Angela Saini: How Science Got Women Wrong
“But what I do do is whenever I read an academic paper is I read around it. I don't just take that as given or assume that that's, you know, now cast in stone and science has nowhere else to go after this paper has been written, but that it sits in a context of other research, and it’s evolving. It's always evolving. It's moving towards the truth. It's sometimes very faltering, really the history of sex difference research and race difference research, I think is a really good example of how faltering it can be and how orthodoxies can get created and take a really long time to be corrected. But if you understand it in that historical context, then I think it's easier to accept science for what it is, which is a journey towards truth, rather than assuming that it's already there,” so says Angela Saini, an independent British science journalist, author, and the founder of the ‘Challenging Pseudoscience’ group at the Royal Institution. Angela joins me today to talk about science as fact, and the nuance that comes when we introduce human bias to the equation through interpretation. While Angela originally found a home in the objective and rational field of engineering, she tells us it was her experience as a journalist that opened her eyes to the vested interests and motivations within the scientific community that influenced the research and answers being published and touted as fact.
Angela has since written two books interrogating the divisive politics embedded in the science of human difference, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story and Superior: The Return of Race Science. Whether it is sex research or race research, certain long-tentacled orthodoxies get created, she tells us, permeating our culture and eliminating any nuance from the conversation. Angela’s work encourages us to dismantle these orthodoxies, which have for so long sat uncomfortably with our lived experiences, and instead, to think more critically about what we assume to be “the norm.” We get into the way our cultural training has impacted our natural genetic destiny, how easy it is to slip into essentialist ideas of what it means to be a woman, and how important it is to embrace intersectional arguments when we talk about equality. When we reflect on who we really are, not just who we have been told to be, she tells us, we open up all the possibilities there are for being human. OK, let's get to our conversation.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Interrogating the politics behind the science of human difference…()
Extricating culture from nature…()
There is no one way to be a woman…()
MORE FROM ANGELA SAINI:
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story
Superior: The Return of Race Science
Watch her 2019 BBC Documentary: Eugenics: Science's Greatest Scandal
Follow Angela on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well, I'm really excited to talk about Inferior with you. I thought it was such a great read, which is hard to do I think when you're weaving together so much social science and science, but it was propulsive, and fun, and incredibly interesting. And also I think I'm sure you've gotten the feedback from other women who have read the book that it was so deeply resonant where you're like, oh, of course. It offered an explanation for so many things that we take as givens in this society. So I know it's been a minute since you wrote the book, but it's, I think a durable classic.
ANGELA SAINI:
Oh, that's so kind of you. That really means a lot. I mean, writing it did challenge me as well. I have to say because when I started, I had a lot of preconceptions about what it meant to be a woman, and all these myths and ideas that you are fed with from some to young age. Researching it just challenged a lot of that, and completely realigned the way I thought about myself, and about the women in my life and what it means to be, for example, married or to be a working mom, all these things. So I am probably of all the readers, most grateful to it.
ELISE:
I also think, and it's, it's interesting to have this conversation at this time when science is being so challenged. It's being so defended and so challenged simultaneously, and we're seeing this sort of bifurcation in society. And it's interesting because your book is, it does such a good job of establishing science as it's done as a study, as a field, as a performance versus reality, right? Or that, but that science is all around us, right? Like the way that we engage with the world is science. Everything in our bodies is science. And then there's the field of science of studying that and trying to prase and grasp it. And that field of course, is susceptible to our own biases. And we like to hold up science as inviolable fact, and it is what it is, but the reality is that we are humans interpreting it and that things get a little murky and messy. And it's interesting to have that conversation a time when people are so defensive of science, for good reason, we really struggle with the nuance. So can we, can you talk about that a little bit? Like how to criticize something or field while also having deep reverence for it, which you clearly do.
ANGELA:
Is tricky because I'm not religious myself. I'm not particularly spiritual either. And I have from a very young age, turned to science as a kind of objective, rational, logical place to tell me about how the world works and the universe and everything. And it was only actually much later, even after I finished university. So I studied engineering, and the kind of science education I got was about facts. And that was part of the reason I wanted to do it was because I thought this isn't subjective. This is just fact, and I'm learning facts. And they can't be disputed. It's only very much later that as a journalist that I saw how many vested interests there are in the scientific community and academia, and what motivates people to research what they do, and the answers that they come up with. And that is particularly true when it comes to science of human difference.
