Instant Genius - Inequality in Science

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Women are underrepresented in science, and some experts are asking whether there are biological reasons why. Meanwhile, racial studies are creeping back into mainstream science. We talk to Angela Saini about the science of gender and race, and about how to even the playing field.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end. materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Darwin said that women were intellectually inferior to men. And he repeated this. You know, he believed this up until he died. And that, you know, that continued. That continued in the 19th century. It continued in the 20th century. And arguably it still continues to this day.

You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, the online editor at BBC Focus magazine. For every Rosalind Franklin, there are countless other male scientists who have taken the limelight.

But even in this modern era, where gender equality is at the forefront of our minds, women are still underrepresented in labs across many scientific disciplines. But what does science tell us about the minds and bodies of women? And is there any biological justification for the division of labour that's historically been present between the sexes? In this week's podcast, Angela Saini, author of the book Inferior How Science Got Women Wrong, discusses the biases in gender science that we need to be aware of, as well as the other form of inequality creeping back into the mainstream science, race. She speaks to BBC Focus magazine editorial assistant Helen Glennie.

First of all, Angela, can you explain your background in science? Well, I have a master's degree in engineering. And while I was at engineering school, I did some placements. I worked at BMW for a while. I worked with London Underground for a little while. and I had every intention of becoming an engineer, except I got involved in student politics and writing for the student press when I was at university. And I really felt strongly that I wanted to try to work as a journalist to write about

the things that I felt were important. And if it didn't work out, I could go back to engineering. Did you have an idea at the time of what sort of things you thought were important? Well, at the time, this was when tuition fees had just been bought in and the government were thinking and raising tuition fees. I was at Oxford and there were a lot of issues around, you know, how do we get people from more diverse backgrounds coming to the university? So all of this was kind of high in the student agenda. Also, this wasn't very long after Stephen Lawrence was killed. I grew up in Southeast London, not very far from where Stephen Lawrence was killed.

Stephen Lawrence was a young black teenager who was killed by white thugs, strangers at a bus stop in southeast London. I think the anniversary of his death is coming up. So there's been some documentaries and some talk in the press about it. But it had a profound impact on us in that generation. And I ended up writing about race when I was writing for the student press. I got involved in the anti-racism committee. So it's kind of these issues, these kind of high-profile political issues

that really motivated me to get involved in student politics and write for the paper. But I loved writing and I love journalism and I just felt it was important on so many different levels, even within science journalism. So, you know, often we associate science journalism

with kind of new discoveries and what's in the... journals at the time. But for me, it's always been about holding power to account about, you know, what is this enterprise about? What are people trying to do? What are their agendas? How is signs being used and abused? So at first you studied engineering, which is typically a really male-dominated profession. Was that your experience? Yeah, it was. I mean, when I was at university, I was the only girl in my class in my college. There were about 10 of us. And that was true throughout the colleges. So there were very few girls in the engineering department

full stop. And it did make me wonder. It made me think, why are there so few women choosing this particular field when I felt very motivated to do it? My dad had been an engineer and I thought, you know, there's so much promise and potential in a career in engineering. There's so many things you can do. You get to travel. It's just boundless, really. And I didn't really think about it at the time, I just thought that this is how things panned out, that boys tend to choose it because it's a traditionally male-dominated field, but there's no reason that women can't do it. And when I came to write inferior, which is many years later, many years after I finished studying, I think that theme came up again because I did, writing the book did make me think more deeply

about why is it that women do the things that they do, choose the things that they do, how have the inequalities we see in society, where have they come from? And this obviously does not seem like a scientific question at all. It's a social question, a cultural question. But it's one that actually scientists think about a lot. Sex difference research is very popular. And there are actually a lot of researchers out there who claim to seize the profound differences in the way men and women think, but also historically who have suggested that we are

suited for different things so that the inequality that we see is not just a social phenomenon, but is also a biological phenomenon. Okay, so let's talk about Inferior. So that was your most recent book, published in 2017, and it hits on this one particular type of inequality in science, and that's the inequality around gender. So can you explain what the book's about? Well, the book isn't so much about women in science or their under-representation, although that is an aspect of it.

