Gatsby Benchmarks
1
2
3 4 5 6
7 8
Why women are not
INFERIOR
and science needs them
Having gone to lengths to ensure young people can access balanced information about
gender difference, Dr Jessica Wade urges schools to use it to spark discussions
and improve diversity in STEM, writes Sarah Wild.
I
t took just 12 days for physicist
Dr Jessica Wade to crowdfund the
£22,000 required to get a copy of
Inferior: How Science Got Women
Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting
the Story into every state school library in the UK.
It’s well worth a read.
Angela Saini wrote it “not with an axe to
grind” but with “a commitment to the facts”,
in order to challenge traditional ideas about
what it means to be a woman.
Given her academic background in science
and engineering, Saini is well aware that
science has treated women as intellectual
inferiors since the earliest days, and she has
experienced stereotyping and bias first hand.
As a journalist, she is able to revisit the
research around gender di f ference,
investigating studies that have hit the
headlines and exploring the empowering new
portrait of women: “as strong, strategic and
smart as anyone else”.
“Today, away from the barrage of
questionable research on sex differences, we
have a radically new way of thinking about
women’s minds and bodies,” Saini writes.
“Fresh theories on sex difference, for example,
suggest that the small gaps that have been
found between the brains of women and men
are merely statistical products of the fact that
we are all unique.
“Decades of rigorous testing of girls and
boys confirm that there are few psychological
differences between the sexes, and that what
differences can be seen are heavily shaped
by culture, not biology.”
She adds that “having more women in
science is changing how science is done”.
34 // STEM