So I came to Inferior after a career kind of writing about engineering and physical sciences topics in which the, these issues don't always come up, although they do sometimes. But when I started writing about the science of human difference, it looked like such a battlefield. There were people who vehementally disagreed with each other. And I had to ask myself, how can this be the case? If there's no such thing as bias in science, if people are perfectly objective all the time, then how can you, on the same facts, completely disagree with each other about what they mean. And, and sometimes even what the facts are, you know, what you are actually looking at and observing. And that's because in politics was embedded there right from the beginning, from the birth of modern Western enlightenment science, there were certain assumptions, political assumptions about the world, including this idea that women were the intellectual inferiors of men.
You can see that if you read Rousseau, or if you read many Enlightenment philosophers, you can, that's, they're very clear on that. And also this idea that there is a racial hierarchy, that there are certain groups of people who are fundamentally, in temperament, and intelligence, and behavior, different from others. And this explains why the world looks the way it does. So there were this, there were these attempts to kind of naturalize in equality, inferiority, and superiority. And given that, that was the basis upon which the scientific human difference started. We shouldn't be surprised that for hundreds of years, even into the present, we still labor under those misconceptions, those political ideas, and that politics today still affect how scientists think. So what I'm trying to do in my work is say, how can we have a better science of human difference? And the only real way to do that is to interrogate the politics inside you.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's fascinating because as you point out so beautifully throughout your book, there are all these sticky myths, right? That then do inform sort of sex differences, that there's an acute difference between the ways that we behave culturally, particularly for women who are definitely more constrained and confined to gender roles versus our actual inherent ability. This still shows up, right? You, you mentioned Larry Summers needing to resign because essentially he said, “Oh, well, there are fewer women in STEAM because they're just not as equipped or capable,” but then you also, you know, which obviously led to a tremendous amount of public outcry, but there's, it's probably still the perception of many academics, even though you point to, I can't remember who it was, but all the manifold research that actually, when they look at you talk about, I think, pages and pages of points looking at sex or gender differences, sex differences, or gender differences, sex differences, sex differences that we're within sort of one, one percentage, point of difference.
ANGELA:
Or less, yeah. Or less, or even much, much less. Yeah. Statistically insignificant most psychological sex differences studies, study after study has shown that there's hardly any differences there. That's not to say that if you have very large groups of people, you can't find whatever you want to find, you can. And that's part of the problem with the signs of human difference is that if you take any group and you look for a difference, eventually you will find one, just because individually we're so different from each other. And so you can get these kind of statistical things that emerge. And also, I mean, this is an area of research that's been growing over the years, that the way that we’re socialized and cultured affect our biology, it can affect the height, the relative height of men and women. If women don't eat as much as men, then the relative heights will be that your relative heights will be different.
Your sizes will be different. So there's so many different aspects of who we are, that we think, you know, as humans we're, as, or as scientists, people are always trying to pin down, “What are we deep down?” You know, if you strip away all the culture and all the society, what is there underneath that we really truly are? And the reason we struggle so much with that question is because I believe we are cultural creatures when you get right down to the bottom. We can't exist outside a cultural framework. That's what makes us human. And that is also what leads to the huge variety that we see. And that's what complicates these attempts to pin down who we are deep down, because everything that we are is a product of the way that we live and the societies that we created around us.
ELISE:
And going back to sort of what you had mentioned about when you look through any group, you can find anomalies. That's where culture really comes in, right? Particularly in things like the sciences, where, I mean like the Noble Prize is, is an embarrassment in terms of its preference for anointing, a lot of old white men. And so we look at sort of these exemplars in science, or medicine, or math as, as indicative of an entire sex. And the reality is that women have been excluded and discouraged, and have had to fight just to sort of get a seat on the bench for decades. So it's not a good example at all of our innate capacity. Is that sort of what you mean by the ways that we look at people to represent entire populations?
ANGELA:
That's definitely one strand of it. So even Charles Darwin, who was so careful in so many other aspects of his work fell into this trap of assuming that women must be the intellectual inferiors of men. Because when he looked around him, he saw that they weren't doing what men were doing. Now that was the crux of his argument. When it came to sex differences in humans was that women were not attaining. So this is in his, his language not attaining what men are attaining. And of course that is blind to the fact that how can women attain what men attain, if they're physically and legally denied from doing it, you know. In his time women didn't have the vote. They were barred from many universities. They were barred from the scientific academies of Europe. That didn't change until the middle of the 20th century.
So in 1945, the first female member of the Royal Society of Britain, which is one of the big scientific academies, it's kind of a gateway into, you know, establishment science started to admit the first woman member. So this is a long history of exclusion, which again, is rooted in the Enlightenment. This Enlightenment idea that women are not as rational or intellectually capable as men are. So why do we need them in universities? And why do we need them in the academies when they're obviously not going to be doing what men are doing, they are much better suited at home, supporting men and raising children, than actually doing that intellectual work for themselves. So we are just recovering from those legacies. And even though legally women, you know, have well recovered in Western many Western societies, at least. Psychologically, and in terms of our biases, we haven't, it's still so commonplace for people to do what Darwin did and look around and say, well, maybe, you know, women, aren't getting all these Nobel Prizes because they're just not capable. And these men are just better. And, you know, that's why things look the way they do already. That record is changing more women are women winning Nobel Prizes. Although I don't think we should use that as a measure anyone's ability, but the point is that it takes time to recover from long histories of exclusion and even longer for people's minds to change about these group differences.
ELISE:
And within that world of Darwin, he also makes a point, which I don't know that he necessarily belabors, but I think it's really important because in this letter to this feminist who had written to him to be like, explain to me how men are superior. And he disappointed her by saying that he thinks men are superior.
ANGELA:
Although, intellectually not morally women are morally superior.”
ELISE:
Which is its own horrible handcuffs for us culturally, this idea that our role is to be intellectually inferior, but morally superior to be, to hold the goodness and be the light house for, for moral and respectable behavior, is in itself a terrible cage. Particularly when we think about this in the context of attaining, and needing to distinguish ourselves, and compete. And not that the two are necessarily at odds, but idea of sort of being a behaving and being a respectable person of decency, I think is at odds at times with the behavior that we expect from people who win, and people who lead, and people who take no prisoners, and all of these sticky ideas about attaining that we have in this culture. And you talk about it too. I think it's, it's really interesting in the context of sexuality because the other sticky myth is that men are, you know, promiscuous. I was gonna use a, a nastier word and that women are more withholding, that we haven't had to work to find partners in the way that men have worked to find partners. And that's wrong. But we for so long also conducted studies. Can you talk about the study that they like to do on campuses around casual sex? Because it's such a perfect example of the way that we pin our social structure on science and then get really skewed results.
ANGELA:
Well, it's interesting how female sexuality has been seen by different civilizations through the century, even the millennia. So at the moment I'm writing a book about patriarchy. And if you look in, for example, ancient Greece, there was, there was this idea that young women were needed to be sexually controlled, because they were just sexually rampant. You know, if they were given the opportunity, they would just go wild. Whereas in the 19th century, and I'm talking again in Europe here and North America, there was this very puritanical fixed idea that people had, which was classist in itself. So it didn't apply to all women, but there's this notion that women were naturally chaste. Darwin also subscribed to this, that women were naturally chaste and men were naturally promiscuous, they wanted to spread their seed as widely as possible. And this fed in the 20th-century into this idea of parental investment theory, that the reason that men are promiscuous is because they do not need to invest so much in a child when a woman gets pregnant, you know. Whereas a woman, she has to be pregnant for nine months and she has to care for that baby breastfeed that baby.
So it's in the interest of men to spread their seed as widely as possible, get as many women pregnant as possible. Whereas it's in the interest of a woman to wait and be choosy, and chaste about which partner she picks for her big investment in her child. And on the surface that sounds logical. Where it doesn't sound logical is in women's own experiences of their own sexuality. And this was the issue that came up in the 1970s, as women started to enter biology and primatology in very large numbers. And they asked quite, you know, legitimately, who is writing these textbooks and saying these things, because this is not our experience. We do not feel ourselves to be chaste. We do not feel ourselves to be waiting for that one right person. And you know, this also glosses over historically that marriage is a patriarchal institution.
It's not one that was constructed in all likelihood by women in order to constrain themselves. It was constructed by men. So this idea of monogamy within marriage is a very, it's a very patriarchal one that oppresses women. So these women, you know, these women professors, biologists were saying, “What actually does the data say about us and who we are?” There was a famous experiment that was done on the campus of a university in America. I think it was Florida State, but I'm reaching here because it's been so long since I wrote Inferior, I'm afraid, where they asked people on campus, will you, you know, they sent students out and they were to ask other members on the campus: Would you have sex with me? Would you go back to my room with me? And of course many of the men said yes, and many of the women were hesitant, because our experience in the cultures that we're in, of being approached by a stranger who propositions us are quite different.
There are, you know, layers and layers of risk involved here that perhaps men don't feel in the same way because of the cultures that we're in. So this experiment in itself was pretty loaded to begin with. And its results were used to reinforce this idea that women are sexually chaste and men are promiscuous. But when this same study was repeated later, I think in Germany, I think it was in Germany many decades later, again by people who just didn't recognize this from their own experience, you know, just didn't recognize going out and dating, that women were these ridiculously chaste creatures who weren't interested in sex. They found exactly the opposite, but that was because they framed it differently. They showed pictures to men and women and said, you know, if this person were, you know, this is this person, if they were interested in sex with you, would you go home with them? And in that kind of situation, a more controlled situation and not quite as threatening, many more were women said, yes. In fact, about as many women as men said yes. So what they did find was women could be more, a bit more choosy, but they certainly weren't chaste.
ELISE:
No, it was Florida State and three-quarters of the men were willing to have sex and none of the women, but there and equal numbers were willing to go on a date. And of course, I mean like there's no, I mean, if I were stopped by a researcher on campus and asked if I wanted to engage and, and I'm putting this in quote, like “promiscuous sexual behavior,” there's no way that I would cop to that. It's just not, it's a social taboo, particularly when I was in college. I'm sure it's, maybe it's gotten better, but it's interesting though how those sorts of studies, and as you mentioned, it was a landmark study, then become this resource point or this reference point for our sexuality in total, in a way that's. It goes back to that question too, of when we do science about humans and the complexity within each of us, the world, within each of us, the way that we're shaped by our genetics, our environment, our cultural conditioning, our education.
And then you, you try to turn it into something that's an emphatic statement about all people. It falls apart. It's interesting. And then going back to the original conversation about you being an engineer, and like when you're talking about code or like, does it work or does it not? It's very binary, it's zeros and ones, right? It's tidy, tidy, tidy universe. And we live in a very messy world where also many things are at play. You mentioned not being religious and I'm not religious either, I would call myself quite spiritual in the sense that I believe that there's energy that we don't understand. And maybe someday we will, but how do we start to cuz it feels like as the world becomes more complex, we need more specific language and to broaden our understanding of these things. So like how do we start to talk about it as like the difference between science is fact and science as conjecture, like what is fact and what is anecdotal observation?
ANGELA:
This is the hard thing. I mean, there are some things that we can with certainty say about the world. The world is round. It is not flat. You know, the earth moves around the sun, not the other way round. And so there are some things that empirically we can observe, and we can measure, and we can be so certain about. When it comes to studying humans. It is a huge minefield because we are so different as individuals, our cultures impact so much of our behavior and even our physiology, you know, like as I already said, you know what you eat and how you dress. Every part of us in, you know, early scientists, often conflated culture with biology and thought that there were certain groups of people around the world who just were behaved the way they did or wore what they did because of their biology, that this was all part and parcel.