It's really about what does science tell us about women? What does it say about our minds and bodies? And it was really sparked by the fact that we are fed such contradictory information by journals in the press by scientists. Some saying that we are profoundly different, that women can't park, that we're better at multitasking, but we're poorer at mathematical reasoning, that there are some profound differences between the sexes in the way we think and the way we behave. And then there's other research that says actually there's not that many. differences at all, and most of it is social and cultural. So I just wanted to get to the facts. What actually does science say about us? How much of it can we trust and why does it say the things we say? Now, it should come as no surprise to us that there might be bias in operation within science

when this is a human enterprise and humans studying humans are obviously going to bring some of their assumptions or prejudices to the table. And science for, or modern science, modern European science for most of its history has been male dominated. Not by accident, but by design, women were deliberately barred from the scientific academies until the middle of the 20th century. For most of that time, they were barred from universities. You know, their voices weren't taken seriously within science, even when they had them. So it should come as no surprise to us that this establishment, which from its very inception, treated women as different, assumed that they weren't capable of doing certain things, that they, you know, they weren't intellectually equal to men,

would also, within research, reinforce that idea. And that's exactly what we see. When we look at Victorian scientists, people like Charles Darwin, Darwin said that women were intellectually inferior to men. And he repeated this. You know, he believed this up until he died. So, and And that continued, that continued in the 19th century, it continued in the 20th century, and arguably it still continues to this day. Yeah, so the argument always seems to go like this, at least for women in the sciences and the types of career paths that women tend to take. Men and women are biologically different. We know that. And so maybe our aptitude for certain skills is different.

You know, maybe men are more suited to things like science and maths and motorcycle maintenance and women are more suited. to teaching and care professions and raising children and that sort of thing. So you've looked at the research around this. What's your answer to that argument? It's not a crazy argument to be making. When we look at society around us and we see such, you know, huge gender inequality, men and women really doing different things. In some societies, you know, a very hard division of labour between men and women. And this has been around for thousands of years.

then it's not outlandish to assume that there might be something biological to it. But actually, when we look at psychological studies, so these are big meta-analyses of thousands of people looking at things like intelligence and cognitive skills, psychological traits, there are very few differences between men and women. And even on things like spatial awareness and mathematical reasoning, things that are very heavily associated as being stronger in men, actually show very little statistical difference at all, you know, not enough to be noticeable on an everyday level.

So, you know, that really surprised me because obviously with my upbringing and my experience in engineering, I'd always assume that maybe there was some difference. I think deep down, I'd assume that maybe there was. To actually learn that there isn't raises another question then. Why do we live so differently? Why is there so much inequality out in the world? And the answer is not that there is something deep rooted in biology, although that may be a small component of it.

The much larger component, and I think most biologists would agree with this, is that we have been raised differently. We have had patriarchy for so long. You know, there have been institutions designed to keep us separate and have us live different roles in life. And it is only now, after many thousands of years, that that is starting to be redressed and we're starting to see some parity because women are being allowed to do things that they weren't allowed to do before and vice versa. Men, you know, are being allowed

to have more involvement in things that women did before. And we see that we're not incapable of doing these things. We're perfectly capable. We're as capable of men of doing these things, just as men are perfectly capable of doing the things that women have traditionally done. And the structures that we have are a legacy of our history. And that, you know, shouldn't come as a massive surprise to us. We are cultural, social creatures as human beings. And society, you know, while there are many different cultures around the world, in some ways we are very homogeneous in some parts, some aspects of our culture and gender is one of them.

You know, there are very few societies that step outside these gender barriers, although they do exist. And we have been deeply, deeply influenced by that to the point where even today, a woman's choices do not exist in a vacuum. A man's choices do not exist in a vacuum. We are heavily conditioned, gender conditioned from a very young age, and that has profound impact on who we become as adult. So let's say that you were suddenly made prime minister or, you know, someone who is in power to enact a lot of change. What would you try to correct? What would you try to do to correct these longstanding issues that are driving women out of science? Well, in some ways, you know, this is a psychological shift that's needed and it's very, very longstanding. So these stereotypes and these structures, these patriarchal structures go back many thousands of years.

