Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (37 page)

Some people want a manned mission to Mars, but I think that can wait. What we need is a mission to earth, and fortunately it has already started.

Let’s look at just a few of the more dramatic changes. In my mother’s generation it was not considered safe for women to drive, although she boldly did. Now we know that women have far fewer accidents than men at all ages, a difference particularly pronounced in the youngest and oldest people. They are just plain better drivers.

When I was in high school, in the 1960s, girls’ sports were almost
nonexistent. By 1978
Time
magazine had a cover article, “Women in Sports,” describing an ongoing revolution. The education law known as Title IX was six years old. Authored by Congresswoman Patsy Mink and Senator Birch Bayh, it prohibited institutions receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex.

By 2014 the number of women in high school sports had increased elevenfold from pre–Title IX levels, in college more than twelvefold. Women have transformed Olympic sports as fans of both sexes fill stadiums to watch them compete. Since 1978 I’ve continued to show my students a slide of that old
Time
cover in my lectures on sex differences. It depicts a young woman playing lacrosse, her lovely features shaped in a typical higher-primate threat face, common to the innate wiring of expression in all monkeys, apes, and human beings. I recently added a photo of soccer star Mia Hamm playing her fierce game with that same expression on her face. Women compete, women fight, women want to win, but they rarely take it to the dangerous extremes men have pursued for so many centuries.

However, they are not just playing: 16 percent of students at West Point are now women, up from zero in 1975, and reflecting the current proportion of women in the armed forces. Although the proportion has been stable for decades, plans are in place to increase both. Women have been deployed to conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and are more often demanding and getting combat roles. They have often flown fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters in combat. Tammy Duckworth, originally from Bangkok, Thailand, and elected to the U.S. Congress in 2013, flew combat missions in Iraq. In 2004 she had lost both her legs and partial use of one arm when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her Black Hawk helicopter. In 2013 the Pentagon lifted its combat exclusion role for women in the infantry, opening hundreds of thousands of frontline positions. Women are scheduled for admission to elite Army Ranger training in 2015 and Navy SEAL training a year later.

Does this mean women will become just like men? I don’t think so.
They are and will continue to be good soldiers, but the fact that women want to serve does not negate the differences. As women become true partners of men, wielding influence at every level of society, the risk that anyone, male or female, will have to go to war will go down. This is the feminization that Steven Pinker writes about in
The Better Angels of Our Nature
and that in part explains the great long-term decline in violence. The growing participation of women in leadership roles is an unstoppable trend, and its consequences will be the ones Elizabeth Cady Stanton predicted: a more humane and safer world for everyone.

The evidence for the trend itself is clear. As we have seen, girls and women in the United States do better in school than boys and men. The gender gap has been almost completely reversed. The majority of young people now graduating from high school, entering college, and finishing college are female, and if males were not favored for purposes of diversity—in effect, many colleges now have de facto affirmative action for males—the imbalance would be worse, an outcome not necessarily welcome to women competing for men in the hookup culture. But it would inevitably mean more women leaders. Medical, law, and business schools continue to slightly favor men, but ongoing trends may equalize those numbers soon. One of the more interesting new psychological findings is that not only are leaders more likely to be the eldest child in their families, but this effect is larger for girls, yet another factor favoring women’s future achievement.

In the twenty-first century, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008, men’s rates of job loss and overall unemployment have been much higher than those of women. According to the National Women’s Law Center, from the beginning of the recovery to July 2013, American women regained almost 95 percent of their lost jobs while men regained only 65 percent. In the same time period, women’s unemployment declined from 7.6 to 6.5 percent and men’s from 9.9 to 7.0 percent. Briefly in 2013, men’s
unemployment edged a tad below women’s, but that was due to men leaving the workforce, not to men getting jobs.

We’ve seen positive trends in the leadership of major corporations, but the percentages of women at the top remain low. Not so for new businesses; the number of women going into business for themselves in the twenty-first century is one and a half times that of men. Between 1997 and 2014, the number of businesses owned or majority-owned by women topped nine million, about 30 percent of businesses, employing more than seven million other people. Given that women-owned businesses are increasing in number much faster than men’s, women’s share can only climb. As
Forbes
magazine put it in 2012, “Entrepreneurship is the new women’s movement.”

Similar trends are evident in the nonprofit sector. In September 2013, when Helene Gayle, the physician CEO of CARE, was asked on CNN for her thoughts on being the first woman and the first person of color to head that massive charity, she said, “I think it was just a matter of time. Women are playing all sorts of different roles in our society. . . . If it hadn’t been me, it may have been another woman. . . . There will be one day when this is not going to be so unique.” Women lead around 19 percent of America’s four hundred largest charities, nearly four times the percentage of women running Fortune 500 companies.

But women’s managerial role is changing at its roots. A front-page article in the
New York Times
of September 7, 2013, by Jodi Kantor described the then-latest graduating class at Harvard Business School, the first products of an experiment to change the school’s culture. HBS offered assertiveness training for women (including teaching them how to raise their hands) to improve grades in the all-important case study sessions, as well as coaching about the outside-of-class culture, dominated by super-wealthy male students, to discourage women from trading sexual and social favors—or,
worse, deliberately holding back on the success they could have in courses—in order to develop relationships with male stars.

