men – why they are better survivors – research has been scarce. Even now, only scraps of work here and there point to answers.

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.

Research on influenza by Sabra Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has shown that while women are generally hit by fewer viruses during an infection, they tend to suffer more severe flu symptoms than men do.

It’s difficult to tear apart biology from other effects. Society and the environment can sometimes impact illness more than a person’s underlying biology. ‘Women are less likely to go to the hospital when they’re feeling chest pain than men,’ says Kathryn Sandberg, who has looked at gender differences in heart disease in particular.

Not only a woman’s own behaviour, but that of others around her, can affect her health. From the second a girl is born, she’s placed in a different box from a boy. She may be handled differently, fed differently and treated differently. And this marks the beginning of a lifetime of differences in the way doctors and medical researchers approach her as well.

John Guillebaud, told a reporter that period pain can be ‘almost as bad as having a heart attack’, and admitted that it hasn’t been given the attention it deserves, partly because men don’t suffer from it.

If there are underlying biological sex differences in health, and the differences aren’t largely down to society and culture, then scientists need to go deeper inside the body to find them.

In 2011 health researcher Annaliese Beery at the University of California, San Francisco, and biologist Irving Zucker at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study looking into sex biases in animal research in one sample year: 2009. 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.

Until around 1990, it was common for medical trials to be carried out almost exclusively on men. There were some good reasons for this. ‘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,’ says Arthur Arnold. The terrible legacy of women being given thalidomide for morning sickness in the 1950s proved to scientists how careful they need to be before giving drugs to expectant mothers. Thousands of children were born with disabilities before thalidomide was taken off the market.

A woman’s fluctuating hormone levels might also affect how she responds to a drug. 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.

It’s a slightly odd list. Peculiarly middle-class and English, for one thing. It’s also difficult not to notice that the male brain appears better suited to higher-paying, higher-status fields like computer programming or mathematics, while the female brain seems to fit best with lower-status jobs, such as a carer or helpline volunteer.

If Simon Baron-Cohen’s work is taken seriously, his ideas could have important consequences for the way society makes judgements about what men and women should be doing with their lives. ‘I think you end up having a theory that gives you permission to limit both boys and girls to certain kinds of behaviours or longer-term interests, eventually vocations,’ says Fausto-Sterling.

that science shouldn’t shy away from the truth, however uncomfortable it is. It’s a claim that runs all the way through work by people who claim to see sex differences. Objective research, they say, is objective research.

‘A lot of research findings never get replicated and are probably false.’

This difference in toy choices, however, is quite a leap from the theory that the brains of men and women are deeply, structurally different because of how much testosterone they’ve been exposed to. It’s also a considerable distance from Simon Baron-Cohen’s claim that there’s such a thing as a typical male brain and a typical female brain – one that likes mathematics, and another that prefers coffee mornings.

and differences between boys and girls. They concluded that the psychological gaps between women and men were far smaller than the gender differences that existed among women and among men in society. In 2010 Hines repeated this exercise, using more recent research. She found that only the tiniest gaps, if any, existed between boys’ and girls’ fine motor skills, ability to perform mental rotations, spatial visualisation, mathematical ability, verbal fluency and vocabulary.

‘It’s quite rare to find differences in typical development.’ The overlap between the sexes is so huge, she explains, that scientists have struggled to find and replicate results that suggest that there is any real gap at all. ‘For the time being, the baby science is not convincingly showing any consistent differences.’

Beyond gender identity and toy preference, on pretty much every other behavioural and cognitive measure that scientists have investigated (in a field that has left few stones unturned in its quest for evidence), girls and boys overlap hugely.

At the same time, the authors pointed out that the biggest effect is seen at the bottom end of the scale. 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.

They found that in those disciplines in which people thought you did need to have an innate gift or talent to succeed, there were fewer female PhDs. The subjects for which hard work was more highly valued tended to have more women.

I don’t think it’s much of a scientific explanation when you make such a big leap … We do see the differences, and I don’t disagree with that finding. What I disagree with is leaping to the idea that this means it is something innate or inborn. I do think that if you just jump to the prenatal … you miss a whole developmental window when something very important and very social is going on.’

Instead of the binary categories we have now, Fausto-Sterling believes that every individual should be thought of as a developmental system – a unique and ever-changing product of upbringing, culture, history and experience, as well as biology. Only in this way, she argues, can we truly get to the heart of why women and men across the world appear to be so different from each other, when studies of mathematical ability, intelligence, motor skills and almost every other measure consistently tell us they’re not.

Gardener’s point was made. Today it’s well established that brain size is related to body size. Paul Matthews, the head of brain sciences at Imperial College London, tells me, ‘If you correct for skull size, there are very tiny differences between the two sexes, but their brains are much more similar than they are different.’ The missing five ounces are accounted for.

‘It has been claimed and demonstrated that many (and possibly most) of the conclusions drawn from biomedical research are probably false,’

The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she says. But they’re not the ones that get published. ‘I describe this as an iceberg. You get the bit above the water, which is the smallest but most visible part, because it’s easy to get studies published in this area. But then there’s this huge amount under the water where people haven’t found any differences.’

‘Challenging the notion of universal male advantage in mathematics, sex differences in average mathematics test performance are not found in many nations and are even reversed (female advantage) in a few,’ Miller and Halpern observe. What looks like a biological difference in one particular place and time, can turn out to be a cultural difference after all.

‘Every brain is different from every other brain,’ Gina Rippon explains. ‘We should take more of a fingerprint type of approach. So there is some kind of individual characteristic of the brain, which is true of the life experiences of that person. That’s going to be much more interesting than trying to put them all together, trying to squeeze them into some kind of category.’

‘If you take any two brains, they are different, but how they differ between any two individuals, you cannot predict,’ she explains. By this logic, there can’t be any such thing as an average male or an average female brain. We are all, each one of us, a mix. Our brains are intersex.

they make many assumptions, and the first is that there are two populations of brains, male and female. This is an assumption that needs to be shown scientifically, or proven. They say: “This is solid ground, and from here I continue.” I question the solid ground.’

‘I was writing about how male baboons were the basis of social organisation. Males compete with males, and then the dominant males form alliances with each other so as to improve their access to females. And then I would make these very oblique parallels to what went on in American universities,’ she remembers. ‘I was, of course, referring to male professors who, when called out for sleeping with academic subordinates, would back one another up. All through my career, these things were going on.’

‘A theory that leaves out half of the human species is unbalanced,’ she declared. ‘While this reconstruction is certainly ingenious, it gives one the decided impression that only half the species – the male half – did any evolving.’

His fieldwork had shown that, while often not hunters of big animals, women were responsible for getting hold of every other kind of food, including plants, roots and tubers, as well as small animals and fish. Men were the hunters, but women were the gatherers. Gathering was arguably a more important source of calories than hunting.

As well as feeding their families, women were often also responsible for cooking, setting up shelter and helping with hunts. And they did all this at the same time as being pregnant and raising children.

childcare may have been one of the major factors in driving up human intelligence.

In half of all the hunting trips she observed, men and women hunted together. If there were differences, they were in the ways women tended to hunt. For instance, a woman never went alone, so as to avoid the risk of people suspecting that she was having a secret tryst with a lover. Women hunters were also more likely to use dogs to help with the kill.