So it's difficult, you know, to overturn them in one swoop. but I think there are things that can be done to make it easier for women and easier for men to achieve the equality that we want out in the world or that many of us want out in the world. And one of them, I think, is childcare. It is taken seriously these days, but we kind of on an individual level, underestimate just how important good childcare is to getting and keeping women in the workforce, cheap, affordable, good quality childcare. again and again when I meet women, I give a lot of talks and I do a lot of events with women in science.

And one thing that always comes up is a childcare issue, that this really is a big component of the glass ceiling for them. Because until you know that the work at home and the work of children is taking care of, it's very difficult in a partnership, even if you have a very supportive partner to put in the hours that you need to put in, given the way the scientific establishment works now. And then on the other side, you know, the way industries work need to take account of the fact that we don't live in a world in which there is someone at home all the time. You know, they have to be flexible. They have to understand that people have lives outside work.

And do you think this is changing now? I know that in the UK there are some new laws about shared parental leave and things like that. Do you think we're headed in the right direction? I think we are headed in the right direction, although there is a lot of kick. back. So there are movements now of young men in particular who are trying, you know, within the alt-right, who don't want this change to happen. There are women as well who don't want this change to happen who like the idea of traditional roles for men and women. So there's a multiplicity of perspectives on this. But I do think we're getting there. I would like to see in Britain at least

many more men take up their share of parental leave. I mean, even if it's available, they don't always take it. So let's go back to this problem with trying to figure out what's biological and what's socialised. You talk in the book about a couple of different studies that are done on very young children, babies around things like toy preferences and what sort of toys grab kids' attention in those first few early years when perhaps the social factors haven't kicked in as much. Can you tell me what you saw in that research? Well, um, From a very young age, children are given different toys to play with. And we cannot underestimate how early this happens, this kind of gender socialization.

Even going into a maternity hospital, you see pink and blue balloons. So it's already happening there in the clothing that we put our children in, in the toys that we give them. So for example, I have a four-year-old son. And nobody's ever given him a doll to play with. But he's been given countless cars and trucks and trains. And he really loves cars and trucks and trains because he's been given so many of them to play with. You know, that's his main group of toys that he's always had. And what scientists are starting to realize is that there is a very delicate interplay when it comes to nature and nurture in toy preference.

So if you give a child toys that exercise their spatial awareness, they will have better spatial awareness, for instance. if you give them building blocks to play with. So if we do divide toys by gender, if we tend to give more toys to one gender and other toys to others, then that does have an impact on the development of the child. So we have to be very careful on that front. Now, we, as far as scientists are aware,

and this is based on the work of the wonderful Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Heimes, we don't see any differences in toy preference until the age of around two or three. So there is statistically, scientists have seen a difference in the kind of toys that children choose at that age. But then we have to remember up until the age of two, there is a huge amount of socialization going on. So that could have also a profound impact on the toys that children choose. So I think the jury is a little bit out at the moment.

There may well be a biological component there to the toys that children prefer, that young girls may prefer slightly dolls. young boys may prefer slightly cars or mechanical objects, but we can't extricate fully the impact of society when we're observing these children. Yeah, and presumably as well, if you give kids toys that develop their spatial awareness and they become good at those sorts of skills,

that's going to carry through into school and university and you do tend to gravitate towards subjects that you're good at. So that presumably is having quite a big effect on who's going into what professions. Absolutely. I mean, all of these things add up slowly. The messages that we give to our children, the little subtle messages about what we think they're naturally going to be capable of doing, what we think they're naturally going to prefer, and then giving them objects or toys or clothes that reinforce those gender

stereotypes that builds up and builds up and builds up that cumulative effect. We shouldn't be surprised if at the age of 16 girls are making different choices from boys when for 16 years they've had this kind of, I don't want to call it brainwashing, but this kind of socialization. And this is natural in a way. You know, it's very difficult as a parent to step outside gender boundaries because we want our children to fit in. We don't want our child to be the only boy in the school who's wearing a dress and carrying a doll or the girl who's the extreme tomboy. You know, we have problems with that. But we have to try and step outside it. I as a mother have tried to step outside it to let my son be who he wants to be, you know, without imposing these

external pressures on him. But it's very, very difficult. We want our children to fit in. We want our children to succeed in the societies in which we live, the cultures in which we live. So in some sense, reinforcing that culture is good for them because it helps them fit in. But at the same time, if we want to build a better alternative, more equal, egalitarian society, we also have to dare to step outside and widen the universes within which our children live, give them more choice, give them more scope and not limit them by gender. And going back to this research as well, we know that scientists aren't living in this perfect objective vacuum where the outside world around them doesn't influence them. So have you seen scientists introducing unconscious biases into their research?

