Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

clementia –
mildness and
clemency.
Women are often stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men,
and are famed for their superior ability to see things from the perspective of
others. If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made
excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields
to testosterone-charged but simple-minded machos. Popular myths
notwithstanding, this rarely happened in the real world. It is not at all clear why
not.
Patriarchal Genes
A third type of biological explanation gives less importance to brute force and
violence, and suggests that through millions of years of evolution, men and
women evolved di erent survival and reproduction strategies. As men competed
against each other for the opportunity to impregnate fertile women, an
individual’s chances of reproduction depended above all on his ability to
outperform and defeat other men. As time went by, the masculine genes that
made it to the next generation were those belonging to the most ambitious,
aggressive and competitive men.
A woman, on the other hand, had no problem nding a man willing to
impregnate her. However, if she wanted her children to provide her with
grandchildren, she needed to carry them in her womb for nine arduous months,
and then nurture them for years. During that time she had fewer opportunities to
obtain food, and required a lot of help. She needed a man. In order to ensure her
own survival and the survival of her children, the woman had little choice but to
agree to whatever conditions the man stipulated so that he would stick around
and share some of the burden. As time went by, the feminine genes that made it to
the next generation belonged to women who were submissive caretakers. Women
who spent too much time ghting for power did not leave any of those powerful
genes for future generations.
The result of these di erent survival strategies – so the theory goes – is that men

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have been programmed to be ambitious and competitive, and to excel in politics
and business, whereas women have tended to move out of the way and dedicate
their lives to raising children.
But this approach also seems to be belied by the empirical evidence. Particularly
problematic is the assumption that women’s dependence on external help made
them dependent on men, rather than on other women, and that male
competitiveness made men socially dominant. There are many species of animals,
such as elephants and bonobo chimpanzees, in which the dynamics between
dependent females and competitive males results in a 
matriarchal
society. Since
females need external help, they are obliged to develop their social skills and
learn how to cooperate and appease. They construct all-female social networks
that help each member raise her children. Males, meanwhile, spend their time
ghting and competing. Their social skills and social bonds remain
underdeveloped. Bonobo and elephant societies are controlled by strong networks
of cooperative females, while the self-centred and uncooperative males are pushed
to the sidelines. Though bonobo females are weaker on average than the males,
the females often gang up to beat males who overstep their limits.
If this is possible among bonobos and elephants, why not among 
Homo sapiens
?
Sapiens are relatively weak animals, whose advantage rests in their ability to
cooperate in large numbers. If so, we should expect that dependent women, even
if they are dependent on men, would use their superior social skills to cooperate to
outmanoeuvre and manipulate aggressive, autonomous and self-centred men.
How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on
cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control
individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have
no good answer. Maybe the common assumptions are just wrong. Maybe males of
the 
species 
Homo sapiens
are characterised not by physical strength,
aggressiveness and competitiveness, but rather by superior social skills and a
greater tendency to cooperate. We just don’t know.
What we do know, however, is that during the last century gender roles have
undergone a tremendous revolution. More and more societies today not only give
men and women equal legal status, political rights and economic opportunities,
but also completely rethink their most basic conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Though the gender gap is still signi cant, events have been moving at a
breathtaking speed. At the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of giving
voting rights to women was generally seen in the USA as outrageous; the prospect
of a female cabinet secretary or Supreme Court justice was simply ridiculous;
whereas homosexuality was such a taboo subject that it could not even be openly
discussed. At the beginning of the twenty- rst century women’s voting rights are
taken for granted; female cabinet secretaries are hardly a cause for comment; and

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in 2013 ve US Supreme Court justices, three of them women, decided in favour of
legalising same-sex marriages (overruling the objections of four male justices).
These dramatic changes are precisely what makes the history of gender so
bewildering. If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system
has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts
for the universality and stability of this system?

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