Once there, she was sedated for “further treatment”, only to actually be given an ultrasound to determine the sex of the twins. Eventually her food was spiked with egg, to which she’s allergic, to get her into hospital. Saini interviews Mitu Khurana, who was pressured by her husband’s family to find out the sex of her unborn twins. Women are often bullied, coerced and even tortured into having abortions, and there are numerous cases in India of dead newborns found, sometimes in large numbers, the corpses inevitably proving to be female. Saini documents the horrific lengths to which some families in South Asia will go to to prevent births of girls. It’s a miracle some women are alive at all. Killer whales are one of very few species known to experience menopause: females stop producing offspring around the age of 40 but have been known to live to 90 in the wild, and they look after their male offspring for life. His methodology was basically going to a town and ranking the average attractiveness of the women, like a park bench pervert under the guise of science. A male baby will be acted upon by hormones that transform it Francis Galton, now remembered as the father of eugenics, made a “beauty map” of the British Isles. There are many intriguing and shocking facts along the way: all fetuses in the womb start as female. Along the way she debunks many myths, explores some of the wrongheaded ideas that prevailed in the past, and the new studies and debates that are arranging around gender differences in humans and animals.

In Inferior, Angela Saini explores the science, past and present, that has attempted to explain and often dismiss women. Another note-heavy review with possible spoilers, if you consider nonfiction something that can be spoiled.įinally getting back into the swing of nonfiction after a very fiction-heavy 2020 thus far, I thought I’d turn to some gender science.

Inferior saini