It was generally quite interesting, and some of it infuriated me when it talked about the ridiculous sexism women experience. There were lots of examples of this so get ready for lots of quotes:
In a study published in 2012, psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin and a team of researchers at Yale University explored the possibility of gender bias in recruitment by sending out fake job applications for a vacancy of laboratory manager. Every application was identical except that half were given a female name and half a male name. When they were asked to comment on these potential employees, scientists rated women significantly lower in competence and hireability. They were also less willing to mentor them and offered far lower starting salaries. The only difference, of course, was that these applicants appeared to be female.
Another study, published in 2016 in the world’s largest scientific journal, PLOS ONE, looked at how male biology students rated their female counterparts. Cultural anthropologist Dan Grunspan, biologist Sarah Eddy, and their colleagues asked hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Washington what they thought about how well others in their class were performing. “Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content,” they wrote. This didn’t reflect reality. Male grades were overestimated—by men—by 0.57 points on a four-point grade scale. Female students didn’t show the same gender bias.
The year before, PLOS ONE had been forced to apologize after one of its own peer reviewers suggested that two female evolutionary geneticists who had authored a paper should add one or two male coauthors. The paper itself was about gender differences among doctorates. “Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” wrote the reviewer.
In 2015 virus researcher Michael Katze was banned from entering the laboratory he headed at the University of Washington following a string of serious complaints, which included the sexual harassment of at least two employees. BuzzFeed News (which Katze tried to sue to block the release of documents) ran a lengthy account of the subsequent investigation, revealing that he had hired one employee “on the implicit condition that she submit to his sexual demands.”
^ What the fuck?! Who does that?!
The Royal Society of London, officially founded in 1663 and one of the oldest scientific institutions still around today, failed to elect any women to full membership until 1945. It took until the middle of the twentieth century, too, for the prestigious academies of Paris and Berlin. “For nearly three hundred years, the only permanent female presence at the Royal Society was a skeleton preserved in the society’s anatomical collection,
Even assuming she was given the same schooling as a boy, it was unusual for a girl to be allowed into universities or granted degrees until the twentieth century. “From their beginnings European universities were, in principle, closed to women,” writes Schiebinger. They were designed to prepare men for careers in theology, law, government, and medicine, which women were barred from entering. Doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system, harming her fertility.
Cambridge would wait until 1921 to award degrees to women. Similarly, Harvard Medical School refused to admit women until 1945. The first woman applied for a place almost a century earlier. This doesn’t mean that female scientists didn’t exist. They did. Many even succeeded against the odds. But they were often treated as outsiders and routinely overlooked for honors. The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless denied from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.
When mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years under a male colleague’s name and without pay.ARGHH the unfairness! It just drives me insane. This isn't even to do with whether female intelligence is slightly different to male intelligence (which I think the jury is still out on), this is just completely excluding women due to pure sexism and disrespect of women. God it makes me angry.
Also, the book made me sad because it talked about the sexism of various historical figures, particularly in evolutionary theory, who I looked up to, like Darwin and Trivers.
Quote from Darwin:
ARGHHH. Not a very articulate review in this part perhaps, but it is absoutely maddening. And then men like to use women's fury at sexism to call us 'overly emotional', when they'd certainly be emotional if this had been done to them for thousands of years.
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,” he explains in The Descent of Man. For Darwin, the evidence appeared to be all around him. Leading writers, artists, and scientists were almost all men. He assumed this inequality reflected a biological fact. Thus, his argument goes, “man has ultimately become superior to woman.” This all makes for astonishing reading now. Darwin writes that if women had somehow managed to develop some of the same remarkable qualities as men, it may have been because they were dragged along on men’s coattails by the fact that children happen to inherit a bit of everything from both parents in the womb. Girls, by this process, manage to steal some of the superior qualities of their fathers. “It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.”
It's a really good point that scientists have historically taken the lower status of women as proof of women's biological inferiority when of course they're missing a pretty huge confounding variable. Then I suppose the bigger question is how were women subjugated in the first place? How did this culture start? I guess it helps that dudes are bigger and so could just manhandle women into doing their bidding.
