Inferior Angela Saini Quotes

Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology.

No matter how neutral the initial presentation of information, people do tend to gradually recruit the stereotypes and the associations that are prevalent in a culture and then project that,

equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right.

Noticing how competitive and sexually assertive females could be in the rest of the primate world prompted her to question why women in her own society should be thought of as any different.

Gender bias is so steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves discriminating against other women.

When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution. . . . The truth will make men free as well as women.

Even as their old way of life disappears, the Nanadukan Agta have shown that, beyond the biological fact that women give birth and lactate, culture can dictate almost every aspect of what women and men do.

As Charles Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century proves, the narratives have often been shaped by the attitudes of the time. Even he, the father of evolutionary biology, was so affected by a culture of sexism that he believed women to be the intellectually inferior sex.

Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we're not as different as we seem. Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities. For most of our history, we lived hand in hand. And our biology reflects this.

Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent. Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Hines and others have repeatedly demonstrated that boys and girls have little, if any, noticeable gaps between them when it comes to fine motor skills, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, and verbal fluency.

The scientific picture emerging now is that there may be very small biological differences, but that these can be so easily reinforced by society that they appear much bigger as a child grows.

For a large chunk of early human history, when humans migrated out of Africa to the rest of the world, women would have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. If they were pregnant or carrying infants, the daily physical pressures on them would have been far greater than those faced by men. “Just reproducing and surviving in these conditions, talk about natural selection!

Plasticity and entanglement imply that every single brain must be unique, for the simple fact that every person’s life experience is different. It is this, argues Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University, that makes looking for differences between groups so fraught with error. Evidence of sex difference in the brain is statistically problematic because each brain varies from the next.

For women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds, they would have to become breadwinners like men. And this wouldn’t be a good idea because it might damage young children and the happiness of households. Darwin is telling Kennard that women aren’t just intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes.

Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face.

In the history of science, we have to hunt for the women, not because they weren't capable of doing research, but because for such a large chunk of time they didn't have a chance.

In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote.

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.

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.

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.

Hormonal effects on the brain or other deep-seated biological gaps aren’t necessarily the most powerful reason for the gaps we see between the sexes. Culture and upbringing could better explain why boys and girls grow up to seem different from each other.

Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” she told reporters when her paper came out. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple data sets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.

We know that around the age of two or three, children start to become aware of their own sex. Between the ages of four and six, a boy will realize that he will grow up to be a man and a girl that she will be a woman. It’s also by then that children have some understanding of what’s appropriate for each gender according to the culture they’re in.

The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she adds. But they’re not the ones that get published.

Science doesn’t operate in a political vacuum,” she explains. “I think there are some sciences which can be more objective than others. But we are dealing with people, we’re not the Large Hadron Collider.

If mathematics ability were rooted in biology and sex differences were fixed, then we wouldn’t expect to see these changes over time. What’s more, we would expect the differences to be the same everywhere. And they’re not.

Gina Rippon believes that sex difference research continues to suffer from bad research because it remains such a hot-button topic. For scientists and journals, a sexy study on sex difference can equal instant global publicity.

research has shown that women who are going to have a myocardial infarction [heart attack] are more likely to have symptoms like insomnia, increasing fatigue, pain anywhere in the head all the way down to the chest, the weeks before they have a heart attack.

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.

Fresh theories on sex difference, for example, suggest that the small gaps that have been found between the brains of women and men are statistical anomalies caused by the fact that we are all unique. Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology.

Understand that bodies are shaped by culture from the very get-go,” explains Fausto-Sterling. “If you neglect a child at birth, their brain stops developing and they’re pretty messed up. If you highly stimulate a child, if they’re within a normal developmental range, they now develop all sorts of capacities you didn’t know they had or didn’t have the potential to develop. So the question always goes back to how development works.

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.

This way of thinking suggests that it’s not varying environments, false negatives, or bad experiments that are obscuring evidence of the brains of women and men being sexually dimorphic. It’s that there isn’t dimorphism in the brain to begin with. “Every brain is different from every other brain,” Gina Rippon explains. “We should take more of a fingerprint type of approach. So there is some kind of individual characteristic of the brain, which is true of the life experiences of that person. That’s going to be much more interesting than to try to put them all together, trying to squeeze into some kind of category.

have argued that there is statistically more variation among men than among women, which means that even though the average man is no more intelligent than the average woman, there are more men of extremely low intelligence and more men of extremely high intelligence.

