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

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СКАЧАТЬ could be doing in a man was pulling him away from masculinity and towards femininity, perhaps even towards homosexuality.

      It took a while for scientists to accept the truth: that all these hormones really did work together in both sexes, in synergy. Nelly Oudshoorn has described how important a shift this was in the way that science understood the sexes. Suddenly a spectrum opened up on which men could be more feminine and women more masculine, instead of simply opposites. Writing in 1939, at the end of what he described as this ‘epoch of confusion’, Herbert Evans at the Institute of Experimental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, admitted, ‘It would appear that maleness or femaleness can not be looked upon as implying the presence of one hormone and the absence of the other … though much has been learned it is only fair to state that these differences are still incompletely known.’

      The implications of this change of thinking were spectacular. The entire notion of what it meant to be a woman or a man was up for grabs. Researchers in other fields began to explore the boundaries of sexual and gender identity. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead started writing at around the same time about masculine and feminine personalities, and how culture rather than biology might be influencing which ones people had. Studying Samoan communities in 1949, she wrote, ‘The Samoan boy is not over pressured into displays of manhood, and the girl who is ambitious and managing has plenty of outlets in the bustling, organised life of the women’s groups.’ The Mundugumor tribe of Papua New Guinea, she also noticed, created women with more of a typically male temperament.

      Not everyone today agrees with Mead’s observations, but her ideas did signal how society was changing, in part prompted by science. There was a radical move from the old Victorian orthodoxies of the kind to which Charles Darwin had subscribed. People could no longer clearly define the sexes. There was overlap. Femaleness and maleness, femininity and masculinity, were turning into fluid descriptions, which might be shaped as much by nurture as by nature.

      This revolution in scientific notions of what it meant to be a woman came in time for the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, following the pioneering movement decades earlier that had earned women the vote. By now, female biologists, anthropologists and psychologists were entering universities and graduating in growing numbers. They were becoming researchers and professors. This helped research on women to enter another era. Fresh ideas challenged long-standing narratives.

      The path paved by Eliza Burt Gamble, the pioneering suffragist who had dared to challenge Charles Darwin in the previous century, was being trodden by a new generation of scientists.

      We arrive at today.

      Lingering stereotypes about sex hormones remain. But they are being constantly challenged by new evidence. According to Richard Quinton, common assumptions about testosterone have already been shown to be way off the mark. Women with slightly higher than usual levels of testosterone, he says, ‘don’t actually feel or appear any less feminine’.

      In 2008, former Wall Street trader John Coates, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University who researches the biology of risk-taking and stress, decided to see whether the cliché of stock-market trading floors being testosterone-fuelled dens of masculinity was true. He took saliva samples from traders, and found that when their testosterone levels were above average, their gains were also above average. Another study in 2015 by a large team of scientists across Britain, the USA and Spain revealed that testosterone didn’t make the traders more aggressive, it just made them slightly more optimistic. And when it came to predicting future price changes, this may have encouraged them to take a few more risks.

      Richard Quinton similarly claims to have seen no link between testosterone and aggression among his patients, despite the stereotype that testosterone makes people more violent. ‘I’m not sure where it comes from,’ he tells me. ‘Urban myth?’

      The balance between nature and nurture is starting to be a little better understood. In academic circles at least, gender and sex are now recognised as two different things. Sex is something scientifically distinct for most people. It’s defined by a 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. It’s defined by what the world tells us is masculine or feminine, and this makes it potentially fluid. There are many for whom their biological sex and their gender aren’t the same.

      But we remain in the early days of this kind of research. The biggest questions are still unanswered. Does the balance of sex hormones have an effect beyond the sexual organs and deeper into our minds and behaviour, leading to pronounced differences between women and men? And what does this tell us about how we evolved? Is the traditional stereotype of the breadwinning father and the stay-at-home mother really part of our biological make-up, as Darwin assumed, or is it an elaborate social construction that’s unique to humans? Studies into sex differences are as powerful as they are controversial. In the same way that research on hormones challenged popular wisdom about masculinity and femininity in the twentieth century, science is now forcing us to question all aspects of ourselves.

      The facts, as they emerge, are important. In a world in which so many women continue to suffer sexism, inequality and violence, they can transform the way we see each other. With good research and reliable data – with real facts – the strong can become weak, and the weak strong.

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       Females Get Sicker But Males Die Quicker

      The evidence is clear: from the constitutional standpoint woman is the stronger sex.

      Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women (1953)

      ‘It’s wonderful,’ says Mitu Khurana, a hospital administrator living in New Delhi. ‘When you have your first pregnancy, everyone is very excited. It is a feeling beyond description.’

      The time she’s so fondly remembering was a decade ago. She had become pregnant with twins just a few months after getting married, and she assumed that nothing could ruin her happiness. Raised in a family of sisters, Mitu didn’t care whether she was having boys or girls, or one of each. ‘I just wanted the children to be healthy,’ she tells me.

      But her husband and his family didn’t feel the same way. They wanted sons.

      So begins a common story. It’s one that has been repeated in millions of homes across India, China and other parts of South Asia, where cultures unashamedly prize sons above daughters. They are cultures, as Mitu learned all those years ago, that will sometimes go to terrible lengths to stop a girl from even being born. Some women keep having children until they finally have a boy. Others are pressured to abort female foetuses, even to the point of torture. If they do make it to the day of their birth, many female babies and young girls are routinely treated worse than boys. In the most appalling cases, they are killed. In 2007, police in Orissa in the east of India found skulls and body parts of what they believed to be three dozen female foetuses and infants down a disused well. A news report in 2013 described a baby buried alive in a forest in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Another in 2014 told of a newborn in Bhopal dumped in a rubbish bin.

      That year, a United Nations report described the problem as having reached emergency levels. India’s 2011 census had already revealed that there were more than seven million fewer girls than boys aged six and under. The overall sex ratio was more skewed in favour of boys than it had been a decade ago. Part of the reason was СКАЧАТЬ