24 Quotes by Angela Saini

Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face.

For a large chunk of early human history, when humans migrated out of Africa to the rest of the world, women would have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. If they were pregnant or carrying infants, the daily physical pressures on them would have been far greater than those faced by men. “Just reproducing and surviving in these conditions, talk about natural selection!

Hormonal effects on the brain or other deep-seated biological gaps aren’t necessarily the most powerful reason for the gaps we see between the sexes. Culture and upbringing could better explain why boys and girls grow up to seem different from each other.

The scientific picture emerging now is that there may be very small biological differences, but that these can be so easily reinforced by society that they appear much bigger as a child grows.

Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent. Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Hines and others have repeatedly demonstrated that boys and girls have little, if any, noticeable gaps between them when it comes to fine motor skills, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, and verbal fluency.

Understand that bodies are shaped by culture from the very get-go,” explains Fausto-Sterling. “If you neglect a child at birth, their brain stops developing and they’re pretty messed up. If you highly stimulate a child, if they’re within a normal developmental range, they now develop all sorts of capacities you didn’t know they had or didn’t have the potential to develop. So the question always goes back to how development works.