Angela Saini

How Science got women – and race – wrong Award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster

Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. She presents science programmes on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in New Scientist, The Sunday Times, National Geographic and Wired. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and named a book of the year by The Telegraph, Nature and Financial Times. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into fourteen languages. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2020 she was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.

Extract from a (June 2016) review of Saini’s book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong in The Guardian (online newspaper):

“With Inferior, Angela Saini sets out to examine the research, looking at everything from whether little boys really do prefer playing with cars rather than dolls, to whether the structure of the female brain is different from the male, and even whether it was inevitable that humans would end up with a patriarchal society. ‘This doesn’t always make for comfortable reading,’ she warns, pointing out that not all studies overturn the stereotypes. The stakes are high: claims of sex differences have fuelled the idea of ‘inferior woman’, leading not only to casual sexism but a host of practices including the termination of pregnancies based solely on the gender of the unborn child. Disturbing, too, is that Charles Darwin himself thought women were inferior, claiming not only that they were less intelligent than men but that they always would be.

But in charting research into sex differences from cradle to old age, Saini discovers that many of society’s traditional beliefs about women are built on shaky ground. Gender identity is very different between boys and girls, and there are also slight differences in toy preferences – with some evidence that biology might play a small role. But for everything from fine motor skills to vocabulary, colour preferences to aggression, the overlap between boys’ and girls’ behaviour is huge. Differences, if they exist at all, are tiny.

Sex differences in the brain, too, are a matter of hot debate. While some are adamant that large differences exist – not least in the wiring of the brain – others question not only the conclusions of such work, but the techniques upon which they are based. As Saini points out when it comes to brain scans, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown regions of activity in the brain of a dead salmon.”