And we still struggle with extricating culture from nature. I think for the basic reason that we haven't fully accepted within the sciences, that culture and nature are very often the same thing that they are completely intertwined with each other, and will never really be able to extricate them. So I think this pointless to me, exercise of trying to get to the root of who we are as humans will never really be done. And it will always be a political football, because there are always vested interests here. You know, there are people who want to fight for this idea that inequality is natural, that groups of people, and I mean group inequality here. I'm not saying that individuals don't have different capacities and talents. Obviously as individuals, we all do this idea of group difference of gender difference or racial difference. There are so many people around the world still so invested in this idea that inequality, historic inequality is a product of who we are, not of social or historical factors, so that debate will never stop.
And it affects the sciences just as it, as it affects any other parts of life. The problem is, you know, going back to your question, how do we know what we can trust and what we can't when it comes to distinguishing scientific fact. And my answer to this has been, I don't fully ever trust anything that I read. That's not to say, you know, it all goes out the window and I don't believe anything that scientists say. But what I do do is whenever I read an academic paper is I read around it. I don't just take that as given, or assume that that's, you know, now cast in stone and science has nowhere else to go after this paper's been written, but that it sits in a context of other research and evolving. It's always evolving. It's moving towards a truth, sometimes very faltering. The history of sex difference research and race difference researcher, I think is a really good example of how faltering it can be and how orthodoxies can get created and take a really long time to be corrected. But if you understand it in that historical context, then I think it's easier to accept science for what it is, which is a journey towards truths rather than assuming that it's already there.
ELISE:
And the orthodoxy it's, it has such long tentacles. And I'm with you in the sense that I think our best approach now is to sort of break those tentacles, and ask people to sort of think a little bit more critically about what they believe, which is in of itself really hard, but then you have other, I don't even know if you'd call it an orthodoxy. And you mentioned this, something that spent a lot of time thinking about, but within medicine and science, that really does our daily lives as women we're too complex to be studied. Everyone sort of works around us. We're not the mythical. What is it? 155-pound man, women are more complex, hormonally, in every conceivable way as you write, nobody wants to do experiments on someone who could possibly be pregnant. And so we're left out of the research. And do you see that changing or evolving now that more people are aware of it. It wasn't something that I was aware of until the last, probably five years of my life.
I just assumed I could take medical science as truth or a complete version of the truth. And then when, I guess when you start to parse it, and most of us don't have, aren't scientifically literate. I put myself in that camp, then you start to get into the minutaea of like, oh, it kind of only shows some results and a certain number of people, et cetera. And, and I guess this leads me to the next phase, which is about the rush to publish, right? Like the pressure that scientists are under to publish and what that then does, the downstream effect of that. The need to make something out of years of research, even when there might not be much to show.
ANGELA:
It has been interesting to me to that in the last five years, as you say, this there's been this huge focus on women being left out of clinical trials, because actually it was way before that, that that was lifted. There was a lot of campaigning by women's health activists in the 1990’s. It means that now that means that now actually for quite a while now, women are expected to be included in clinical trials in the Europe, in Europe and the us. And often a lot of research into sex differences shows that there isn't a huge difference there between men and women. As you say, we are messy and complex, but so are men. You know, this mythical 155 pound men or whatever you mentioned there is as mythical among men as it is among anything else. You know, men are just as varied as we are, but it's been this presumption of enormous sex difference that I think has held women back more than anything else.
This assumption that our biology must be weird in some way, which goes back to the ancient Greeks when actually it isn't, it's not that weird, you know, anymore, the men's biology is very weird. Yes, we do have fluctuating hormones depending on our, our age, you know, and these very much throughout your life cycle. So it's not the case that, you know, just because you can't do studies on a woman who might be pregnant, you could still do studies on a woman who is post-menopausal, or you know, or who can't get pregnant. You know, there are, there are many ways around that because not all women are able to, or are in a position where they want to get pregnant. So I think it's that, that is the bigger issue here. And what we sometimes forget is I sometimes read, and this is always a red flag for me as a journalist, sometimes read, people's saying that drugs tested on men won't work on women.
That is absolute nonsense. Most of the drugs that we use were tested only on very small groups of people, usually university students, male university students, and they work fine in everybody. As long as you have a very large group of people that you're testing on, and whatever group that is, things will work by and large. There are certain conditions, of course, that are gender specific. And this, you know, is generally with regards to reproductive health, but on almost anything else, we vary so much within our groups. Way more on most of the measures of the things that kill us than between the sexes. There's a wonderful set of researchers at Harvard actually called the Gender-Sci Lab, which is relatively recent, but doing amazing work on this, they had a paper out in Nature just last week, debunking this claim that was very common last year that men were innately more likely because of their weaker immune systems to contract COVID than women. And what this paper showed was actually there isn't really the evidence for that. We just don't have the evidence for that based on the studies that we have, that isn't to say, the evidence might not come along. It could, but we can't make that assumption based on the evidence that we have.
So we have to be very careful before we fall into this kind of essentialist trap that women are, are as the ancient Greeks presume these kind of weird mythical complex creatures that are cannot be captured by modern medicine, and men are somehow this homogenous mass of very clearly, you know, measurable human beings that are very well captured by modern medicine. Because neither of those things are true of of course. And it's that nuance that I worry sometimes is missing from this debate. The issue is not just that historically certain enormous groups of people, including older people have not been included in clinical trials. I mean, that was the big issue during COVID—this disease hit the old, old much harder than it hit any other group. And yet older people are very often excluded from clinical trials. It's usually younger people that are included. So it's that breadth of individual difference that we need to think about rather than focusing quite as much as we do on groups.
ELISE:
Yeah. Those differences fall on such a spectrum. Yeah. I mean, it's so it's just interesting, too, to think about the way you mentioned how women over time have probably altered our we've, we've been entrained ourselves to be smaller and weaker, right. For the most part, not all of us, but many of us, according to sort of a cultural standard of what a woman should look like. And it's interesting to think about that in the context of maybe where we started, and how we have actually affected or changed our own genetic or natural destiny over time. But it's, and it's also interesting though, because I don't remember when this story came out in The New York Times, but when started to re excavate caves of warriors in the Amazon, and then did, you know, more advanced science looking at sort of exactly who these people were and found that almost 50% of them were women, or Dean Snow, going back to look at cave paintings, which were presumed to be done entirely by men, and realizing that the hands were women's hands. And the ways in which our, I think even you, you talk about sort of when they've gone to look at tribes that sort of are maybe as close as we can get to sort of our ancestors as possible, that the calorie foraging is pretty equally split, right? Among men and women, both, both, all people were involved in this act of staying alive. How do you think that shows up?
ANGELA:
Yeah, well, I was just going to say, I think we have to be very careful and this is something I've been researching for the last three years. Writing this book on the origins of patriarchy is we have to be very careful before we assume that the gender norms of our particular society are the same in any other in the present, but also historically. Gender norms change so much. So whatever is normal for, you know, I'm sitting in New York right now, whatever is normal New York, I can promise you is not even normal for another state in the U.S. You know, gender normals will be different even within the us. It will definitely not be normal for some other community elsewhere on the planet. And that has always been true right throughout history. So as you say, you know, this idea, this ideal, this female ideal of skinniness and tall skinness that is prevalent in Western culture at the moment.
Number one, has not always been prevalent in Western culture, but is definitely not prevalent in other cultures. In India, where my family are from when I was growing up in the, in the eighties and nineties, every time I went to India, my aunts would get so upset at how skinny I was. You know, this is part of my physiology, I can't do anything about it. I was just really thin. And they would be disgusted by it. You know, why are you so thin? It just doesn't, you know, it's not seen as a beauty ideal, or at least at that time, it was not seen as a beauty ideal in India. Everyone wanted you to be curvy. Tall and curvy. That was, you know, the kind of cultural beauty ideal for women at that particular time. And that when you go back in history, even the idea of gender, even this idea that men and women, to be a man or a woman meant the same as it does now, I think is fraught.
We can't be absolutely sure that it did. I, especially when we go back to, for example, the neolithic, and now we're talking 8,000 to 10,000 or more years ago, we just can't be sure that people thought about, or the gender was even salient to them in the way that it is now. These norms appeared over time, in particular ways, in particular places. And our obsession now, for example, and our surprise in finding that there were women in warriors or women Pharaohs, or Kings, or hunter gatherers or fighters, or all of these things, all of these things that in our own society in our own time are so heavily gendered are surprised in finding that, you know, 5,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, they weren't, actually shouldn't come as a shock to us at all. Gender equality is not some recent invention. It exists, egalitarian societies already exist around the world, but they have existed even more in our long distant past.
So this is not some new thing that we're just encountering now. The fact that we are dismantling this idea of gender, we're breaking it down, what it means to be a man or a woman. I think part of the reason it's happening is because it has always sat so uncomfortably with our lived experiences. The ways in which societies have constrained us in our particular ways has always involved some friction and tension because it has never felt completely right to people. And the way that we're expressing it now. And I really welcome the ways that we express it now, because it goes back to those fundamentals and asks us, who are we really? What possibilities are there for being human, which we were much more free to ask, you know, at the beginning, you know, when we were first building our civilizations, building our states and our cultures. But we feel less free to ask now because of the constraints of the laws and regulations and the states and the governments around us. But if we can get back to that, I think that would be an amazing thing.
ELISE:
All of this is driven by sort of our innate, well-founded curiosity to understand really who we are and that feeling out of like, what's me, and what's been imposed on me, and it's finding sort of that inner resonance, but those moments of trying to reconcile how we perceive ourselves to be with the way that we're perceived by culture, and then how those things crash into each other.
ANGELA:
Go ahead. I was just gonna say I was interviewing this lovely archeologist recently. She's quite young. She works in Europe and she was saying, there has never been just one way to be a woman. And what worries me a little bit about where the discourse or the narrative around feminism can sometimes end up, and I am a feminist, it's a very broad church, obviously that we have so many ways of being feminist, but what sometimes worries me is we can slip into these essentialist ideas of what it means to be a woman. There's just one way to be a woman, which can be just as limiting as those patriarchal notions of what it is to be a woman. I think the more we can expand it the better, because one, it becomes more inclusive, and two, it, it understands us then in our variety, in our complexity, it doesn’t seek to airbursh it away
ELISE:
It's interesting. I'm writing a book about the, the patriarchy too. It'll be very different than yours. It's less about the patriarchy and more about how it shows up in our inner lives. And I agree, you know, that there it's those inner constraints at this point, that so much of what we experience in the world is in some ways, internalized patriarchy against ourselves and against each other, in a way that we're not really conscious, because we're still bound by these ideas of how we're supposed to be and what it means to behave, and what's appropriate for women. And what's not. And also as a feminist, but recognizing one that it's that's that that word is so fraught, right? And I'm a white woman. And so it's particularly fraught for white women, but really trying to parse and understand where that leaves us. How to move forward. What are the hurdles and barriers that remain? How many of them are truly societal versus within ourselves? It's hard. It's really hard to unwind. And then as you say, like culture, culture in some ways is everything, it's as much as our biology.
ANGELA:
And it matters to us. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is part of the arguments around white feminism is that we, and this applies to every single one of us. You know, we are all, we are not just cultured as women. We're not just kind of inducted into womanhood. We're also inducted into race, we're inducted into class. So all these different things that we're invested in that becomes part of who we are. They don't sit separately from each other. They're completely intertwined with each other. And very often, for example, if you look at patriarchy, patriarchy is mediated not just by men, it's also mediated by other forms of power in a society. This is why you get women, you do get women at every level, the society, the numbers you get. I mean, we, when we talk about, you know, gender equality, what we are not talking about is, you know, the woman housekeeper having the same pay as the woman boss, what we're talking about is the woman boss having the same pay as the male boss, the woman housekeeper having the same pay as the male housekeeper, is that the society that we want to build, I think it's important when we talk about equality to be so clear about the terms on which we're talking about it.