Yeah, of course. And it happens. It's something that's becoming increasingly recognised within the sciences and things are being done to tackle that. But certainly you do see it when it comes to gender. And again, this should come as no surprise to us because we are social creatures and we are, of course, shaped heavily by our assumptions. When Charles Darwin looked at the world around him and saw that women weren't achieving what men were achieving and assumed that this must be biological, we still do that now. It's quite a natural thing to do. We form generalisations based on our observations of the world. But we need to kind of look beyond that. There are still scientists today who believe that there's such a thing as distinctly male.

female brains that we don't think the same, that our behaviour is, our behaviour is kind of radically different, that we are suited to different things, different spheres in society. And within inferior, one of the things that I do is I take big high profile studies and I look underneath them, you know, what was happening underneath the results? Where did this piece of speculation come from? what happened with this study when it got out into the real world and journalists were interpreting it or when the public were interpreting it? What were the scientists themselves thinking when they did this work or approached it with a question that they did? And again and again and again, you can see flaws on every level. Sometimes it's unconscious bias.

Sometimes it's unconscious bias. Sometimes it's in the speculation where you see the stereotypes play. In other times, it's when it gets out into the real world. world that research gets manipulated. But it is there. It is being increasingly recognized, especially within the most problematic fields like evolutionary psychology, where there have been so many errors, but even feels like neuroscience where there has been a lot of hype and some mistakes made as a result of kind of overzealous brain imaging studies over the years, people are starting to understand just to what extent bias can play out when they're doing.

research. Are you able to give me an example of somewhere where you've seen a flaw in some research that's come about through conscious or unconscious bias? Well, there was a very famous experiment a while ago, very high profile involving brain scans of men and women. And this was done by a team of researchers, mainly based in America. And they claim to show very profound differences in the structure of men and women's brains when it came to the white matter.

So the grey matter is kind of the, what we think of as, you know, the bulk of the brain. But the white matter is what connects the two halves of the brain together. It's the connections between the brain. And what they found was that there were more connections between the two hemispheres in women, and there were more connections within the two hemispheres for men. And they claim that this was statistically significant.

Now, that may well be right, that, you know, this result was true, although there have been claims that they were cherry-picking their results a little bit. But that aside, what happened when they did this research is when it was published, they made a number of claims about what this meant, what this observation meant. And one of those claims was that it suggested that women were better at multitasking. Now, there is no way to make that claim based on that observation. We have no idea what this means.

If there is this brain, you know, on average structural difference, which is still, you know, a question of debate, how on earth do you get from there to this idea that women are better at multitasking? Multitasking is, you know, a gender stereotype that we have about women in countries in Europe, in the West. But, you know, to make that big leap really is exploiting a stereotype. And in fact, when I spoke to one of the researchers afterwards, the lead author of that report, he said, actually, they shouldn't have made that claim.

that the co-author who made this suggestion about multitasking shouldn't have done that because actually there was nothing in the research to disprove or prove that. So it is possible. I mean, scientists do sometimes do research, sometimes get a bit over-excited about it, make big claims, but it is possible sometimes for them to look back and realize that perhaps those claims may have been overblown. That's fascinating because women being better at multitasking is a really, ingrained stereotype. Do you know if there's any evidence to support that

that's, you know, actually looked at the ability to multitask rather than the structure of the brain? Well, you know, as far as I know, there's anecdotal evidence. I haven't looked into, you know, whether there are hard. I don't even know how you'd approach that kind of study because what would you do, set people down and give them lots of tasks to do and see if they're better or not. I mean, there was some research a while ago that showed that multitasking does not

actually make anybody better at doing the individual tasks themselves. So it may be that multitasking is something that traditionally women have had to do because we're expected to juggle so many things. Now, I know this from my own experience that I have a career. I'm also expected taking a lot of the burden at home. And we have good statistics around this, that in the West at least, women are expected to do everything, that even when they do take up careers, the heavier burden of housework and childcare still falls on them.

