What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew
For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution...
What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew
For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists—most of them male, of course—claimed to find evidence to support this.
Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition or behavior, science has continued to tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.
In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating—and sorely necessary—new science of women. As Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science’s failure to understand women, she finds that we’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous, or that the way men’s and women’s brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes.
As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women’s bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women’s brains, bodies, and role in human evolution.
作者简介
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Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist whose print and broadcast work has appeared on the BBC and in the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, the Economist, and Science. A former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award in 2015. Saini has a master’s in engineering from ...
Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist whose print and broadcast work has appeared on the BBC and in the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, the Economist, and Science. A former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award in 2015. Saini has a master’s in engineering from Oxford University, and she is the author of Geek Nation: How Indian Science Is Taking Over the World.
Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different...Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different as we seem.感覺可以跟《被隱形的女性》一起看(展开)
无非
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Le Flaneur
F
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0 有用 Exfkcuseme 2019-05-31 08:23:02
很有意思的书，从很多角度描述了女性在人类历史上的重要性，通过研究观察灵长类动物社群来推演女性和本性和在进化中的作用
0 有用 Le Flaneur 2025-07-11 22:40:58 江苏
《Inferior》这本书可以和《The Better Half》放在一起看，两者引用的很多科学证据都是一样的，《Inferior》倾向“两性平等”，而《The Better Half》主张“女性优越”，背后是“平等女权主义（equality feminism）”与“差异女权主义（difference feminism）”之争；我觉得《Inferior》的作者拼命想要强调“两性平等”，其实是出于一... 《Inferior》这本书可以和《The Better Half》放在一起看，两者引用的很多科学证据都是一样的，《Inferior》倾向“两性平等”，而《The Better Half》主张“女性优越”，背后是“平等女权主义（equality feminism）”与“差异女权主义（difference feminism）”之争；我觉得《Inferior》的作者拼命想要强调“两性平等”，其实是出于一种自保，不想被扣上极端的帽子，但书中后半部分列出的许多证据，都证明了女性不是和男性“一样”，而是更加优越，这两者前后矛盾恰恰说明了作者太过于保守了 (展开)
0 有用 Haha 2019-01-07 10:55:28
我读过？完全没印象。。。🫠
4 有用 无非 2019-03-10 13:09:08
大致读了一遍。从一个女性科学工作者和记者的角度对科学界里的性别偏见和歧视状况做了历史梳理，数据很多，但不是枯燥的罗列，有态度，有观点。与少数激进女权不切实际的偏激口号和要求相比，这种实打实的研究还是最有意义的。作者此前已经在国内出过一本《极客帝国》，版权谈好就可以着手翻译啦。
0 有用 珠江口德子 2025-10-14 15:32:36 广东
Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different... Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different as we seem.感覺可以跟《被隱形的女性》一起看 (展开)