A relevant quote from a feminist who wrote to Darwin: “Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”
More infuriating sexism:
They weren’t even recognized as full citizens by their own countries. By 1887 only two-thirds of US states allowed a married woman to keep her own earnings. And it wasn’t until 1882 that married women in the United Kingdom were allowed to own and control property in their own right.The AUDACITY of trying to relate questions after conferences to evolution like this.
Through a “runaway process” in which smarter males mated more often and sired smarter offspring, Miller argues, the human brain could have reached its relatively large size as quickly as it did. “Male nightingales sing more and male peacocks display more impressive visual ornaments. Male humans sing and talk more in public gatherings, and produce more paintings and architecture,” he writes. Later he adds, “Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions.” Men are better at all these things, he implies, because they have evolved to be better. For anyone who fears this might be a little unfair to women, Miller has a response. “In the game of science,” he advises his readers, “sounding sexist is not a good reason to ban a theory.”
There was a discussion of selective abortion and infanticide in Asia and god, how horrible. There was a story of a woman whose husband tricked her into eating something she was allergic to so he could bring her to the hospital and get a scan to find out the sex of her twins, and then on finding out that they were female pressured her to get an abortion, wouldn't let her eat and kicked her down the stars. Also, a doctor said that in hospitals in South Asia you can find children's wards 80% full of boys, because sick girls just aren't brought to the hospital.
Apparently biologically girls survive much better than boys; female newborns have a 10% higher chance of surviving than male ones. And yet in these Asian countries demographics are skewed in favour of boys - that's how much they're discriminating against girls. So disgusting.
Women generally survive better at every stage of life and have later ages of onset of most common diseases including heart disease and cancer, and kidney disease progresses faster in men.
Sexism is just so unnecessarily pervasive. Look at this!
In research on the evolution of genitals (parts of the body we know for certain are different between the sexes), scientists have also leaned toward males. In 2014 biologists at Humboldt University in Berlin and Macquarie University in Sydney analyzed more than three hundred papers published between 1989 and 2013 that covered the evolution of genitalia. They found almost half looked only at the males of the species, while just 8 percent looked only at females. One reporter described it as “the case of the missing vaginas.”
There was a chapter on brain differences between men and women, basically asking whether the well-known physical differences in e.g. physical strength extend to mental differences. Lots of different studies and scientists were presented but really the impression I got of the field was that it's a mess; so many people seemed to be operating based just on their opinions of how things should be, or using archetypes like (ugh) Simon Baron-Cohen with his 'empathizing' vs 'systematizing' shite.
The chapter talked about the 'missing 5 ounces of the female brain' and wow it's so dumb, they just kept insisting absolute brain size was the important thing rather than even brain-to-body-ratio. A quick gripe first: PICK A UNIT! How am I supposed to compare between these three different units?!
1,150 grams (approx. 2.5 pounds), around five ounces less than the average male brain
Some researcher (in contemporary times) found that there's more blood flow through the male brain and made a very big deal of it. But this part was interesting to me:
George John Romanes, an eminent evolutionary biologist and friend of Charles Darwin, also weighed in. “Seeing that the average brainweight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former,” he argued in Popular Science Monthly. “We must look the facts in the face. How long it may take the woman of the future to recover the ground which has been lost in the psychological race by the woman of the past, it is impossible to say; but we may predict with confidence that, even under the most favourable conditions as to culture, and even supposing the mind of man to remain stationary,…it must take many centuries for heredity to produce the missing five ounces of the female brain.”
In the 1970s sex difference research had experienced a decline because gender scholars and women’s rights campaigners argued that it was sexist to look for biological gaps between women and men, just as it was racist to look for differences between black and white people. Gradually, though, it became acceptable again.Why IS it acceptable to do it by sex but not by race? I'm not really for banning looking for sex differences, though I do take issue with how they're interpreted, but by that logic we should do it by race too. Which brings me to a similar point - I've noticed that the word 'racist' seems much scarier to people than the word 'sexist' does; sexism, at least in my experience, is more accepted than racism. Neither should be accepted and this inequality in inequalities pisses me off.