So in that respect, we have to be good at multitasking in order to be able to juggle all the things that we have to juggle. That doesn't mean it's biological. That just means that this is a societal cultural burden that's been placed on women. That doesn't necessarily mean we're better at it. It's kind of like saying women are better at housework. If you do a lot of housework, yeah, you will get good at it. And women have traditionally done a lot of housework.

Now, if men were to do the same amount of housework, then I'm sure they would be great at it, too. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about gendered medicine. One of the most interesting things that I found in the book is that you say that in pharmacological studies, articles reporting only on males outnumber those reporting only on females by five to one. So why is there a discrepancy here? Well, to some extent, historically, if we look at clinical studies on huge, humans, then there are good reasons for this. So traditionally, drugs have not been tended not to have been tested on women because you don't want to give an experimental drug to a pregnant woman. So

people have taken, you know, all women of fertile age off the table. There's also the hormonal issue, you know, women's hormones fluctuate throughout their cycle, whereas men's hormone levels are more stable throughout the year. So there have been kind of sensible, logical reasons for keeping women out of clinical studies. But at the same time, that has had an impact because there are some physiological differences between women. And if you don't test certain drugs on women, then that may have an adverse effect on them. And indeed, the FDA, which is the Food and Drug Administration in the US, did find a very small number of drugs. They had to withdraw from market

because they found they had more adverse effects in women than in men because the likeliest reason is that they haven't been tested on women and they've only been tested on men. Now that isn't to say that we are profoundly different. You know, out of the thousands and thousands of drugs out there, it was something like eight drugs. So this isn't a huge effect

and it may just be a size thing. You know, women on average are a little bit smaller. So, of course, the same amount of drug in the average woman's body may have a different effect from the average man's body, but it may also have the same kind of effect in a smaller man's body when compared to the average woman's body. So, you know, there have been good reasons that women, human women, have been left out of clinical studies in the past. But why, you know, there is less data on females in general. so females of other species, that's more of a mystery. And it may be an unconscious bias at play, you know,

that people for some reason have more interest in the male form or that the male form is somehow seen as a default and the female isn't. You know, I think where society needs to go and I think medicine is moving in this direction is to treat people as individuals. We are all a product of so many different things, not just our gender, but also our weight,

our size, our class, what we eat, our upbringing, so many different things go into making a person who they are and that affect how a drug will affect them genetics as well. Some of us are allergic to certain things. I'm allergic to penicillin. I can't take penicillin. So, you know, that isn't anything to do with my gender or with my race or anything else. That's just unique to me. But, you know, this idea, I think with personalized medicine, that's where we're going. We're starting to understand human beings as individuals rather than trying to group them into buckets. And when we look at gender, even though there are some gender differences between men and women, for example, in presentation of stroke symptoms, there are differences. In certain autoimmune disease prevalence, there are

differences. But in the end, there are also huge overlaps between us. So it makes much more sense to think about each of us as unique rather than trying to force us into buckets in which we may not fit, depending on the disease that we're looking at. So what about things that are just specific to women's health? Like I remember reading a study a while ago about a team of researchers who are able to improve athletic results in female athletes by changing training based on where people were in the menstrual cycle. And one of the researchers made a comment that if men went through any of this, it would have been studied ad nauseum.

So in women's specific health, are there still things that we need to discover? Is there still some catching up to do there? Yeah, I think there is a lot of catching up to do. I mean, some areas of women's health are very well-resourced, things like breast cancer. We have a, you know, there are some areas in which we have a very good understanding. But there's other in which we're really lacking that for some reason there's been this huge absence of research. For example, period pain. You know, this is something that many, many women experience, sometimes very severely.

