Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knewFor hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. 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.Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition, or behavior, science has continued to assert that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be regarded as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of new research reveals that women are as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.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. 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.