中文导读
安吉拉·萨伊尼是一位科学记者，为包括经济学人在内的许多杂志做过报道。最近在她的一本新书里，她对“女性低于男性”这一主流观点做出反诘，并且根据科学理性的分析和研究结果说明了女性和男性的客观平等性。最重要的一点是她指出了一些所谓的女性弱于男性的科学结论实际上存在很大的人为诱导性。如若万民仰慕的科学都如此带有偏见，有意设卡，那女性如何且何时才能清白自证？
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong.
By Angela Saini.
FOR much of history women were treated as men’s intellectual inferiors. Victorians believed that women’s reproductive health would be damaged if they strained their brains at university. A century ago few countries allowed women to vote. In 2005 Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, got into trouble for suggesting that one reason for the scarcity of women among scientists at elite universities may be due to “issues of intrinsic aptitude”. Some scientists rushed to his defence, citing research that suggested that this was true.
“Inferior” by Angela Saini, a British journalist and broadcaster (who has written in the past for The Economist), is an illuminating account of how science has stoked the views that innate preferences and abilities differ between men and women. Ms Saini unpicks some of the most influential studies that have framed women as gentle, caring and empathetic and men as strong, rational and dominant—differences attributed to biology and evolution. A striking pattern emerges: almost all of the prominent scientists behind these studies are men, whereas much of the growing, more recent research that disputes them is done by women.
Designating women as the weaker sex is biologically unfair. The natural sex ratio at birth is skewed in favour of boys, but they are more likely than girls to be born preterm and die in their first years of life. Women live longer than men and recover faster when they fall ill. Science is yet to find out why.
Men’s brains are 8-13% bigger than women’s. In the 19th century that was seen as proof that men were the cleverer sex. Since then, reams of research have shown that differences between the sexes in cognitive abilities or motor skills are very small or non-existent. When differences are found, they are not always in favour of the same sex and may shift over time. Girls in some countries are now better at maths than boys, for example. In America the ratio of boys to girls among children who are exceptionally talented at maths has plummeted since the 1970s. The brain, like other organs, is simply proportionate in size to men’s bigger bodies.
Yet scientists keep searching for sex differences in the brain, these days with imaging machines that measure brain activity. This line of research relies on human eyes looking for patterns, and also on imperfect technology (scans of a dead fish have shown dots of “activity” in its brain). Such studies grab headlines when they juxtapose cherry-picked images of male and female brains that look dramatically different from each other. Any links to behaviours or proclivities are purely speculative, yet the media like the fiction.
In fact, no two brains are the same: each is a mosaic of features, some of which are more common in men and others in women. According to one analysis of studies on sex differences in the brain, the proportion of people whose brains had purely masculine or feminine features was between zero and 8%.
