Inferior

How Science Got Women Wrong

Angela Saini begins with a personal memory of being the only child to show up for a model rocket launch she had organized at school. Later, as a student interested in engineering and mathematics, she often found herself one of very few women in the room. That feeling of isolation reflects a wider pattern. Girls often do well in science and mathematics at school, yet women remain underrepresented in many scientific fields, especially at senior levels.

For centuries, this gap was explained as proof that women were naturally less capable. Science helped build that story. Many major institutions excluded women outright, and even when women made major discoveries, they were denied credit or pushed aside. Marie Curie was refused entry into the French Academy of Sciences, and researchers such as Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell Burnell saw their work recognized through male colleagues instead of through them.

These old beliefs were reinforced by influential thinkers. Charles Darwin argued that men had evolved sharper minds because they competed for mates, while women were more passive. Victorian scientists used similar claims to defend women’s exclusion from education, politics, and public life. Women were described as naturally suited to the home, and their supposed inferiority was presented as a fact of biology rather than a product of unequal power.

Not everyone accepted that version of nature. Writers and campaigners such as Eliza Burt Gamble challenged Darwin’s conclusions and pointed out that traits linked with women, including cooperation and care, were essential to human survival. Over time, even the biology used to separate the sexes began to unravel. Hormones once treated as male or female turned out to exist in both sexes, and their effects were far more complex than simple stories about aggression in men or passivity in women.

Modern research also shows how deeply bias shapes scientific careers. Mothers are often judged as less committed than fathers, and women without children still face hiring discrimination, exclusion, and sexual harassment. In one study, scientists rated the same application less favorably when it carried a woman’s name. Science is not produced in a vacuum. When a field has long been shaped by male assumptions, those assumptions can slip into what counts as evidence, what questions get asked, and whose abilities are taken seriously.