Published in 2023
256 pages
10 hours and 25 minutes
Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired and The Sunday Times, and she regularly presents science programmes on the BBC. In 2020 she was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. She has won honours from the Association of British Science Writers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Angela has a a Masters degree in Engineering from Oxford University and was a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What is this book about?
By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.
In this bold and radical audiobook, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini goes in search of the true roots of gendered oppression, uncovering a complex history of how male domination became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.
Travelling to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analysing the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and tracing cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, she overturns simplistic universal theories to show that what patriarchy is and how far it goes back really depends on where you are.
Despite the push back against sexism and exploitation in our own time, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. Saini ends by asking what part we all play – women included – in keeping patriarchal structures alive, and why we need to look beyond the old narratives to understand why it persists in the present.
