'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 book, 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 pushback 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. About the Author Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist and author of three books, including the critically acclaimed Superior: The Return of Race Science and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong. Both are on university reading lists worldwide. She presents radio and television programmes for the BBC, and her writing has appeared in The Financial Times, The Economist, Wired, National Geographic, The Guardian, New Scientist and Scientific American. She has a Master's in Engineering from Oxford University and has been a former fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2022 she was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and a resident scholar at the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin. In 2020 Angela was named one of the world's top fifty thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK.