Debunking the Myths: Inferior

Inferior by Angela Saini

4th Estate

Pp. 237

Angela Saini contends that the so-called science which has labelled women as ‘the weaker sex’ is biased and influenced by politics, history, and social culture. Sick of people (men) telling her that women are inferior to men based on dubious scientific data, she wrote this book in an attempt, “not to lose control but to have at hand some hard facts and a history to explain them”. She challenges myths and provides explanations as to why some assumptions were made in the first place. Even though science is perceived to be neutral, women have historically been excluded from research, experiments, and theories. “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.”

Darwin in his The Descent of Man believed that women were inferior because he couldn’t see any women doing the same intellectual things. “The evidence appeared to be all around him. Leading writers, artists and scientists were almost all men. He assumed that this inequality reflected a biological fact.” In evolutionary terms, drawing assumptions about women’s abilities from the way they happened to be treated by society at the moment is narrow-minded and dangerous.

Those ‘Men are from Mars; Women from Venus’ type ‘theories’ remain popular because anything that claims to explore sex differences is highly sought-after by media outlets looking for clickbait articles. People who counter that differences are not wholly due to genetics are often labelled sex difference deniers, in a way that would never be introduced in debates about race or colour; not since the 1950s, anyway. Sexual selection theories which were proven to be incorrect and unscientific, however, are making a popular comeback.

People are messy and come with preconceptions and prejudices. Saini argues that it is impossible not to politicise scientific data and that neuroscience has profound repercussions for how people see themselves. Humans are bound to pick up attitudes and adopt behaviours based on societal expectations rather than independent biological factors or sex chromosomes. We are also able to change and adapt as recent research into neuroplasticity confirms that the brain isn’t set in stone in childhood but is in fact mouldable throughout life.

Saini also debunks several myths, such as the one that women are better at multi-tasking than men. The paper that was published on this subject, actually never reported this claim, but the cultural and gender stereotypes were stressed in the press release. A further belief is that in previous cultures men went hunting while women gathered, making the males dominant. Research by Bion Griffin and Agnes Estioko-Griffin into the Nanadukan Agta refutes this assumption, suggesting that males did some tasks and females did others. “By and large people did whatever they wanted to do. There was no sphere of work that was exclusively male or female – except perhaps the killing of other people.  Women would stay back when groups of men went out on raids of their enemies”.

Hunting was not the primary source of nutrition anyway, so the group that hunted did not have the most crucial task. While studying the !Kung hunter-gatherers in southern Africa in 1979, Richard Borshay Lee noted that women’s gathering provided as much as two-thirds of food in the group’s diet, so gathering was arguably a more important source of calories than hunting. It is also likely that the first tools were digging sticks and containers for the food, which, being made from wood, skin or fibre, would break down and disappear over time leaving no record, unlike the hard-wearing stone tools that archaeologists have assumed were used for hunting. “This is one reason that women’s invention, and consequently women themselves, have been neglected by evolutionary researchers.” Many of these myths began because they fitted the dominant – male – narrative that positioned women as inferior.

Humans are not automatically the same as other animals, and much of our behaviour is more likely due to societal pressure than biological expression. Women are not inferior, and the science that seeks to suggest this is the case is inevitably flawed. It is time for this to be recognised and stopped. Sarah Hrdy argues, “A feminist is just someone who advocates for equal opportunities for both sexes. In other words, it’s being democratic. And we’re all feminists, or you should be ashamed not to be.” This is the science we should all follow.