The Patriarchs by Angela Saini review – why it’s still a man’s world

Exceptions to patriarchal societies: women from the Mosuo community in China’s Yunnan province, where ‘a man’s place is in his mother’s home’. Photograph: VCG/Visual China Group/Getty Images

Angela Saini’s 2017 Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong (2017) interrogated sexism in science and reminded readers that there is no biological basis for entrenched inequality between the sexes. That understanding has now led her to explore how, in that case, patriarchy took root, let alone became so powerful throughout history and across the world.

This is a vital question, and never more so than now. With the backlash against women’s rights that we see in so many places, from Afghanistan to the US, Iran to Russia, we need to think more about how patriarchal societies begin, how they are maintained – and how they can be changed.