Angela Saini


Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the third, , was published in 2019. Her work has appeared in Science, Wired, The Guardian, The New Humanist and New Scientist. She is also a presenter on BBC radio.

Early life and education

She holds two master's degrees - in Engineering from the University of Oxford and in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

Career

Saini worked as a reporter at the BBC, and left in 2008 to become a freelance writer. In 2008 Saini won a Prix CIRCOM for her investigation of fake universities, focusing on Isles International University. She was named European Young Science Writer of the Year in 2009.
Saini's first book, Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World, was published in 2011.
In 2012 she won the Association of British Science Writers Award for best news item, 2012. She was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2012 and 2013. In 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Gold Award.
Her second book, , was published in 2017. The magazine of the Institute of Physics, Physics World, named Inferior as book of the year 2017. Saini told Physics World that her aim was to tackle the contradictory information on gender studies put forward in the media and in scholarly journals.
“Really I just wanted to get to the heart of that riddle… what does science actually say about men and women and what is the true extent of the sex differences between us?”
In August 2017 an internal memo written by a Google employee about the company's diversity policies, "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", received public attention. Saini criticised the memo, calling it " just intellectual laziness; prejudice masquerading as fact".
Her third book, , was published in May 2019. It was named as one of the top 10 books of 2019 by the science magazine Nature. “People want to believe they were born into a special group. Group superiority really appeals to them,” Saini says. In addition, “Very often they’re not remarkable people in their own right, and they need to believe something about themselves that makes them feel better about who they are.”

Books