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Title details for Inferior by Angela Saini - Available

Inferior

How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini
Hannah Melbourn
Audiobook
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What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew
For 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 tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.
In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating—and sorely necessary—new science of women. 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. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous, or that the way men’s and women’s brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes.
As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women’s bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women’s brains, bodies, and role in human evolution.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 30, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780807090473
      • File size: 216723 KB
      • Duration: 07:31:30

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In this hugely important book, Angela Saini debunks scientific studies that determined that women are intellectually and physically inferior to men. Topics include comparative brain size, medical trials, the ability to feel empathy, promiscuity, and why women are sicker than men but more likely to survive illnesses and live longer. Hannah Melbourn's narration is appealingly British and a perfect match for this material. She has a lovely accent, a conversational style that maintains the listener's attention even during deep dives into detailed research, and a wry sense of understatement that quietly draws attention to historical absurdities. Stereotypes are more complicated and insidious--a 2012 study showed that male and female scientists evaluating identical resumes except for the name on the top were equally likely to judge female candidates as less qualified and less deserving of higher salaries. A.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Booklist

      May 15, 2017
      Prepare to be enraged. Journalist Saini dives deeply into gender science to find out why it has always been assumed that women were the weaker, thus the inferior, sex. In this deceptively slim yet exhaustively researched book, she wastes little time on talking tough, instead speaking on the record with male and female scientists, perusing correspondence, describing research, and relating the findings in dozens of historical reports on the female sex dating back to Darwin. Alternately bemused and appalled, Saini hangs in there while discussing how analysis from a study of newborn babies supported the idea that females were more empathetic and males more mechanically minded, how the smaller size of female brains (by five ounces) meant for decades that they were, of course, less intelligent, and how assertions about superior male hunting skills diminished the role of women in the history of human survival. In admirably subtle prose, Saini questions, considers, and refuses to accept traditional generalizations. A brilliant approach to a long overlooked topic, Inferior is impossible to ignore and invaluable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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