She mentions stereotype threat uncritically, but I've heard that the famous stereotype threat study is actually overcooked and failing to replicate and wow very dodgy stats that I don't know how they got away with in the first place.
Also, she said 'From breasts and vaginas to brain structure and cognitive ability, for every difference or similarity we see, there must be some evolutionary purpose to it', which is something the author of Junk DNA also said and remains untrue -- things can just be there by drift or descent, no? Sure, less likely for big anatomical things to happen by drift maybe, but she says every difference.
Expectant mothers almost always have people to help them when their babies are due. In my case, it was an entire team, including my husband, sister, doctors, and a midwife. Anthropologists Wenda Trevathan at New Mexico State University and Karen Rosenberg at the University of Delaware have noted that childbirth is a lonely activity in few human cultures. Helpers are so important that women may even have evolved to expect them, they’ve argued. Their theory is that the awkward style of delivery of human births and the emotional need that mothers have to seek support during birth may be adaptations to the fact that our ancestors had people aiding them when they delivered their babies.
How is that an adaptation? What? Am I missing something?
Something funny: '“One of the primary traits that we have is that we’re sort of the rabbits of the great ape world,” explains Richard Gutierrez Bribiescas, professor of anthropology at Yale University,'.
Apparently this is a thing;
In Amazonian South America, there are communities that accept affairs outside marriage and hold a belief that when a woman has sex with more than one man in the run-up to her pregnancy, all their sperm help build the fetus. This is known by academics as “partible paternity.”
I don't get this at all. Has no one told them the science? Do they actually believe this? And it's just okay for them to be wrong? If they found out would the other fathers stop supporting 'their' kid? What.
She has this ~controversial~ quote (cos trans people): 'the biological fact that women give birth and lactate'.
There was an interesting bit about how babies are brought up unconsciously differently:
In her most recent research project, Fausto-Sterling has tried to get closer to answers by filming mothers playing with their children. She recounts one vivid example: “You see a little three-month-old boy, just slouched on the couch. He’s not even big enough to sit up on his own, but he’s kind of propped up with pillows. His mother is trying to engage him in play, and she’s stuffing little soft footballs in his face, American footballs… . She’s thrusting this football at him and saying, ‘Don’t you want to hold the football? Don’t you want to play football like your daddy does?’ And he’s just sitting there like a kind of blob. He has no interest one way or the other,” she describes. The impact of actions like these, small as they may seem, can be long lasting. “If that kind of interaction is going on iteratively in the early months, then if at some point he does reach out and grab, when he’s big enough to do that, at four months, five months, or six months, he’s going to get a very positive reinforcing response from his mother,” Fausto-Sterling explains. This relationship between the boy and footballs is strengthened as he sees how happy they make his mother, and also because the toy is already so familiar to him. “He may see them again at an older age, when he is more capable of physically interacting with them. And just seeing them and recognizing them may give him a certain kind of pleasure.” By the end, the boy appears to love football. Fausto-Sterling adds that evidence is emerging from her team’s observations of mothers that boys are also handled differently from girls, which might be influencing the way they grow. “The mothers of sons in my cohort are moving them around a lot more. They’re shifting them, they’re playing with them, and they’re talking to them less. They’re more affectionate to them when they’re moving them physically.” This could simply be because boys demand more physical movement from the start, but again, it’s another element of the development process that hasn’t been fully studied.
Some people have suggested that the means for male and female intelligence are pretty much the same but men have more variability, so more at the top and bottom of the IQ scale. But apparently that effect is concentrated at the bottom because boys are much more likely to have mental retardation. They did see a significant different at the top end too though which is worrying.
One of the most interesting chapters was 'Choosy or Chaste?', which talked about how women do actually have sexual desire but men have specifically suppressed it throughout human history in a manifestation of mate guarding.
Infidelity
Hanuman langurs of Mount Abu forty years ago showed that a female monkey can benefit from mating with more than one male because it confuses them all over their possible paternity of her children, making them less likely to commit infanticide.