This is not the college hookup culture, although it involves sex; these women are not nineteen but twenty-seven. They are no longer postponing real relationships; they are seeking them, and they will never again have access to this kind of pool of unmarried successful men. For decades women at HBS were openly denigrated by men, lacked role models, knew they would not have the same real-world opportunities, and retired into the background. But Drew Gilpin Faust, a distinguished Civil War historian and Harvard’s first woman president—the one who replaced Larry Summers after his sexist gaffe, among other blunders—made up her mind to change this culture and in 2010 began to appoint administrators at HBS who would do that. The changes were strong and pervasive.

There was certainly pushback from some men, but even they conceded that the program was working and that they paid attention to new data showing that women investors do better than men and that companies with more women on their boards do better as well. Interviewed at a graduation party celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women at HBS, one young couple about to get married joked about their status, because the woman had a job and the man did not. She said she would be supporting him, and he called her his “sugar momma.” She said, “It’s, like, perfect, I came to HBS just to find him, a stay-at-home dad, my trophy husband!” Kantor, interviewed on WNYC after her article came out, had heard from the fall semester’s newly enrolled women. They were puzzled by the note of pessimism in her story, finding the school a very good place for women and a very positive experience.

Stanton did not just talk about fairness for women, or even just the improvements in society that would come from declines in bad male behavior. She envisioned positive changes that would follow from the rise of women. She alluded to man as “but half a complete being,”
and said sardonically, “To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing.”

Is it? Or is there something more than the negative—the
not-male,
as in refraining from violence and abusive sex—that we can legitimately expect from women as they gain more power? Evidence is growing that there is.

It is well established that there is a gender gap in political attitudes, and not everyone likes the result. Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could have been elected without disproportionate support from women, and the media frequently mention this as a problem for Republicans in the United States. This is also true in Britain, Norway, and a number of other advanced countries, but not all of them. Also, a simple left-right distinction will not explain all gender differences: Women are more in favor of government-sponsored social programs and more opposed to war but less in favor of marijuana; they are more in favor of equality for gays and lesbians but less in favor of sexual liberation generally. Marriage, motherhood, divorce, labor participation, socioeconomic status, and other factors contribute to women’s voting patterns.

Many studies have probed the differences more deeply. Social psychologist Alice Eagly has studied this extensively; she pointed out in a 2009 overview of her life’s work that women and men are both helpful to others, although in somewhat different ways. But she and her colleagues had already done a large combined analysis of many studies and come to certain conclusions. First, women consistently outscore men on politically relevant social compassion; this means they “support the provision of social services . . . including housing, child care, educational opportunity, and financial support in the form of welfare. Women are also more opposed to violence, including warfare, the death penalty, and partner violence, and advocate protections from violence, such as gun control.” They are
also more favorable toward equal rights for gays, lesbians, and, predictably, women. So the gender gap in voting is consistent with the psychological research.

However, “Women also advocate more restriction of many behaviors that are traditionally considered immoral,” including casual sex and pornography. None of this changed much over the course of the late twentieth century. The gender gap in social compassion was evident in many studies over the period from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, during which both women and men fluctuated in this measure, but without shrinking or enlarging the gap. The same can be said about traditional morality, but in the other direction. Probing more deeply, a commitment to equality as a core value predicted both social compassion
and
traditional morality,
independent of sex.
This does not translate simply into a left-wing agenda, but it suggests that as women continue to participate in politics in the advanced countries and increase their role in the developing world, there will be more equality and social compassion and less tolerance for pornography and casual sex.

There are other ways to see big trends. In 2006 political scientists Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth analyzed the gender voting gap in ten countries—Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States—in relation to work, marriage, and motherhood. They had two measurements of attitudes. The first asked how much the respondent favors or opposes the government (1) financing projects to create more jobs, (2) reducing the workweek with the same goal, and (3) actually providing jobs for all who want work. The second simply asked whether the person supports or affiliates with left or center-left parties. It turns out that unmarried women with full-time jobs have a bigger positive gender gap on these measures than married women with full-time jobs, but the only women who have a reverse gender gap are married women who are not in the labor force. Iversen and Rosenbluth also detect time trends and project
them forward: “Given the overall trend toward more women in the workforce, we are not surprised to find that women as a group seem to be moving to the left politically.” Time-series analysis clearly shows such a move in rich democracies. However, because women started to the right of men, and because they are not yet fully integrated into the labor force in many countries, the complete transition may take some years.

As we saw from the Eagly analysis, it seems likely that future increases in women’s influence on women (among other things) will expand government programs that provide jobs and increase equality.

If you think that’s a threat to freedom, don’t worry, because women’s empowerment also predicts democracy. Population scientist Paula Wyndow and her colleagues did a stunning paper on this subject in December 2013. They began:

In the latter part of the 20th century many countries moved away from autocratic rule toward more democratic regimes. During this period women’s economic and social rights also improved, with greater access to education and employment, and a worldwide fall in fertility rates. The general presumption has been that democracy leads to improvements in these aspects of gender equality. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the possibility that a causal relationship may operate in the opposite direction.

Insufficient no longer; Wyndow’s group analyzed data for ninety-seven countries followed from 1980 to 2005, so they could look at all the relevant dimensions and how they changed over time. While you can’t do a randomized experiment on the whole world, this is a pretty good way to get some idea of what causes what.