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

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Angela Saini 2017

Cover photograph © Vanessa Serpas on Unsplash

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Source ISBN: 9780008172039

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008172046

Version: 2017-12-12

Dedication

For my boys, Mukul and Aneurin

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Woman’s Inferiority to Man

2 Females Get Sicker But Males Die Quicker

3 A Difference at Birth

4 The Missing Five Ounces of the Female Brain

5 Women’s Work

6 Choosy, Not Chaste

7 Why Men Dominate

8 The Old Women Who Wouldn’t Die

Afterword

Acknowledgements

References

Index

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

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 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 must have been about sixteen years old, on the playing field of my school in south-east London, watching a home-made rocket zoom into the sky. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. Fresh from the nerdy triumph of having been elected chair of the school’s first science society, I’d organised a day of building small model rockets before setting them off. I couldn’t think of anything better. The night before, I calculated whether we 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 recognise how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, you’ll know it’s far lonelier. By the time I reached sixth form, 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 a couple of years later, I found myself the only woman in a class of nine at university.

Things haven’t changed much since then. Statistics collected by the Women’s Engineering Society in 2016 show that only 9 per cent of the engineering workforce in the UK is female, and just over 15 per cent of engineering undergraduates are women. Figures from WISE, a campaign in the UK to promote women in science, engineering and technology, reveal that in 2015 women made up a little more than 14 per cent of their workforces overall. According to the National Science Foundation in the United States, although women make up nearly half the scientific workforce there, they remain under-represented in engineering, physics and mathematics.

Standing on that playing field by myself aged sixteen, I couldn’t figure it out. I belonged to a household of three sisters, all brilliant at maths. Girls stood alongside boys as the highest achievers at my school. According to the Women’s Engineering Society, there’s very little gender difference in take-up and achievement in the core science and maths subjects at GCSE level in British schools. Indeed, girls are now more likely than boys to get the highest grades in these subjects. In the USA, women have earned around half of all undergraduate science and engineering degrees since the late 1990s.

Yet as they get older, fewer women seem to stick with science. At the top, they’re in an obvious minority. And this is a pattern that goes as far back as anyone can remember. Between 1901 and 2016, of the 911 people awarded a Nobel Prize, only forty-eight were women. Of these, sixteen women won the Peace Prize, and fourteen the Prize for Literature. The Fields Medal, the world’s greatest honour in mathematics, has been won by a woman only once, in 2014 by the Iranian-born 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’. In other words, that there’s a biological difference between women and men. A few academics defended him, but by and large Summers’ remarks were 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 it? 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. 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 feed our babies fantasies in pink or blue. We buy toy 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 more monogamous. Our visions of the past are loaded with these myths. When we picture early humans, we imagine powerful men striding 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.

In the journey to understand ourselves better and to distil facts from fiction, we of course turn to biology. It is science, we believe, that holds the power to resolve the 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 even 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 having our biology determine how we live. Many believe that what science says shouldn’t be a factor in the battle for basic rights. Everyone deserves a level playing field, they say – and they’re right. But then, we can’t simply ignore biology either. If there are differences between the sexes, we can’t help but want to know. But more than that, if we want to build a fairer society, we need to be able to understand those differences 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 science is crucial to understanding why this bias exists. 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 that we’ve been labouring under for centuries. 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. It should come as no surprise, then, that the scientific establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex. This, in turn, has skewed how science looks and what it says even now.

When I stood on my own on that playing field, aged sixteen, 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. A beacon of rationality free from bias. What I didn’t yet understand was that the reason I found myself alone that day was because it’s not.

In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the problem of bias in science by conducting a study in which over a hundred scientists were asked to assess a résumé submitted by an applicant for a vacancy as a laboratory manager. Every résumé was identical, except that half were given under a female name and half under a male name.

When they were asked to comment on these supposed potential employees, scientists rated those with female names significantly lower in competence and hireability. They were also less willing to mentor them, and offered far lower starting salaries. Interestingly, the authors added 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.’ Prejudice is so steeped in the culture of science, their results suggested, that women are themselves discriminating against other women.

Sexism isn’t something that’s only perpetrated by men against women. It can be woven into the fabric of a system. And in modern science, that system has always been male. 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 the figure was 32 per cent. In Ethiopia, only 13 per cent.

Usually, women are present in high numbers at the undergraduate level, but thin out as they move up the ranks. This is explained, at least in part, by the perennial problem of childcare, which lifts women out of their jobs at precisely the moment that their male colleagues are putting in more hours and being promoted. When American 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 US were a third less likely to get tenure-track jobs than married fathers of young children. This isn’t a matter of women being less talented. Unmarried, childless women are 4 per cent more likely to get these jobs than unmarried, childless men.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States runs an annual Time Use Survey to pick apart how people spend the hours of their day. Women now make up almost half the American labour force, yet in 2014 the Bureau found that women spent about half an hour per day more 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 those 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. And when decisions are made over who should take maternity or paternity leave, it’s 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 US estimates that in 2015 a woman 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, although it’s falling, according to the Office for National Statistics a gender pay gap of more than 18 per cent still exists. In the scientific and technical activities sector this gap is as big as 24 per cent. Data analysed by Times Higher Education in 2016 showed that women in British universities on full-time academic contracts earned around 11 per cent less than their male counterparts.

