The Food Medic - S4 EP 7 PART 1: INFERIOR: How Science Got Women Wrong

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

In this two part episode, Dr Hazel is joined by Angela Saini, an award-winning science journalist who holds Masters degrees in Engineering from The University of Oxford, and in Science and Security from King’s College London. Angela is also author of the books Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and Superior: The Return of Race Science.In part 1 they discuss the effect of sexism on scientific research, how scientists often reinforce sex and gender stereotypes - instead of challenging them, and how sexism influences social beliefs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello, and a very big welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Hazel Wallace. So on this episode, I'm joined by Angela Saini, who is an award-winning science journalist who holds a master's degree in engineering from the University of Oxford and in science and security from King's College London. Her latest book, Superior, The Return of Race Science, was one of Nature's top 10 books of 2019 and won the Transmission Prize. It was also named a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Sunday Times. Angela also wrote Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong, which explores the effect of sexism on

scientific research. So this is a two-part episode and on the first part of this episode we are going to talk about the effect of sexism on scientific research, how scientists often reinforce sex and gender stereotypes instead of challenging them, and how sexism influences social beliefs. In the second part of this episode, we discuss her second book, Superior, The Return of Race Science. Just to start off, it would be great to know a little bit more about yourself and what really sparked the idea for you to write your book Inferior? Well I'm a science journalist I haven't always been a science journalist so I studied engineering at university at the beginning of my career I was kind of just a general reporter so I was doing crime and politics and things then I left I was working at the BBC I left

because I wanted to focus on science again I really missed my degree in the kind of world of science and also I felt that science reporting there's some excellent science journalists out there and some really great reporting on science but I wanted to bring more of a journalist side so kind of interrogate why do scientists do what they do why you know what are theators? What is the social and political aspects of scientific knowledge? And I came to write Inferior, really, it was an accident because I'd just come off maternity leave and I'd been out of the game for a couple of years. And one of the first things an editor asked me to do, and obviously at that point, I wasn't

in the position to be picky about what I did. I just had to take what I could get. An editor asked me to write a piece on the menopause. And of course, someone who'd written mainly engineering stories, physical science stories, not really human biology or human nature or psychology or anything like that. It was a big leap for me. And I normally wouldn't have done it, but I didn't have a choice. So I looked into what are the evolutionary

explanations that exist out there for why women experience this thing. It's very unusual in the animal world for a species to experience the menopause. Why do we have it and not others? In fact, I don't think there are any other primates that do. And at the time, this paper was published. So coincidentally, at the same time that I was writing this piece, the paper was published by three male scientists in Canada arguing that women experience menopause because no men of any age, older or younger men, find older women attractive. They don't want to have sex with them. And because women aren't having sex, all the way back through evolutionary history,

because older women aren't having sex, then they don't need to be fertile. They don't need to be able to menstruate or reproduce into older age. And what struck people, it was a controversial paper at the time, not least because we can't really explain evolutionary history anyway. So, a lot of these evolutionary explanations sometimes are spurious or speculative. But in this case, particularly, it sat at odds with the leading explanation at the time, which was that older women are so important to the survival of their children and grandchildren that that is why we live so long into our infertile years. So where other animals die around the time that they become infertile, humans live so long, and women in particular live so long because the existence of grandmothers actually ups the odds of survival of children and grandchildren. And what intrigued me was that this grandmother hypothesis, this counter hypothesis was so well evidenced. It was so popular. It had really heavy

kind of scientific weight behind it. Women had worked on it. Some men had also worked on it. In fact, the first person to have the idea was a man, but many women had worked on it. But this counter hypothesis, this patriarch hypothesis was almost entirely put forward by men. And what I couldn't help thinking to myself was if science is so neutral, if it is what I think the public often imagine it to be, which is just facts, then why should the gender of the researcher matter? And I think what that showed was that the gender of the researcher matters because science is political and especially when it comes to issues like human biology and human psychology which are you know highly contested areas because they have such a huge impact on how we think about ourselves. We have so many biases and assumptions about human nature because we are human and it matters. Then actually the biases

and assumptions of the researcher do actually play into this. And it's not just with the menopause, it's with so many other areas of human biology and female biology in particular. And it was really out of personal curiosity rather than anything else. It that point in my life, I just had a baby. I was facing social pressures as a mother. And I just wanted to know how much of this stands up. A lot of these stereotypes and these ideas that I have about what it means to be a woman, is this backed up by the science? And as it turned out, the science itself is contested. It's a battleground. We don't have the correct facts because there are so many people arguing over what it means to be a woman, not least because the history of science has been so heavily dominated by men. It's only really in the last 50, 60 years that women have gained a proper foothold in science and only very