It can be debilitating. And yet there are very few drugs available to manage this. Very few kind of remedies to fix this problem. And yeah, it's difficult as a woman. not to imagine that if this were a man's problem, that it would have been fixed a long time ago. But I think part of that is perhaps because women have been outside the loop when it comes to medical research until fairly recently. Women are now very well represented in medicine. But for the bulk of history, they weren't.

And another aspect of this, I think, is that as societies, and this I think is true in many different cultures, we kind of expect women to put up with a certain amount of pain, that we accept it as a part of our everyday life in the way that men don't accept pain as part of their everyday life because they don't routinely experience it. So when a woman has period pain, we kind of think, well, yeah, manage it how well you can, but this is something you're going to have to live with. And the same moment when it comes to childbirth. I was kind of stunned when I started going to childbirth classes before I gave birth to my son, that they were saying, have a natural birth, have a natural birth, you don't necessarily need the strongest drugs. And I was thinking,

if I was undergoing any other kind of surgery, if I was having a leg amputated, nobody would be telling me this. Why do we expect women to put up with this, to tolerate it? When in our modern lives, there are so many different forms of pain that we don't tolerate, we don't allow, you know, if we have a serious disease for it to go untreated because it's just a part of the human condition. We manage things. We treat things for a reason. Why should women's pain be any different? But I do think there's this kind of prevalent cultural idea that women should somehow put up with things. And perhaps, and this is just my own opinion, this isn't backed up by any kind of research, but I do wonder if sometimes we are expected to put up with things because historically it has

always been that way. So even after all of this pain and all of this male-centred health research, women are still consistently living longer than men. So how's that happening? Well, it's surprising that, you know, as long as records have been kept and throughout cultures all over the world, women do tend to live longer than men. And it's possible to assume that this is because men take on more dangerous work. Men tend to be more heavy smokers. You know, they're sometimes exposed to more toxic environments, you know, mining and other things which are traditionally male professions, that that may account for it. And sure, that may account for a portion of it. But there are biologists now who are looking into this longevity gap and asking, well, actually might there be something biological there?

And it seems there may be a biological aspect because, even on a maternity ward, and this is something that's anecdotally known very well by doctors and nurses, a boy child is less likely to survive than a girl child at birth. And this survival edge seems to be maintained throughout life. So right the way through a woman's life, when it comes to, for example, immunity, women have on average, stronger and more flexible immune systems than men. So we fight off colds and things more rapidly. This is just on average.

This isn't true of everybody. It's certainly not true of me. But, you know, this is an average. And by the end of their life, they tend to live longer. In fact, if you look at, there's a list maintained online by the Gerontology Institute of all the people alive in the world that they know of over the age of 110. And almost every single one of them are women, which is fascinating. You know, how is it? How is that part?

That's quite statistically. that's quite astounding. And they do think there may be something biological to it, that because our bodies need to give birth, they need to do this quite remarkable and physically very punishing thing that perhaps our bodies are kind of endowed with a slight survival edge

in order to be able to cope with that. There may be chromosomal differences, so there are people looking at the genetics of this. Certainly women are guarded against certain X-linked diseases because we have two X chromosomes and men only have one. So, for example, ex-linked mental retardation is one of the reasons why you see more men at the bottom of the intelligence spectrum, you know, right at the bottom of the intelligence spectrum than women. So there are things in the body that suggest that women have a slight survival edge over men on average. But this is something that the research is really in its early days.

Some believe it may hold the key to longevity. If we can understand this, what it is in our bodies, then we can all live longer. But it is very early research and some of it is quite speculative. Yeah, it's interesting because recently I've heard of all these different attempts to preserve life for as long as possible. You know, replacing bits of your body with machines, uploading your brains to computers so you can live like that. But no one really seems to be looking at what women are doing. Yeah. And why, you know, why not? Why haven't we been looking at that? Here we have an natural subset of the human species, half of us, more than half of us, who happen to be living longer. And, you know, it makes absolute sense to look to women to understand this key to longevity, although it's a very difficult puzzle and it may have many, many different pieces. But scientists are doing it now.

Was there anything that came up while you were doing the research for this book that really surprised you? Well, I would say to some extent it all surprised me. And perhaps it shouldn't. You know, it shouldn't come as a shock that men and women are psychologically and cognitively not that different. I mean, I should say that while I was writing it, I had a two-year-old son. So I had very recently come off maternity leave. and the chapters that I wrote about motherhood and work, and also on menopause, really had a profound impact on the way I think about myself and other women in my life. Because here I was going back to

work, the reason I was able to go back to work was because my mother-in-law, who is a doctor, by the way, was taking two days off work every week in order to look after my son when he wasn't at nursery. And she was a powerhouse. You know, she allowed me to go back to work. and at the same time, because of the work that, you know, the research that I was doing around motherhood, understanding that throughout history, women have not been the sole caretakers of their children, that we have tended to live in communal societies in which everyone is responsible for taking care of the kids, not just the mother, took away some of the guilt for me on going back to work and helped put this entire story in context. And it was incredibly liberating, I think, to realize that working women have been the rule throughout history and that older women, particularly mothers and particularly mother-in-laws, and here I mean grandmothers and grandmother-in-laws, helping their children raise the family and be kind of lynch-pins of the family was also incredibly important.

And it has made me see women completely differently. It's made me think very positively about myself. It's made me feel very positively about getting older. I don't have a fear of getting older now. I see it as a great thing that, you know, one day I will shift into this new gear in my life and be a, have a different status. And also, just about the inequality out there in the world, it's made me think quite radically about that. And it informed my feminism in a way. I was always a feminist, but writing this book has really.

given a new dimension to my understanding of what it means to be a woman. Great. Okay. Now let's switch over and talk to talk about another big form of contention in science. And that's race. Now, how is science treated race historically? Well, this is something I'm just looking at now. So, you know, from one of the reasons I got into journalism in the first place was because I was involved in anti-racism, because racism was a,

a big feature of life in London in the 80s and 90s and with the death of Stephen Lawrence. So it's something as a science journalist I've wanted to explore for a long time. In recent years, we have seen this kind of slight uptick. Race science has always been there in some form or another, but we've seen this slight uptick, I think, in academics, researchers at big universities being more open about this idea that maybe race is real, that there are differences between population groups and how do those differences play out?

And that's what I'm exploring now. You know, what are these scientists saying? And historically, where does that sit in the context of understanding race over many centuries and this quite dangerous idea? And in some ways a very kind of mad idea, you know, this idea that we can divide people up into a few groups,

that there are such thing as black people and brown people and white people and red people and there are profound differences between us. How does that play into that kind of 19th century way of thinking about differences between people? And it's fascinating. It's much less clear than you would think. So, you know, whichever society we live in, we have quite firm ideas about how race works. But actually, every society is different on that front. And the science itself,

while there are some scientists who think that race is real, their definition of race is maybe different from the 19th century definition of race, but they have new definitions for how it works. So it's very difficult territory for me as a journalist because not only do I have to understand race as a scientific concept historically, but I also have to understand it as a social concept. And that idea shifts from person to person. Everybody has a different idea of what it is. And the way the science fits into that is actually very complicated. So presumably there have been some real troubles in the past with race science playing into things like eugenics. Can you give me some examples of that? Yeah. I mean race science has the most

toxic history possible. I mean, it was there in the 18th and 19th centuries, partly developed by European scientists. And I'm talking about the very idea of race. The idea of race has not been around forever. It was an invention. And it was partly invented by scientists trying to understand how the world was divided up. And then it was used by people to justify slavery, to justify colonialism, to justify genocide, mass discrimination. You know, forming these groupings was politically expedient for so many reasons and especially for European colonizers who went out into the world and on the basis of there being a racial hierarchy in their mind thought that it was okay to take over certain parts of the world to treat people in the most inhuman, brutal way

possible. And that continued well into the 20th century, of course, the idea of eugenics and racial hygiene in the hands of the US became mass sterilization, which continued well into the 20th century in the hands of Nazi Germany became concentration camps and racial hygiene and, you know, the genocides that we saw during the Second World War. So it has the most toxic history. We sometimes imagine that that history is behind us that was left behind in the United States. 1945 when the Second World War ended. And one of the things that I've learned while writing this book is that, no, it wasn't left behind. Those ideas remained. They're still there. They're still alive in parts of academia, maybe in different forms. They might be called different things. But those

