While I do not think we necessarily need a biological argument to fight for women's advancement (i.e., cancer can be perceived as 'natural' and we fight it anyway), Inferior does advance the discourse surrounding gendered discrimination in science in meaningful ways. Overall, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to everyone, in particular to those interested in science, feminism, and the production of knowledge. She sheds light on new research that seeks to understand gender and sex from more nuanced, feminist, and holistic perspectives.

Saini discusses an array of ways in which this inaccurate idea of female inferiority came to popularity: research journals favoring studies that show differences over studies that show similarities, scientific findings that fail to take into account culture and patriarchy, sexism in research labs and universities, and more. She uses a thorough understanding of science and a fine eye for detail to reveal how many of these perceived sex differences were actually the product of biased researchers or flawed studies. With great diligence, Angela Saini combs through decades and decades of research that tried to show how women are worse than men in several areas, ranging from intelligence to aptitude for work to physical health. As Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science's failure to understand women, she finds that we're still living with the legacy of an establishment that's just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice.Ī powerful book that pierces through the notion that women are biologically inferior to men.

In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating-and necessary-new science of women, investigating the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delving into cutting-edge studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women's brains, bodies, and role in human evolution. But a huge wave of new research reveals that women are as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else. Men, on the other hand, continue to be regarded as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. Biologists claim women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic.

Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition, or behavior, science has continued to assert that men and women are fundamentally different. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists-most of them male, of course-claimed to find evidence to support this.

Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knewįor hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex.

Inferior by Angela Saini