recently that they have become leaders in scientific fields particularly in biology and medicine and because of that and a male-dominated history then we have had historically a very skewed impression of what it means to be a woman and also what is natural behavior for women. Yeah. And one of the things that you mentioned there is that science should be factual, should be unbiased. And in fact, it should challenge stereotypes instead of reinforcing them. Can you give us some examples of how science does, whether it's consciously, whether it's subconscious bias of the research, how it kind of reinforces these biases and stereotypes that we have. Well, we have many examples going back really, even at the birth of modern science. So if you think of modern Western science, enlightenment science, there was this idea in the 17th and 18th

centuries that women just weren't the intellectual equals of men. And because of that, enlightenment science, there was this idea in the 17th and 18th centuries that women just weren't the intellectual equals of men. And because of that, this is a biological idea, because of that, women were denied access to the scientific academies. They were barred from university, most universities. They weren't given a place in the scientific academies of Europe because they were seen as not needing a place, that they weren't intellectually useful to the endeavor of science. So if you think that that is what science itself was built on, that assumption, it should come as no surprise to us then that in the 19th century, when we have people like Darwin and when people are drawing up more sophisticated ideas about human history, human evolutionary biology, human nature, that these same stereotypes start to seep

in to the claims that biologists make. So Darwin, for instance, also believed that women were the intellectual inferiors to men. In fact, he believed that we were somewhere lower down the scale of evolution. We weren't as evolved as men, which is course is nonsense, we know now. And there were other scientists who claimed, for instance, that a woman's intellectual capacity was impaired by the fact that she had to reproduce, that if she used her brain too much, it would affect her ability to have children. And so there was lots of kind of bogus stereotypes, sexist assumptions that kind of in every direction of biology kind of seeped in, whether it's psychiatry, psychology, medicine, everywhere, they seeped in to what these kind of male Western thinkers were saying about women. And it should come as no surprise because society itself held these ideas. They were common in society itself. And so should come as no surprise because society itself held these ideas. They were common in society itself. And so really, they were just reflecting in their work and in

their research, in the theories that they had, these same kind of assumptions in the same way that they did with race, for instance. So the 19th century we know was height of colonialism, height of empire, height of slavery, and these same kind of completely pseudoscientific ideas about black people and non-white people circulated within Western scientific circles at the time for exactly the same reason, that the politics was affecting, the politics of the time was shaping what they thought. Yeah. And you mentioned Charles Darwin and reading in your book that's one of the first things that you discuss I think it's in your opening chapter and you discuss the exchange that he had with

a women's right campaigner Caroline Kennard after she had heard that he had written in his book that women are more inferior to men from a biological perspective. I was, first of all, disappointed to hear that that was the belief that he held as obviously someone who's an incredible scientist and we owe him a lot for the work that he's done. But can you briefly tell us about what kind of correspondence happened between the two of them? It's really fascinating. So I went to Cambridge University Library where they have the actual letters that they wrote to each other. So I could see for myself exactly the way that they were written. And what's fascinating is that Caroline Kennard's first letter to Darwin is very neat and beautiful and very polite. And in it, she writes in a really

charming way, trying to find out from Darwin, what do you actually think about women? Because I've heard that you think this, but that can't be true because I don't think a man of your genius would ever believe that women were inferior or not as smart as men. So actually, someone's copied out his letter in clearer handwriting so that in the notes in the library, you can see what he actually said. But he basically writes back and says, yeah, that is what I think. You know, I do actually believe that women are the intellectual inferiors of men. Although patronizingly, he also adds, they are the moral superiors to men. They are the intellectual inferiors. And when she writes back to him, you can see that she's incensed just in her handwriting. You can see how angry she is. And she puts forward all these really good counter arguments. Like, for instance, he was saying that in order for men and women to catch up to each other, women would have to do the same kind of work that men do. So it's a kind of evolutionary explanation. If women do what men do, then maybe in the evolutionary game they can catch up to men. And she said, well, they already work. Look out there.

There are already women working. How can you compare men and women unless women have the same opportunities and conditions that men do? It's just not fair to make biological judgments about what women are and what they're capable of when they don't even have the same chance to do what men do. And of course, that's an argument we recognize now. We don't know what he made of it because we don't have any correspondence going back again. But you can see then that even at the time, there were challenges.

