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

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

by Angela Saini
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

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

by Angela Saini

eBook

$12.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807071717
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication date: 05/30/2017
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 162,197
File size: 692 KB

About the Author

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist whose print and broadcast work has appeared on the BBC and in the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, the Economist, and Science. A former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award in 2015. Saini has a master’s in engineering from Oxford University, and she is the author of Geek Nation: How Indian Science Is Taking Over the World.

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1
Woman’s Inferiority to Man

CHAPTER 2
Females Get Sicker but Males Die Quicker

CHAPTER 3
A Difference at Birth

CHAPTER 4
The Missing Five Ounces of the Female Brain

CHAPTER 5
Women’s Work

CHAPTER 6
Choosy, Not Chaste

CHAPTER 7
Why Men Dominate

CHAPTER 8
The Old Women Who Wouldn’t Die

Afterword
Acknowledgments
References
Index
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews