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

By Angela Saini

‘A powerful, compelling and much needed account that challenges deeply rooted preconceptions about sex differences – some blatant misogyny, others buried in thousands of years patriarchy. Inferior shows that both are fundamentally flawed, and beautifully illustrates how science is just beginning to tackle this staggering imbalance’

– Adam Rutherford, author of Creation

An eye-opening account of a new wave of revisionist science and the extraordinary schisms that surround it – an alternative history that rises to the challenge of properly understanding the female of the human species.

From intelligence to emotion, for hundreds of years science has told us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families, while men excel at tasks that require logic and motor skills. Anthropologists say that human evolution has been shaped by man, the hunter-gatherer. But this is not the whole story. A huge wave of scientific research is now emerging with an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The differences between the sexes are being redefined and a radically new story is being written about women’s place in evolution.

In Inferior Angela Saini takes readers on an eye-opening journey to uncover how women – their bodies and their minds – are being rediscovered. By telling personal stories, shedding light on controversial research and investigating the ferocious gender wars in biology, psychology and anthropology, she explores what these revelations mean for us as individuals and as a society. And as part of the larger cultural movement towards a new feminism, she reveals an alternative view of science in which women are included rather than excluded.

So what does the rediscovered woman look like? Well, she had a far bigger hand in human evolution than we thought, she drove the rise in human longevity, she was never confined solely to the kitchen or childrearing, she is as smart as any man and in some aspects she is physically stronger. And, most provocatively of all, her fight for gender equality is not a fight against nature as some might see it, but goes hand in hand with nature. It is, as Saini says, her biological right.