Women did stand up to these ideas. The problem was that they were outside scientific circles most of the time. They were kind of corresponding with scientists, but not on an equal standing because they couldn't be scientists themselves by and large. And so very often when women made these spirited and really clever challenges back to these sexist ideas at the time, they were often dismissed by scientists, even if they were popular with the public. Yeah, it's so interesting and good on her for sending him the letter in the first place. I think from picking up your book and from just kind of reading what it's about, people are going to infer that you're going to make these comparisons between men and women and

how they differ in terms of health and disease. And while that's not totally what the book's about really at all, you discuss in part of the book and use one of the quotes women get sicker but men die quicker and I was really interested to read that and obviously most people know that women have a longer lifespan and tend to live slightly longer than men but can we just touch on that quote and kind of the basis behind it? Well, that is an adage that one of the researchers I interviewed gave to me. So this is kind of folk saying that people have sometimes in hospitals in the US, I don't know if they have the same here in the UK, but this idea that women just seem more robust. And certainly that is borne out by the evidence that pretty much everywhere in the world, women tend to outlive men by quite a margin.

And as far as we can tell from the research at the moment, that edge, that kind of survival edge, that tendency to survive or outlive men, even when women get sick, starts at birth, which is quite remarkable. We don't have a huge amount of research on it, so we can't really explain why. I mean, we can speculate on the evolutionary reasons why, for example, the role that women play in reproduction, but we just don't know. So more work needs to be done on that, but it's a real phenomenon. And it is one of those areas in which we do see a sex difference. And in fact,

it's playing out now when you look at COVID-19 death rates, what we're seeing is that the disease seems to hit men a little harder than women for this. And people believe it may be this immune system edge that women have because of their double X chromosome. So there may be a kind of genetic edge that women on average have. So like I say, this isn't a kind of hard and fast, all women are going to outlive all men or that all women are stronger or more immune or have stronger immune systems than all men. In fact, in my family, that's not true. My husband never gets sick. I get sick all the time. I catch everything. Whatever my son has, I catch. So this isn't a kind of hard and fast thing. It's

really an average, but it is certainly one instance in which we do see sex differences between men and women. And I think it's important to recognize where these differences do exist. I think very often people love binaries. They like to think that either men and women are exactly the same or we are completely different. And in fact, the truth is far more complicated than that. In some ways, of course, we are different. You know, we have different reproductive systems. We have different hormone levels that sex hormones, for instance, were sex specific, that women only contained female sex hormones and men only contained male sex hormones like testosterone. And they were very shocked when they learned that actually women contain testosterone too and men contain female sex hormones. And they vary in level. So they, you know, depending on who you are, we are all individuals and we can have different levels of these hormones. So I think we have to always be wary of choosing one narrative over another because the fact, and this is something I try to emphasize in Inferior, is that the truth is far more complicated than that. We are not as distinct as sexes as we like to believe I think

yeah I completely agree and I think like you said we like as humans we like to think in binary and black and white and it fits with the story that you know men are have x traits and women have y traits or opposite I should actually use it in the opposite way but we like to think that they fit into either or categories and i think one of the things that is often used as anecdotally is that men are more intelligent than women you know you see it in newspapers you even see it in the research where they're always debating whether you know men have higher iqs than women and the reasons for this. And this is something that you go into in your book. And I'd love for you to share the

story of the lady Alice Chen with Day, who really dedicated her life to exploring this. And I just think the story is really, really fascinating. Well, I think Alice Day, who was at the time that she lived, which was kind of end of the 19th century, early 20th century, was better known by, in public at least, by her pen name, Helen Hamilton Gardner. And she was, like I said before, one of these women who was challenging these kind of scientific orthodoxies at the time about what women were. And one of these orthodoxies said that men have bigger brains and that is why they are smarter. So they didn't even question that men were smarter. They were really thinking, why are they smarter? And they said, well,

they have bigger brains. And so she went and spent time with a brain scientist herself and she learned about brains and she came up with this wonderful retort and just imagine what that must have been like for her so she is not in her whole life educated into the world of science she wasn't able to do that yet she went and trained herself and she is arguing with like the leading brain scientists and neuroscientists of the time who were all parroting, or many of them were parroting this belief that men were biologically innately smarter than women, thanks to their larger brains. And what she came back with was the really smart, again, clever argument that

actually brain size is relative to body size. And if absolute brain size were an indicator of intelligence, then humans would not be the smartest species. That species would be whales or something, you know, a really huge species because they have the biggest brains of all. And when you compare men and women's brains, they are generally in proportion to their bodies. Smaller men have smaller brains. Larger men have larger brains. Larger women have larger brains. Smaller women have smaller brains. So there's no reason to suspect that men's brains are kind of so large that they're out of proportion with their body, and that makes them any smarter. And in fact, when she died, she left her brain to science. It went to a kind of brain collection. I think it's still there. You can see it in a jar. And they weighed weighed her brain and it turned out to weigh exactly the same as the founder of this brain collection who

