I usually write my columns over the weekend to submit by our Monday deadline, but this week was not the case. I was waiting for something different—exciting, challenging, puzzling (we’ll skip over the KHODA exposé from last week’s issue… that’s for another time).
I’m glad I waited. Fellow columnist and Director of the Center for Science Writings John Horgan invited Angela Saini, a British science journalist and author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, to speak as a lecturer this past Wednesday about sexism in science. As a woman studying chemical biology with a newfound appreciation for science journalism, I was more than intrigued.
She began her talk with pictures, all taken from the Hollywood hit “Planet of the Apes.” “What looks similar in all of these images?” she asked the audience, as images of male apes skirted across the projection screen. Male apes beating their chests, the Abraham Lincoln memorial replaced with the bust of a male ape—all of the power was centralized around the male figure. The only female character of any substantial prowess was ascribed by birth, a mere result of her kinship to a powerful male figure. Saini admits that after she became a mother, she saw more clearly how male domination is the “given rule,” which impelled her to look further into the non-progressive attitudes towards women in science.
In her research, Saini uncovered that the creation of the patriarchy started in the years of the Mesopotamians and Assyrians. Saini reports that “we were egalitarian once,” although this fact has remained unbeknownst to many and faded from history.
She also discussed the validity of our scientific predecessors, such as Charles Darwin. I came to revere Darwin during my high school biology classes, with his explorations to the Galapagos and theory of evolution by means of natural selection. It was shocking—and hurtful—to know that he, as per Saini, was known to insist that women are inferior to men. But Saini raised a good point: “Darwin wasn’t looking everywhere,” she said, referring to Darwin’s somewhat limited sample. He was looking at Victorian women who had been taught to dress modestly, oblige their husbands, and live stifled lives. “They had no space,” Saini argued, and these observations lent themselves to support a very unscientific, yet widely-accepted notion that women are intellectually inferior than their male counterparts.
What captivated me the most was Saini’s argument that “gender roles are not facts of biology.” Take the Bonobo, a chimpanzee species that is female dominated, or the ancient tribal community of Tibetan Buddhists called the Mosuo, who demonstrate the closest thing to a matriarchal society. Saini maintains that because gender roles are not universal—meaning not common to all cultures—they cannot be accepted as products of our genetic makeup.
Saini’s lecture served as a reality check for me. Our society has been built up, reconstructed, demolished, and revitalized countless times and yet we continue to see the perpetuation of male dominance and female inferiority everywhere—in film, music, and in my own beloved realm of science. In his introductory remarks, Horgan mentioned that it has been more difficult for him to remain an optimist, given the state of our administration, inequality on all fronts, and the idea that the label “social justice warrior”—which Saini has been labeled as by critics—is necessarily negative.
I would echo those doubts, but Saini left us with an important message: be observant of yourself. Just as science students are expected to remain astute of their surroundings and engineers are needed to identify points of weakness in a system, we need to be more mindful of how and why we treat each other the way we do. Like Saini said, our generation has the opportunity to remove ourselves of the gendered “luggage” our parents and grandparents carry. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to throw this nonsensical, pseudo-science garbage into the Hudson so that it may sink and never resurface again.
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