Housework and motherhood aren’t the only things affecting gender balance. There’s also outright sexism. A paper 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 apologise after one of its own peer reviewers suggested that two female evolutionary geneticists who had authored a paper should add one or two male co-authors. ‘Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author 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, 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, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suspended a professor of theoretical astrophysics, Christian Ott, for 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, childcare, gender bias and harassment, we have some explanations for why there are so few women at the top in science and engineering. Rather than falling into Lawrence Summers’ tantalising trap of assuming the world looks this way because it’s the natural order of things, take a step back. The reason for gender imbalance in the sciences is at least partly that 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 outnumber men both at the university level and in the workplace. There tend to be more women than men studying the life sciences and psychology. And in some regions, women are much better represented in science overall, suggesting that culture is also at play. In Bolivia, women account for 63 per cent 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 on engineering courses. In Iran, similarly, there are high proportions of female scientists and engineers. If women were truly less capable of doing science than men, we wouldn’t see these variations – proving again that the story is more complicated than it appears.

As with all stories, it helps to go back to the start. Since its very earliest days, science has treated women as the intellectual inferiors of men.

‘For nearly three hundred years, the only permanent female presence at the Royal Society was a skeleton preserved in the society’s anatomical collection,’ writes Londa Schiebinger, professor of the history of science at Stanford University and author of The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660 and one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world, failed to elect a woman to full membership until 1945. It took until the middle of the twentieth century, too, for the prestigious scientific academies of Paris and Berlin to elect their first women members. These European academies were the birthplaces of modern science. Founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were forums for scientists to come together and share ideas. Later, they bestowed honours, including membership. These days they also offer governments advice on science policy. Yet for the vast majority of their history, they excluded women as a matter of course.

Things got worse before they got better. In the early days, when science was a pastime for enthusiastic amateurs, women had some access to it at least, even if only by marrying wealthy scientists and having the chance to work with them in their own laboratories. But by the end of the nineteenth century, science had transformed into something more serious, with its own set of rules and official bodies. Women then found themselves almost completely pushed out, says Miami University historian Kimberly Hamlin: ‘The sexism of science coincided with the professionalisation of science. Women increasingly had less and less access.’

This discrimination didn’t just happen high up in the scientific pecking order. It was unusual for women even to be allowed into universities or granted degrees until the twentieth century. ‘From their beginnings European universities were, in principle, closed to women,’ writes Londa Schiebinger. They were designed to prepare men for careers in theology, law, government and medicine, which women were barred from entering. Doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system, harming her fertility.

It was also thought that merely having women around might disrupt the serious intellectual work of men. The celibate male tradition of medieval monasteries continued at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge until the late nineteenth century. Professors weren’t allowed to marry. Cambridge would wait until 1947 to award degrees to women on the same basis as men. Similarly, Harvard Medical School refused to admit women until 1945. The first woman had applied for a place almost a century earlier.

This doesn’t mean that female scientists didn’t exist. They did. Many even succeeded against the odds. But they were often treated as outsiders. The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless barred from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.

There are others who are less well-known. At the start of the twentieth century American biologist Nettie Maria Stevens played a crucial part in identifying the chromosomes that determine sex, but her scientific contributions have been largely ignored by history. When the German mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, ‘What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?’ Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years, under a male colleague’s name and without pay. After her death Albert Einstein described her in the New York Times as ‘the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began’.

Even by the Second World War, when more universities were opening up to female students and faculty, they continued to be treated as second-class citizens. In 1944 the physicist Lise Meitner failed to win a Nobel Prize despite her vital contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission. Her life story is a lesson in persistence. At the time when she was growing up in Austria, girls weren’t educated beyond the age of fourteen. Meitner was privately tutored so she could pursue her passion for physics. When she finally secured a research position at the University of Berlin, she was given a small basement room and no salary. She wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs to the levels where the male scientists worked.

There are others who, like Meitner, have been denied the recognition they deserve. Rosalind Franklin’s enormous part in decoding the structure of DNA was all but ignored when James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize after her death in 1962. And as recently as 1974 the Nobel for the discovery of pulsars wasn’t given to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who actually made the breakthrough, but to her male supervisor.

In the history of science, we have to hunt for the women – not because they weren’t capable of doing research, but because for a large chunk of time they didn’t have the chance. We’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice.

‘I’ve noted that even the best male minds sometimes become obtuse when they start talking about women – that there is something about gender as a topic that dulls otherwise discerning intellects,’ writes Mari Ruti, a professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, in her 2015 book The Age of Scientific Sexism.

Sex difference is today one of the hottest topics in scientific research. An article in the New York Times in 2013 stated that scientific journals had published thirty thousand articles on sex differences since the turn of the millennium. Be it language, relationships, ways of reasoning, parenting, physical and mental abilities, no stone has gone unturned in the forensic search for gaps between women and men. And the published work seems to reinforce the myth that those gaps are huge.