ideas are still there. They didn't die in abrupt death when Nazi Germany ended. They are alive still in the way we think about ourselves. So we still think about race. Race to us is still real, for many of us and to some people they really do think there are these profound biological differences between people

and this is a dangerous idea that has never gone away so there's a similar argument here to the gender one you know someone who's Norwegian will be biologically different from someone who's from you know Botswana or something like that

what's the argument against trying to figure out if those differences are more than just skin colour well there are some There are many social scientists who believe, for instance, that even asking that question is loaded, is politically loaded. Why ask that question in the first place? Why would we assume that these are comparisons that need to be made and that need to be understood? You know, why do we not, for instance, go out in the world and say, what's the difference between tall people and short people?

What's the difference between people who have curly hair and straight hair? or between blue eyes and brown eyes, it's just as arbitrary, you know. These are differences that exist in the world. It's just as arbitrary to say, what's the difference between someone with dark skin and someone with lighter skin? The reason that these questions are asked

in the way that they are is because of the history of race, it's because of politics, it's because of this very toxic idea from the 18th and 19th centuries that there is something fundamentally different between people because of where they live or the skin color that they have or the supposed race that they belong to. So we have to be very careful about asking these questions in the first place.

There are many scientists out there who say that these are objective questions. You know, why shouldn't scientists in the spirit of inquiry or the spirit of curiosity go out there and ask these questions? They're as valid as any other questions. But then I would say, And I think there are many race scholars out there who would say, well, why are you asking that question? Why not something else? What about representation in the sciences? Do you know whether if in the UK, at least any racial groups are underrepresented in science? Well, what's interesting is that there are very profound cultural differences between countries in their attitudes to science. And this actually intersects with gender. So, for example, if you look in South America, in parts of the Middle East, especially Iran, in parts of Asia, women are very well represented in the sciences.

These are cultural differences. And if you look within a country, so if you look at the UK, ethnic minorities and particularly Asian people are very well represented, for example, within medicine. Now, is there any reason to say that, you know, people have indicted? Indian descent are better at doing medicine. No, of course not. There's no reason to think that. It's for cultural reasons. The cultural differences that we see between countries, the gender differences we see between countries are because of the products of those societies, because what does that society value? For example, engineering. Now, when I was the only goal to be studying engineering in my class, one of the reasons for that is because I come from an Indian family. My dad was an

engineer. And in India, engineering is a very well-respected, prestigious profession. It is something you do if you're getting really high grades at university. The engineering schools in India, the Indian institutes of technology, are the hardest places to get into as a student. You know, they're Uber, Uber competitive. And the graduates go on to do incredible things and earn incredible amounts of money. So culturally, for me, engineering was a very prestigious thing to do. In the UK, it's not seen that way. Engineering is not seen as this prestigious profession. It's seen as kind of, you know, these are the people who fix cars and the people who tinker in the dirt and they wear overalls and, you know, you don't want to do this. But I didn't have that kind of cultural message. I had a very

different cultural message. So as a woman, even though other women were underrepresented, I still chose to do it because of the other cultural inputs I was getting. So we have to understand that there are lots of things that intersect to create the patterns that we see out there in the real world. It's not just about gender. It's also about race. It's also about class. It's lots of different things. And I say race advisedly.

I don't mean race as in biological race. I mean race as in what we understand race to be. So culture, ancestry, you know, the societies that we belong to, that intersect to create the individual choices that we see out there in the world. And to me that's fascinating. That explains the differences that we see far better than biology. You know, if we look at history, we look at culture, we look at the individual reasons why people make the choices that they do,

then it's very easy to see why society looks the way it does. That was Angela Saini talking about inequality in science. Her book, Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong, is available from Harper Collins now. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast, The August issue of BBC Focus magazine is out this week, and in it we're hunting for life's cosmic origins on the back of ancient asteroids, celebrate NASA's 60th birthday, and ask why we haven't developed a male contraceptive pill yet. And there is, of course, much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

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