was a very eminent academic in his own right who was a man so posthumously she kind of proved her own point yeah what like what a stamp in history did she make. It's amazing. The next thing I wanted to chat to you about is how biologists believed, and actually many still believe, that women are naturally modest and chaste, whereas men are innately promiscuous. And you kind of go into the repression of what really is the true female sexuality. And I think it's really interesting how you untangle, you know, is it really a biological basis to this? Or is it just the result of the patriarchy? Or is it a bit of both?

And it would be nice to chat through that. that? Well, this is a complicated area, because I think people even now still have this sense that men are perhaps a little bit more promiscuous than women, that they're more likely to want sex than women. And certainly, in the early 20th century, that was, and of course, in the 19th century, in Europe, that was certainly a more widespread view. In fact, there was even this belief that women were naturally chaste, that they weren't really interested in sex at all. Now, it was only really in the second half of the 20th century when women came into the sciences that they started to challenge this, not least because it didn't chime with their own experience. So it's one thing for a man to assume that women aren't interested in sex. But when you're a woman, you know whether you are interested in sex or not. And it was these

women, women like Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy in particular, who's amazing. Well, I was very lucky when I was writing Inferior, I went to spend time with her. In fact, I even stayed at her walnut farm in Sacramento. She is one of the most incredible writers and thinkers on female biology. She really challenged the evolutionary biologists of the 1970s and 1980s, who were still repeating this idea ad nauseum that women were somehow not sexual creatures in the same way that men were. There was even one evolutionary biologist, Don Simons, who wrote a book on human sexuality, who thought that the female orgasm was a kind of vestige of the male orgasm, that women hadn't evolved their own orgasmic biology or their own orgasmic equipment, that it was just a vestige of the fact that men had it the same way

that men have nipples. They don't need them, but they have them, that women have orgasms for the same reason. So this is what she was up against. And the argument she made, if you read her work, it is just breathtakingly simple, but so smart at the same time. It's so obvious, and yet it took her to make this observation. And what she said was that if, when we look through history, women are so chaste and so uninterested in sex, if they're so naturally modest, why is it then that we go to such lengths as societies to stop women from having sex? You know, we have not only kind of moral double standards around what women should do and what men should do, but we also have really repressive means of stopping women from having sex, not least, and this is the example I write about in Inferior, female genital mutilation. This is a widespread

practice. It's been done to millions of girls alive right now. What essentially happens to them is they are at a young age, sometimes as young as six, they are cut and then sewn up. And the sole purpose of this, I mean, it really is so obviously the sole purpose of this is to stop them from having sex before marriage and then keep them faithful to their husbands after they get married. Now, the question is, if women are naturally chaste, if we're naturally modest, then why would you do this? Why would you do something so violent to women's bodies to stop them from having sex if they're not interested in sex in the first place? I mean, it's such an

obvious, it's clear when you think about it in those terms. And when you look at all the hundreds, if not thousands of different ways that societies discourage women from having sex whether it's through religious means or cultural means or social means political sometimes sometimes legal you know there are so many different ways that we have stopped women from exercising sexual agency from being free to express themselves sexually and you have to ask yourself then why do we go to all this trouble in the first place why do we have all these elaborate means for all these thousands of years if women aren't interested in sex first? And then the question becomes, why do we stop women from having sex freely as they might want to? And then we come back to kind of arguments around

patriarchy and female sexuality. And again, this isn't clear. We can't know for sure why societies and cultures work the way they do. But one explanation at least is that male control of female sexuality is a way of ensuring paternity. So men can be sure that their children are their own if they can be sure that the woman that they're with is not having sex with anybody else and that means that their inheritance their property their wealth gets passed down to their own children and not to somebody else so this is a feminist and political argument to explain these kind of social and cultural practices that we see yeah yeah it's obviously a very eye-opening book and i think it's interesting how you really delve into the science behind things, but also parts of it are, you know, political and there's a huge, obviously, social aspect to this and cultural as well. But what are the key messages that you hope your readers will take away from the book?

Well, I hope they get a better understanding of themselves. I mean, that's really why I wrote it. I just wanted to know what it really means to be a woman. And it did, I have to say, writing in theory, I've challenged so many of my own stereotypes and assumptions, some which I think were subconscious that I'd internalized. For example, you know, when I studied engineering, I was often the only girl in my classes. And for a long time, I think I never expressed it to myself. But I, I used to think perhaps that I was different from other women, you know, I was good at maths and physics, and that's because I was different from other women. I was good at maths and physics and that's because

I was different. And what I realized through writing Inferior was that actually I was no different. I had a very different upbringing from many girls. I lived in a very egalitarian household. My dad had been trained in engineering, but when I was growing up, my parents, there were no such thing as men's or women's jobs in my family. You know, my parents did everything equally and they still do. You know, my mum, when my parents retired, she took on a second career. And my dad does all the housework. He does a lot of the cooking.

You know, it's not, and he doesn't think anything of it. And what I didn't realize at the time was that other girls weren't getting that message. When I knew that my dad was an engineer, I thought, well, I can be an engineer then because my dad did it. And what I didn't realize at the time was that other girls weren't getting that message. When I knew that my dad was an engineer, I thought, well, I can be an engineer then because my dad did it. But many girls get the message that if men are doing it, then I can't do it. And in fact, the message I had was that my dad did it so I can do it. And it was only really through writing Inferior that I articulated that to myself. So for me, it really completely changed the way I think about myself in so many different ways. Even growing older, I turned 40 this year

and I don't feel, society wants you to feel bad about aging. That's a message we get constantly. And I don't feel bad about it because when you read things like the grandmother hypothesis, you just think, wow, older women are amazing you know they are powerhouses they have propelled human life they have created these societies along with everybody else and i'm proud of getting older and i want to own it and i hope that's the message that men and women get when they read it, that we shouldn't be hemmed in by the stereotypes that we've been fed, because they are not backed up by the science, they just aren't. And you can live your life however you want to live it, there are no biological constraints

on you. No, of course. And I think the book really does challenge a lot of the preconceptions that even I had of both men and women. And I think now we're seeing, especially in the last, I'd say, two or three years, a lot more books and literature coming out that's starting to challenge these kind of preconceived ideas that we've had and innate ideas that we've maybe been brought up thinking and things like that. Do you have any books that you've been particularly inspired by that have maybe helped you with writing this book or even after writing this book that you've come across that people may want to read for further reading? Well, Inferior is three years old now. And I remember when I was trying to get it commissioned, it was really difficult because nobody wanted to know. It was quite tough. I had to hustle. Nobody thought that anyone would want to read a book on this subject. And there've been so many more books since,

which is amazing. At the time that I wrote it, the writing that inspired me the most was that of Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy, as I said, women like Patricia Gowarty, another evolutionary biologist, wonderful feminist scientific thinkers like Donna Haraway. There are just so many brilliant writers in this field who've been around for many years. One I would definitely recommend, especially now, is Anne Fausto-Sterling, a gender scholar who's been in this field, even when it wasn't fashionable. So for many, many decades. And she wrote a book 20 years ago called Sexing the Body, looking at the way that gendered ideas about men and women play out in how we think about what men and women are and in the science. And that book is coming out this year in a new edition. And I would really recommend everybody read it,

especially now, because I think we're going through an interesting time politically in terms of trying to navigate sex differences and the trans debate and all of this. And I think Anne Fausto-Sterling is a wonderful guide to why we should be very careful when we essentialize about men and women. We need to be very careful about making judgments about what we think is feminine or masculine. Because actually, when you look at the science and you look at the data, and especially as more research is is done and we don't have very much research but as more research is done the research doesn't really back up the kind of traditional stereotypes that we have no yeah I'll definitely check that out and I think also as a doctor scientist researcher it's really important to check in with those biases that we have because it's not just how we conduct research

or the ideas that we have as researchers, but also how we interpret the science. And I think just listening to these messages, again, it's quite eye-opening how easy they can just trickle in. Yeah, it's quite easy for it to do that. And I think especially when, you know, we can't all have read thousands of scientific papers and loads of books on the subject to kind of educate ourselves and it's very easy I think sometimes to make especially in the age of social media where sometimes that degree of nuance that we really need in understanding these topics isn't always allowed because there isn't a space for it that we kind of rather than jumping to assumptions that we kind of think more carefully

about the ideas that we have and constantly challenge ourselves like you say constantly challenge our own biases which is something that is really difficult I do I try to do it and it's really really tough yeah I know it is it's tough it is a difficult thing to do but I guess an important activity that we should be practicing. Okay, guys, so that was part one of this two part episode. Make sure to tune back in next week for the second part of the episode discussing racism and race science.