April Book Club

Note: All the upcoming books and those that we didn’t select in the February vote are listed at the bottom of this section.

April: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew
For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists—most of them male, of course—claimed to find evidence to support this.
Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition or behavior, science has continued to tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else.
In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating—and sorely necessary—new science of women. As Saini takes readers on a journey to uncover science’s failure to understand women, she finds that we’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous, or that the way men’s and women’s brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes.
As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women’s bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology, and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women’s brains, bodies, and role in human evolution.

Rachel will be moderating this month. Hope you can join us for some thoughtful discussion.

Upcoming books: (June is the next book selection month.)
May: Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (Kevin)
June: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves (Steve)
July: We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality by Jill Elaine Hasday (Steve)

Not selected this time:
Humanism: Five Values for Living Well by David B McLaughlin
Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt Paperback by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer