Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy

Biologically, women are better suited to run a world in which testosterone-related qualities—physical strength, unrelenting competitiveness, sexual predation—can be more obstacle than blessing, says neuroanthropologist Konner (Tangled Wing). "Male domination has outlived any purpose it may once have had," he writes. "Empowering women is the next step in human evolution." For most of human history, i.e., during our hunter/gatherer phases, female status was elevated. Women did 90 percent of the child-rearing—via the "cooperative breeding" of mothers, sisters, and grandmothers—and acquired 70 percent of the food. Their nomadic life made ownership, and the male-associated violence and war it can inspire, impossible. Further, women's voices were well heard, as critical elements of language were likely their invention owing to mother/child communication needs and to female group foraging (which facilitated talking, unlike men's hunting, which required silence). The dawn of agriculture, ownership, and war disadvantaged women for a few millennia but that is ending, the author says. The delicate, data-driven New World requires cooperation and communication, not endless combat, and women are already leading the way, engineering, among other things, the end of the 2013 U.S. government shutdown.