Angela Saini > Quotes

“Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we're not as different as we seem. Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities. For most of our history, we lived hand in hand. And our biology reflects this.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“No matter how neutral the initial presentation of information, people do tend to gradually recruit the stereotypes and the associations that are prevalent in a culture and then project that,”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“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.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“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!”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Nothing is more seductive that a nice string of data, a single bell curve, or a seemingly peer-reviewed scientific study. After all, it can’t be racist if it is a “fact.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“Plasticity and entanglement imply that every single brain must be unique, for the simple fact that every person’s life experience is different. It is this, argues Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University, that makes looking for differences between groups so fraught with error. Evidence of sex difference in the brain is statistically problematic because each brain varies from the next.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Noticing how competitive and sexually assertive females could be in the rest of the primate world prompted her to question why women in her own society should be thought of as any different.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“All this intellectual jumping through hoops to maintain the status quo. All this to prove what they have always really wanted to know: that they are superior.

Well, keep reaching, keep reaching. One day there will be nothing left to reach for.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“لا يوجد شئ هندوسى فى العدد صفر، غير أنه تصادف أن براهما غوبتا كان هندوسيا، تماما كما لا يوجد شئ مسيحى فى حساب التفاضل والتكامل، غيرأنه تصادف أن إسحاق نيوتن كان مسيحيا.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation

“science has failed to rid us of the gender stereotypes and dangerous myths we’ve been laboring under for centuries. Women are so grossly underrepresented in modern science because, for most of history, they were treated as intellectual inferiors and deliberately excluded from it. It should come as no surprise, then, that this same scientific establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex. This, in turn again, has skewed how science looks and what it says even now.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“As Charles Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century proves, the narratives have often been shaped by the attitudes of the time. Even he, the father of evolutionary biology, was so affected by a culture of sexism that he believed women to be the intellectually inferior sex.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution. . . . The truth will make men free as well as women.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“A couple of years after I graduated from university, in January 2005, the president of Harvard University, economist Lawrence Summers, gave voice to one controversial explanation for this gap. At a private conference he suggested that “the unfortunate truth” behind why there are so few top women scientists at elite universities might in some part have to do with “issues of intrinsic aptitude,” that a biological difference exists between women and men.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Even as their old way of life disappears, the Nanadukan Agta have shown that, beyond the biological fact that women give birth and lactate, culture can dictate almost every aspect of what women and men do.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of white people of European descent, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed?”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“For women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds, they would have to become breadwinners like men. And this wouldn’t be a good idea because it might damage young children and the happiness of households. Darwin is telling Kennard that women aren’t just intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Enjoy your culture or religion, have pride in where you live or where your ancestors came from if you like, but don’t imagine that these things give you any biological claim. Don’t be sucked into believing that you are so different from others that your rights have more value, that your blood is a different color. There is no authenticity except the authenticity of personal experience.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“Gender bias is so steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves discriminating against other women.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“عندما تفكر فى ماضى الهند، ستدرك بسهولة لماذا ظلت الهند الدولة الأكثر تدينا على سطح الأرض، فهى المنشأ لأربع من الديانات الرئيسية فى العالم، وهى الهندوسية والبوذية والجاينية والسيخية، كما أن النسبة المؤية للملحدين بها لا تزال مجرد أرقام أحادية تقل عن عشرة فى المائة حتى الآن. فهنا فى الهند يحيا الماضى فى تقاليد دينية ومعتقدات خرافية، حتى إنه من الطبيعى أن يستشير كبار الساسة وأصحاب الأعمال التجارية التى تقدر بالمليارات معلمى الدين الهندى والحكماء الطوافين بحثا عن التوفيق. كما أن الفلاحين، مثل الذين قابلتهم فى إقليم فيدرابا، يبحثون عن المنجمين ليخبروهم عن طالع المستقبل، وكذلك يفعل كثير من العلماء فى المدن المختلفة مثل مدينة لكهنؤ.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation

“Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” she told reporters when her paper came out. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple data sets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“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.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“There is actually no guarantee that two beautiful and brilliant parents will produce brilliant and beautiful kids. Genetics is bit more of a crapshoot.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“تبدو بنغالورو مختلفة عن بقية أجزاء الهند. تصطف على جانبى الشارع حانات أنيقة، بما فى ذلك حانة اسمها "ناسا" تغرق فى أضواء النيون الأزرق، وداخلها طاولات ذات أرجل تتخذ شكل الصواريخ. وبرغم أنه من المستحيل تقرييا أن تجد لحما بقريا فى معظم أرجاء الهند، بسبب تحريم الهندوس لذبح الأبقار، من السهل جدا الحصول على شريحة لحم هنا. كما يُمكنك أن تجد محل حلوانى لبيع الحلويات الفرنسية، ومحلات لبيع الأطعمة السريعة الأمريكية، ومحلات موضة إيطالية. وهذا المزيج المنصهر للثقافات والأفكار هو الذى جعل من بنغالورو مكانا جذابا لأصحاب المشروعات العلمية.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation

“The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the United States estimates that in 2015 women working full time earned only seventy-nine cents for every dollar that a man earned. In the United Kingdom, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. But today, according to the Office for National Statistics, a gender pay gap of more than 18 percent still exists, although it’s falling.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“ربما تكون العلوم الزائفة والخرافات سمة من سمات الحياة الهندية اليومية والمعاصرة بقدر ما كانت عليه منذ مئات السنين.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation

“We know that around the age of two or three, children start to become aware of their own sex. Between the ages of four and six, a boy will realize that he will grow up to be a man and a girl that she will be a woman. It’s also by then that children have some understanding of what’s appropriate for each gender according to the culture they’re in.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“إن المولعين بالعلم هم الذين يُعرضون حياتهم للخطر فى سبيله.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation

“من المنطقى أن يعتقد الأشخاص الذين يعيشون فى القرى الريفية، حيث تكون معدلات مرتفعة، كما أن أنماط الحياة بها لم تتغير لعدة قرون، فى الأساطير الدينية والخرافات.”
― Angela Saini, Geek Nation