If we are just talking about equality for women, you know, which means gender parity at every class level, or every race level, I'm not sure that means very much, you know, is that, is that true emancipation? I'm not sure that it is. And I think that's the exciting thing about this wave of feminism, is that finding that interrogation of what equality would really mean for everyone in every stage of society, what are the possibilities for that? And what does feminist literature and feminist theory have to offer there? It has so much to offer. And for, for me, that is the exciting thing, but I, I honestly don't think equality is possible unless we're really fighting for everyone's equality, not just for the particular group that we happen to be exercised about at that moment.
ELISE:
No, absolutely. I also feel like in the way that the conversations here in the states about white supremacy have been so illuminating for people to really actually grok what it means to exist in an invisible power structure that you aren't really conscious of. You're certainly not necessarily working to exercise it, but you're entrapped it as well, is such a helpful frame for the ways that we think about the patriarchy, right? Because like we throw that word around, but I don't think that anyone, we stop to really think about that as this meta structure for society under which all of these other systems of oppression operate. But I think we're also, and maybe a I'm just slow on the uptick and in beginning to sort of consider and contemplate all of these things, but that we're starting to understand that these structures that we didn't necessarily build, or haven't intentionally upheld, or worked to sustain, do in turn, I don't wanna use the word sustain us, but they do drive us.
And that we're all men, women, we're all in some ways victimized by these same oppressive structures of which we bear little consciousness or awareness. And we can't really fix or rebuild until we understand how they impact our lives. And so I think we're seeing people sort of, it's a struggle, right? This, this awareness, because I think you, you encounter people who feel guilty about something with which they don't necessarily hadn't felt aware and, or hadn't really felt like they were working to uphold, but have just by being in the system. But it's interesting to see where we go next. And whether now that we start to understand how these things work, we can undress them a little faster.
ANGELA:
Yeah. It it's really tricky. I mean, for me, when my last two books—one was on gender, one was on race. And when the race book came out, I remember I was giving a talk in London and there was a woman who came to attend, who was a huge fan of Inferior, but she said that a white woman, she was, but she said she was very hesitant about picking up Superior because she didn't think it would be as relevant to her. And this was, you know, after so many women had already told me, we need more men to read Inferior, why they not reading Inferior. And yet here was someone telling me that she didn't think a book on race would be relevant to her because she, she was white. And I, I think this is a perfect natural thing to do. We don't notice the disadvantage that we are not victims of.
We don't see the role that we play in or, or the part that we play in it. We think that that is somebody else's problem. But if we are to hold men to account for their part in women's suppression, then I think we also have to completely at the same time, hold up our hands in the role that we play in class oppression, or racial oppression, or any other kind of oppression. We have to. If we don't do that, then like, as I said before, what are we really asking for here? Yeah. We're asking for another form of privilege. We're asking to just be recognized and elevated over some other group, you know, and I think these are conversations that are being had now, internationally among, among feminist thinkers. And I think it's good, and high time that they were, not, that they haven't been had before, you know, in the Soviet Union, arguably was that attempt.
You know, it was an attempt to introduce this idea of this leveling attempt, not in a great way, not in a good way, but in a, this kind of leveling attempt on the world in a truly intersectional way. To say, ou know, not just with regards to patriarchy, but with regards to class and everything. We know that that didn't work, but we have to ask our us now in the 21st-century, then what will work? How can we actually achieve this true equal egalitarian vision that we have? Will it always be in a kind of piecemeal war of attrition type of way, or is there some bigger way of doing it? And I don't think we would do have answers to it at the moment, it feels that we just do it piece meal, perhaps we will still get there. It will just take a very long time.
ELISE:
So as mentioned, Angela's written two books: Superior, which is about the sort of creation of race, and Inferior, which is about this sticky idea that men are sexually superior to women. And she really does an exquisite job of tracing it back to its roots in a way that's fascinating, and accessible, and a fun read that will also make you a little angry. But it's an interesting study in social studies, in the ways in, in which these ideas take hold in our consciousness and then how they ricochet, how they transform what we think we're capable of. For women, obviously we've heard a lot about the dear of women in STEM, but the reality is that women have been earning more degrees and outperforming men in these fields. They're just not the ones who are getting the attention, the positions, the awards. And things are changing as always progress, volution is slow, but I highly, highly recommend her book if want crash course in how so many of these ideas lodge in our minds as facts.