Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story

212 Pages·2017·1.11 MB·English

by  Angela Saini

For my boys,
Mukul and Aneurin
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Woman’s Inferiority to Man
CHAPTER 2 Females Get Sicker but Males Die Quicker
CHAPTER 3 A Difference at Birth
CHAPTER 4 The Missing Five Ounces of the Female Brain
CHAPTER 5 Women’s Work
CHAPTER 6 Choosy, Not Chaste
CHAPTER 7 Why Men Dominate
CHAPTER 8 The Old Women Who Wouldn’t Die
Afterword
Acknowledgments
References
Index
INTRODUCTION
For centuries, scientists have influenced decision makers on important issues
including abortion rights, granting women the vote, and how schools educate us.
They have shaped how we think about our minds and bodies and our
relationships with each other. And of course, we trust scientists to give us the
objective facts. We believe that what science offers us is a story free from
prejudice. It is the story of us, starting from the very dawn of evolution.
Yet when it comes to women, so much of this story is wrong.
I was watching a homemade rocket zoom high into the sky. It was a sunny
Saturday afternoon and I must have been about sixteen years old, on the playing
field of my school in southeast London. Fresh from the nerdy triumph of having
been elected chair of the school’s first science society, I’d organized a day
building small model rockets before shooting them into the air. I couldn’t think
of anything better. The night before, I desperately calculated whether we even
had enough construction materials for the crowds that were sure to come.
I shouldn’t have worried. On the day, I was the only one who turned up. My
chemistry teacher Mr. Easterbrook, a kind man, stayed and helped anyway.
If you were the geek growing up, you’ll recognize how lonely it can be. If you
were the female geek, you’ll know it’s far lonelier. By the time I reached my
final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students.
I was the only girl in my mathematics class of about a dozen. And when I
decided to study engineering at university, I found myself the only woman in a
class of nine.
Things haven’t changed much since then. Statistics collected by the Women’s
Engineering Society in 2016 show that only 9 percent of the engineering
workforce in the United Kingdom is female and just over 15 percent of
engineering undergraduates are women. Figures from WISE, a campaign in the
United Kingdom to promote women in science, engineering, and technology,
reveal that in 2015 women made up a little more than 14 percent of their
workplaces overall. The picture is similar in the United States: according to the
National Science Foundation, although women make up nearly half the scientific
workforce, they’re underrepresented in engineering, physics, and mathematics.
Standing on that playing field by myself at age sixteen, I couldn’t figure it out.
I belonged to a household of three sisters, all brilliant at math. Girls stood among
boys as the highest achievers at my school. According to the Women’s
Engineering Society, there’s little gender difference in enrollment and
achievement in the core science and math subjects at secondary level in UK
schools. In fact, girls are now more likely than boys to get the highest grades in
these subjects. In the United States, women have earned around half of all
undergraduate science and engineering degrees since as far back as the late
1990s.
Yet, as they grow older, fewer women seem to stick with science. At the top,
they’re in an obvious minority. And this is a pattern that runs as far back as
anyone can remember. Between 1901 and 2015, 822 men were awarded a Nobel
Prize and only forty-eight women. Of these, sixteen women won the Peace Prize
and fourteen won the Prize for Literature. The Fields medal, the world’s greatest
honor in mathematics, has been won by a woman only once, in 2014 by the
Iranian-born mathematician 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,” that a biological difference exists between women and men. A few
academics defended him but, by and large, Summers was 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 the
same? 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. It’s 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 live in the balance of that question, feeding our babies
fantasies in pink and blue with the assumption they are deeply different. We buy
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 are
monogamous. Even our visions of the past are loaded with these myths. When
we picture early humans, we imagine powerful men wandering 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.
Only science has the power to resolve this 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 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 the notion that our biology should determine how we
live. Many believe that what science says shouldn’t make a dent in the battle for
basic rights. We deserve an equal playing field, they say, and they’re right. But
whether or not it sits easily with us, we can’t ignore biology either. If biological
differences exist, we can’t help but want to know. More than that, if we want to
build a fairer society, we need to be able to understand these gaps 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 the sciences is crucial to
understanding why, 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 we’ve been laboring under for centuries.
Women are so grossly underrepresented in modern science because, for most
of history, they were treated as intellectual inferiors and deliberately excluded
from it. It should come as no surprise, then, that this same scientific
establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex. This, in turn
again, has skewed how science looks and what it says even now.
When I stood on my own on that playing field as a girl, 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. It was a beacon of rationality free from
bias. What I didn’t yet understand was that I found myself alone because it’s not.
If you want to know what science tells us about the female of our species, there’s
no better place to begin than by understanding the experiences of women
working in science today. 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, female researchers
were 32 percent of the population. In Ethiopia, the proportion of female
researchers was only 13 percent.
The common trend is for women to be around in high numbers at the
undergraduate level but to thin out as they move up the ranks. This is best
explained by the perennial problem of child care, which lifts women out of their
jobs at precisely the moment their male colleagues are putting in more hours and
being promoted. When 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 United States were a third less likely to receive tenure-
track jobs than married fathers of young children. This isn’t a matter of women
being less talented. Unmarried, childless women are 4 percent more likely to get
these jobs than unmarried, childless men.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs an annual Time Use Survey to pick
apart how people spend their hours. Women now make up almost half the labor
force, yet in 2014 the bureau found that women spent about half an hour more
every day 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 these 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. When decisions
are made over who should take maternity or paternity leave, it’s also 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 United States estimates that in 2015 women 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, according to the
Office for National Statistics, a gender pay gap of more than 18 percent still
exists, although it’s falling. In the scientific and technical activities sector this
gap is as big as 24 percent.
Housework and motherhood aren’t the only things affecting gender balance.
There’s outright sexism, too. In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne
Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the
possibility of gender bias in recruitment by sending out fake job applications for
a vacancy of laboratory manager. Every application was identical except that
half were given a female name and half a male name. When they were asked to
comment on these potential employees, scientists rated women significantly
lower in competence and hireability. They were also less willing to mentor them
and offered far lower starting salaries. The only difference, of course, was that
these applicants appeared to be female.
Interestingly, the authors wrote 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.” Gender bias is so
steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves
discriminating against other women.
Another study, 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 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 year before, PLOS ONE had been forced to apologize after one of its own
peer reviewers suggested that two female evolutionary geneticists who had
authored a paper should add one or two male coauthors. The paper itself was
about gender differences among doctorates. “Perhaps it is not so surprising that
on average male doctoral students coauthor one more paper than female doctoral
students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit
faster than female doctoral students,” wrote the reviewer.
Another problem in parts of the sciences, the extent of which is only now
being laid bare, is sexual harassment. In 2015 virus researcher Michael Katze
was banned from entering the laboratory he headed at the University of
Washington following a string of serious complaints, which included the sexual
harassment of at least two employees. BuzzFeed News (which Katze tried to sue
to block the release of documents) ran a lengthy account of the subsequent
investigation, revealing that he had hired one employee “on the implicit
condition that she submit to his sexual demands.”
His case wasn’t an exception. In 2016 California Institute of Technology
suspended a professor of theoretical astrophysics, Christian Ott, for also sexually
harassing students. The same year two female students at the University of
California, Berkeley, filed a legal complaint against assistant professor Blake
Wentworth, who they claimed had sexually harassed them repeatedly, including
inappropriate touching. This was not long after a prominent astronomer at the
same university, Geoff Marcy, was found guilty of sexually harassing women
over many years.
So here, in all the statistics on housework, pregnancy, child care, gender bias,
and harassment, we have some explanations for why so few women are at the
top in science and engineering. Rather than falling into Lawrence Summers’s
tantalizing trap of assuming the world looks this way because it’s the natural
order of things, take a step back. Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly
because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often
don’t face.
As bleak as the picture is in some places and some fields, the statistics also
reveal exceptions. In certain subjects, women tend to outnumber men both at the
university level and in the workplace. There are usually more women than men
studying the life sciences and psychology. And in some regions, women are
much better represented in science overall, showing that culture is also at play.
In Bolivia, women account for 63 percent of all scientific researchers. In central
Asia they are almost half. In India, where my family originate from (my dad
studied engineering there), women make up a third of all students in engineering
courses. Iran, similarly, has high proportions of female scientists and engineers.
Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman to have won the
prestigious Fields medal, was born in Tehran. If women were less capable of
doing science than men, we wouldn’t see these variations, proving again that the
story is more complicated than it appears.
And like all stories, it also helps to go back to the start.
Since its very earliest days, science has treated women as the intellectual
inferiors of men. You would see it if you were to travel back to when the major
academies of science were first created in Europe, according to Londa
Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University and
author of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these academies were founded as forums
for scientists, who usually worked independently, to come together and share
ideas. Later, they bestowed honors, including membership. These days they also
offer governments advice on science policy. Yet these prestigious institutions, so
crucial to the growth of modern science, excluded women as a matter of course.
The Royal Society of London, officially founded in 1663 and one of the oldest
scientific institutions still around today, failed to elect any women to full