When Scelza started doing fieldwork with the Himba in 2010, women would ask her why she didn’t have men coming to her hut. “Well, I said, ‘You know, I’m married.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but that doesn’t matter. He’s not here.’ So then I tried to explain that my marriage was a love match, because then I thought they would understand. And they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s okay, it’s okay. He’s not going to know; it’s okay,’” she recalls. “They really hold a very different idea in their heads about love and sex, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing at all for me to say, on the one hand, that I really love my husband but that I’ll still be having sex with somebody else when we’re apart. That, to them, was not a transgression.”
There was apparently some campus study that purported to show that men were more promiscuous than women because when researchers went to bars and asked them to sleep with them the men usually said yes whereas the women never did, but a later redo of the experiment found that women were much more likely to say yes than before when the experiment was done in a safe place so not just going back to some random dude's house when he could attack you.
Also, apparently Bateman's seminal fly study about how female flies don't really bother with mating but get enough but males have high variability in whether they'll get a mate or not was super flawed, which is concerning because I read that uncritically for Schols.
d contradicted Bateman in the most fundamental way. “We observed the movements of females and males in vials during the first five minutes of exposure to one another. Video records revealed females went toward males as frequently as males toward females; we inferred that females were as interested in males as males in females,” they wrote in their paper, published in the journal Evolution in 2002. This raised the dilemma of just how Bateman managed to see what he claimed to see in his own fruit flies. Investigating further, Gowaty soon began to notice problems with Bateman’s study. In a subsequent paper, published in 2012 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gowaty and researchers Yong-Kyu Kim and Wyatt Anderson at the University of Georgia, wrote, “Bateman’s method overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with one or more mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of offspring number by sex.” They claim that Bateman counted mothers as parents less often than fathers, which is a biological impossibility, since it takes two to make a baby. Another error is that the same genetic mutations Bateman needed his flies to have so he could distinguish the parents from their offspring also affected the fruit flies’ survival rates. A fly with two severe and debilitating mutations, such as uncomfortably small eyes and deformed wings, could have died before Bateman had the chance to count it. This would have almost certainly skewed his results, too. The mistakes are so clear, claims Gowaty, that Bateman’s 1948 paper could only have been published if the editor—who should have checked for errors—hadn’t actually read it. Failure to replicate scientific findings is a big deal. Often it leaves grave doubts about the original experiment. And for an experiment as important as Bateman’s it should cause enormous concern. In this case, though, the reaction to her findings has been mixed.
Female Genital Mutilation as an extreme example of mate guarding (gory quote)
Infibulation is what was done to Wardere. It happened forty years ago, but she remembers it as vividly as if it had been this morning. She grew up assuming that being cut was something to be proud of. It was a feeling reinforced when her female relatives threw a party in her honor to celebrate the big moment. They cooked her favorite food. They told her she was about to become a woman. In her six-year-old innocence she excitedly imagined that this might mean finally trying on her mother’s makeup. “They made you feel like something amazing was going to happen,” she tells me. “It was not like that. It was the beginning of a nightmare.” In Somalia, female genital mutilation is often carried out by a respected female elder, who’s likely to have cut hundreds of girls already. Wardere recalls the woman who did it to her. “Her eyes haunt me even today. She instructed my mother, my aunties, and other helpers to hold me down, and they did. My mother looked away, but the others did hold me down. Then she ripped my flesh as I screamed and struggled and prayed to die. She just kept on going. It didn’t bother her that I was just a child. It didn’t bother her that I was begging for mercy.” Wardere’s torn flesh lay on the floor. The life sentence had been served. The cut was cruel enough, but she would also suffer recurrent urinary infections and scarring. The flashbacks would haunt her forever.
The puzzling thing about female genital mutilation is that there seem to be no winners. Not men, not women. Wives have reported depression and domestic abuse because their husbands can’t accept that they don’t want to have sex. One young man admitted to her that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation and he was scared of hurting her. If men would accept brides who weren’t mutilated, she notes, the stigma might go away. Yet, however damaging it might be to their wives and their marriages, few men stand up against the practice. And the reason for this is simple. The torture continues because it does what it was always intended to do. A woman who has been cut as a child will almost certainly remain a virgin when she’s older. It would be too painful for her to be anything else. And once she’s married, a husband can be confident that she’ll be a reliably faithful wife. Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate guarding as anyone has ever seen. The practice has been absorbed into some cultures so fully and for so long that women now have little choice but to give it their full cooperation. Without it, they risk being ostracized. Girls put pressure on each other to be cut, like they did when Wardere was six years old. Mothers take their own daughters to be cut, like Wardere’s did. And female elders do the cutting. “It’s all instigated by women."
And another, similar enough thing that's also revolting:
When this standard isn’t enough to limit her behavior, humans have gone to elaborate lengths to enforce it. The most aggressive include forced marriage, domestic violence, and rape. One member of the gang who violently raped and killed a student on a bus in India in 2012 claimed to the BBC in an interview from prison that it was her own fault for taking the bus in the first place. As far as he was concerned, she was the one who had transgressed. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night,” he told the reporters. “Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.” This double standard is even written into the laws of some countries.Woman the Gatherer
There was also a cool discussion of 'Woman the Gatherer' rather than 'Man the Hunter' saying that women were actually vital for getting calories from the group. A study of one modern hunter-gatherer tribe found that the men were only successful in their hunts 1/30 days, so for a consistent food supply women's gathering of berries/tubers etc and hunting of small game was really important and sometimes provided more than half the group's calories.
Our Closest Ancestors
It's interesting the difference between bonobos and chimps. We're pretty much equally closely related to both, but chimps, which are aggressive and patriarchal, have long been used to explain our 'natural' behaviour whereas bonobos are only starting to be, and they're the opposite, with a more matriarchal society and mothers needed to defend their sons from being attacked by other females.
Also, bonobos apparently love having nonreproductive sex as a sort of 'social glue', including gay sex, oral and genital massage. Also, their society runs on female friendship and cooperation (between unrelated females) -- even though males are longer, females run the place because of their alliances. And across species, size doesn't always correlate with sex or dominance.
Post-Menopausal Women
The last section posed an interesting question I wouldn't have thought of: why do women survive so long after they lose their fertility? What's the point, from an evolutionary perspective?
One interesting idea is the 'grandmother hypothesis' - childbirth was so dangerous for a woman that it was better for her to stop having babies and look after the ones she did have, or her grandchildren. There's evidence for this with the Hadza hunter-gatherers; apparently the grandmothers allow their daughters to go shorter intervals between having babies because they'll step in and mind the previous baby before it's fully independent.
An alternative hypothesis is that we're just living longer and previously would've died around menopause but now have modern medicine and tech. However, life expectancy data is flawed because once you survive childhood your life expectancy can actually be quite long, and some people in ancient times could've survived into their seventies.
Some of the other ideas are:
the follicular depletion hypothesis, which, like the extended longevity hypothesis, says that women nowadays outlive their eggs. The problem with this is that you might then expect women with more children to go through menopause later, because they’re not menstruating while pregnant. They don’t. Another hypothesis focuses on reproductive cost, saying that baby making takes such a large physical toll on a woman’s body that menopause evolved to protect her from further damage. But if this were true, we might expect to see women with more children experiencing menopause earlier, and we don’t. Another, the senescence hypothesis, offers up the possibility that menopause is just a natural feature of aging, like wrinkles or loss of hearing. And while other side effects of old age may happen gradually, including male infertility, female fertility just happens to end more abruptly for physical reasons.
Unfortunately sometimes Saini said things that I don't think were really backed up by the evidence she'd presented and she came across as a bit biased even though she said she wouldn't. I get it, I'd be biased too, but don't say you're not going to be y'know. To be clear I do think women are just as good obviously, but for specific things the evidence to say something one way or the other just wasn't fully in and it seemed she'd already chosen a side, though in fairness she did present evidence from the other side.
4/5 stars.
