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A review by kmhst25
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini
informative
medium-paced
2.75
Not as good as similar books I've read (if you're interested in this topic, definitely read: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine). Saini seems so desperate to appear neutral and not feminist-biased that she often completely obscures her point.
For example, she builds an entire chapter around a study that claimed to find sex differences in the behavior of one-day-old babies that has never been replicated. Anyone sufficiently familiar with scientific research knows that one study proves exactly nothing, unless it has a very large sample size (this one had a sample size of around 100), but she saves that point until the end of the chapter and even then doesn’t hit it hard. Combine this with the author's exceedingly dry sense of humor, and I don’t know if every reader is going to realize that the takeaway from the chapter is that there’s virtually no evidence of this claim.
The author seems very resistant to actually asserting her thesis or admitting that any claim that science has made about women (no matter how ridiculous) is truly meritless or at least highly unlikely. It leads to a very wishy-washy book that feels like a summary of research on women more than a refutation of more or less anything.
For example, she builds an entire chapter around a study that claimed to find sex differences in the behavior of one-day-old babies that has never been replicated. Anyone sufficiently familiar with scientific research knows that one study proves exactly nothing, unless it has a very large sample size (this one had a sample size of around 100), but she saves that point until the end of the chapter and even then doesn’t hit it hard. Combine this with the author's exceedingly dry sense of humor, and I don’t know if every reader is going to realize that the takeaway from the chapter is that there’s virtually no evidence of this claim.
The author seems very resistant to actually asserting her thesis or admitting that any claim that science has made about women (no matter how ridiculous) is truly meritless or at least highly unlikely. It leads to a very wishy-washy book that feels like a summary of research on women more than a refutation of more or less anything.