Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story. Angela Saini
the world’s greatest honour in mathematics, has been won by a woman only once, in 2014 by the Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani.
A couple of years after I graduated from university, in January 2005, the president of Harvard University, economist Lawrence Summers, gave voice to one controversial explanation for this gap. At a private conference he suggested that ‘the unfortunate truth’ behind why there are so few top women scientists at elite universities might in some part have to do with ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude’. In other words, that there’s a biological difference between women and men. A few academics defended him, but by and large Summers’ remarks were met by public outrage. Within a year he announced his resignation as president.
But there have always been gently whispered doubts.
Summers may have dared to say it, but how many people haven’t thought it? That there might be an innate, essential difference between the sexes that sets us apart. That the female brain is fundamentally distinct from the male brain, explaining why we see so few women in the top jobs in science. That hushed uncertainty is what lies at the heart of this book. The question mark hanging over us, raising the possibility that women are destined never to achieve parity with men because their bodies and minds simply aren’t capable of it.
Even today, we feed our babies fantasies in pink or blue. We buy toy trucks for our boys and dolls for our girls, and delight when they love them. These early divisions reflect our belief that there’s a string of biological differences between the sexes, which perhaps shape us for different roles in society. Our relationships are guided by the notion, fed by many decades of scientific research, that men are more promiscuous and women more monogamous. Our visions of the past are loaded with these myths. When we picture early humans, we imagine powerful men striding out into the wilderness to hunt for food, while softer, gentler women stay back, tending fires and caring for children. We go so far as to wonder whether men may be the naturally dominant sex because they’re physically bigger and stronger.
In the journey to understand ourselves better and to distil facts from fiction, we of course turn to biology. It is science, we believe, that holds the power to resolve the dark, niggling feeling that never seems to go away, no matter how much equality legislation is passed. The feeling that we aren’t the same. That, in fact, our biology might even explain the sexual inequality that has existed, and continues to exist, across the world.
This is dangerous territory, for obvious reasons. Feminists in particular have passionately argued against having our biology determine how we live. Many believe that what science says shouldn’t be a factor in the battle for basic rights. Everyone deserves a level playing field, they say – and they’re right. But then, we can’t simply ignore biology either. If there are differences between the sexes, we can’t help but want to know. But more than that, if we want to build a fairer society, we need to be able to understand those differences and accommodate them.
The problem is that answers in science aren’t everything they seem. When we turn to scientists for resolution, we assume they will be neutral. We think the scientific method can’t be biased or loaded against women. But we’re wrong. 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. It should come as no surprise, then, that the scientific establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex. This, in turn, has skewed how science looks and what it says even now.
When I stood on my own on that playing field, aged sixteen, shooting rockets into the air, I was in love with science. I thought it was a world of clear answers, untainted by subjectivity or prejudice. A beacon of rationality free from bias. What I didn’t yet understand was that the reason I found myself alone that day was because it’s not.
In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the problem of bias in science by conducting a study in which over a hundred scientists were asked to assess a résumé submitted by an applicant for a vacancy as a laboratory manager. Every résumé was identical, except that half were given under a female name and half under a male name.
When they were asked to comment on these supposed potential employees, scientists rated those with female names significantly lower in competence and hireability. They were also less willing to mentor them, and offered far lower starting salaries. Interestingly, the authors added in their paper, which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: ‘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.
Sexism isn’t something that’s only perpetrated by men against women. It can be woven into the fabric of a system. And in modern science, that system has always been male. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which keeps global figures on women in science, estimates that in 2013 just a little more than a quarter of all researchers in the world were women. In North America and Western Europe the figure was 32 per cent. In Ethiopia, only 13 per cent.
Usually, women are present in high numbers at the undergraduate level, but thin out as they move up the ranks. This is explained, at least in part, by the perennial problem of childcare, which lifts women out of their jobs at precisely the moment that their male colleagues are putting in more hours and being promoted. When American researchers Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas Wolfinger and Marc Goulden published a book on this subject 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.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States runs an annual Time Use Survey to pick apart how people spend the hours of their day. Women now make up almost half the American labour force, yet 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.
These discrepancies partly explain why workplaces look the way they do. A man who’s able to commit more time to the office or laboratory is naturally more likely to do better in his career than a woman who can’t. And when decisions are made over who should take maternity or paternity leave, it’s almost always mothers who take time out.
Small individual choices, multiplied over millions of households, can have an enormous impact on how society looks. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the US estimates that in 2015 a woman working full-time earned only seventy-nine cents for every dollar that a man earned. In the United Kingdom the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. But today, although it’s falling, according to the Office for National Statistics a gender pay gap of more than 18 per cent still exists. In the scientific and technical activities sector this gap is as big as 24 per cent. Data analysed by Times Higher Education in 2016 showed that women in British universities on full-time academic contracts earned around 11 per cent less than their male counterparts.
Housework and motherhood aren’t the only things affecting gender balance. There’s also outright sexism. A paper published in 2016 in the world’s largest scientific journal, PLOS ONE, looked at how male biology students rated their female counterparts. Cultural anthropologist Dan Grunspan, biologist Sarah Eddy and their colleagues asked hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Washington what they thought about how well others in their class were performing. ‘Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being