A radical move from the old Victorian orthodoxies of the kind Charles Darwin had subscribed to was underway. People could no longer clearly define the sexes anymore. There was overlap. Femaleness and maleness, femininity and masculinity, were turning into fluid descriptions, which might be as much shaped by nurture as by nature.

women may respond differently from men to certain drugs. Medical researchers in the mid-twentieth century often assumed this couldn’t be a problem. “There was a notion that women were more like little men,. . .that if this treatment works in men, it will work on women,

Studies, including some carried out by Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania, saw sex differences in the brain when it came to almost everything. Examples included verbal and spatial tasks, listening to someone read, responding to psychological stress, experiencing emotion, eating chocolate, looking at erotic photos, and even smelling. One claimed that the brains of homosexual men had more in common with the brains of straight women than straight men. “I just got drawn into it because I thought this is horrendous, that it is being used in exactly the same way as people in the past saying women shouldn’t go to university because it will mess up their reproductive systems,” she tells me.

There are people like Larry Cahill who call us ‘sex difference deniers,’ but it’s the same kind of attack that gets put on feminism at each stage, or whatever wave you think you’re in,

Rippon, Fine, Jordan-Young, and Kaiser have argued that biology and society are “entangled”—that they work in concert with each other, through mechanisms like plasticity, to create the complicated picture we call “gender.

I realized that I was using sex effects on the genitals as an implicit model when thinking about sex effects on the brain,” she tells me. “This is not a good model.

Hrdy’s feminism and science met in the middle, not just because of the behavior of some men in her field but also because she recognized that scientific theories that ignored female behavior were incomplete.

But the reality, observes Hrdy, is that it’s more common for mothers not to form an immediate attachment to their offspring than we like to believe. Her argument is that this is a legacy of cooperative breeding.

Hrdy’s hypothesis about the profound importance of cooperative breeding is a difficult one to prove, especially given the myriad pressures that pregnant women experience in the modern world. But it also has the power to release women of the guilt they may feel when they’re unable to cope alone.

Sex hormones play a crucial role in determining how male or female a person looks even before birth. In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all fetuses start out physically female. “The default blueprint is female,

In 1993 the US Congress introduced the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which includes a general requirement for all NIH-funded clinical studies to include women as test subjects, unless they have a good reason not to. By 2014, according to a report in Nature by Janine Clayton, just over half of clinical-research participants funded by the NIH were women.

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.

Research reveals that, depending on the study, between 23 and 53 percent of people show variability in their brains, with features associated with both men and women. Meanwhile, the proportion of people in the studies she has analyzed that have purely masculine or purely feminine brain features is between none and 8 percent. “If you take any two brains, they are different, but how they differ between any two individuals, you cannot predict,” she explains. By this logic, there can’t be any such thing as an average male or average female brain. We are all, each one of us, a mix. Our brains are intersex.

In their particular set of data, around two boys for every girl achieved the very highest intelligence test scores. At universities, gaps in the numbers of male and female science professors are usually far bigger.

Older siblings had a more positive effect than anyone besides the mother. After this came grandmothers, then fathers, followed far behind them all by grandfathers.

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.

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.

On defining feminism, "Well for me, it’s as simple as the belief that men and women should be equal. That they should have equal rights and have equal opportunities. And I’d be shocked if not everybody agreed with that.

Sex is something scientifically distinct for most people. It’s defined by a certain package of genes and hormones as well as more obvious physical features, including a person’s genitals and gonads (although a small proportion of people are biologically intersex). Gender, meanwhile, is a social identity, influenced not only by biology but also by external factors such as upbringing, culture, and the effect of stereotypes.

He proved his hypothesis the hard and fast way, by repeatedly injecting himself with a concoction made out of the blood, semen, and juices from the crushed testicles of guinea pigs and dogs.

Women live about five or six years longer than men across almost every society and that’s been true for centuries,

Evolution was an alternative to religious stories that painted woman as man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behavior and virtue were challenged. “Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen. . .and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.

For many people their biological sex and their gender aren’t the same.

A lot of research findings never get replicated and are probably false.