Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (39 page)

Meanwhile, the same research team was planning the 2014 publication of an American study with related implications. They examined data for over 2,000 women-owned and nearly 48,000 other U.S. firms (all privately held) between 2005 and 2009, a time when large numbers of workers were laid off because of the Great Recession. They found that “workforce reductions are more than twice as frequent at male-owned firms as at female-owned firms (13.5% versus 5.9%)” and that average year-over-year workforce reductions also differed “substantially” (2.3 versus 1.8 percent). (Economists, probably seeking “neutral” language, call this “labor hoarding.”) The gap persisted after controlling for many differences between the two groups aside from gender. As in the Norwegian study, it is not known how these differences will affect profits in the long run. Even the underlying motives remain somewhat speculative, but the authors quote Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller, the CEO of TRUMPF (a high-tech international manufacturer of machine tools and medical technology), who said on the
PBS NewsHour
in 2012,

It’s just a terrible thought having to lay off people, because we like our employees and we need them. And they are well-trained, and they’re loyal. And they have been working for us for decades, some of them, or many of them have. And it’s just a terrible thought to have to send them away.

They also note what Susan Spencer, a meat-processing entrepreneur and former NFL general manager, told Reuters in 2011: “Women’s
empathy enables them to look at business issues through a wide angle lens.”

Another pair of economists, Renée Adams and Patricia Funk, surveyed both board members and CEOs in public companies in Sweden, to probe possible differences in values between men and women in these roles. They received responses from 628 people, around a third of those approached. The results were striking, even at the top:

Male directors care more about achievement and power than female directors, and less about universalism and benevolence. This is consistent with prior literature that has found that across cultures men consistently attribute more importance to self-enhancement values (achievement and power), whereas women emphasize self-transcendence values (universalism and benevolence).

These differences in leaders parallel those often found in studies of ordinary women and men. But not all the sex differences followed the usual male-female pattern: “Female directors are less security and tradition oriented and care more about stimulation than male directors.” Surprisingly, but in line with the economists’ finding about security, women directors are also slightly more “risk loving” than their male colleagues. So adding more women to boards in countries that
don’t
have quotas might be expected to decrease achievement orientation, power brokering, and commitment to traditions among directors, while increasing benevolence, universalism, and risk taking. By the way, women board members in Sweden are more likely to be married and have on average more children than their U.S. counterparts, probably because the social supports for mothers in Sweden—one of the world’s most gender-equal countries—are much better, and the supports include paternity leave for fathers.

Interestingly, women directors across countries tend to be younger than their male counterparts, in all likelihood because it’s (so far) been harder to find qualified women. The age difference is
consistent with my prediction that gender balance will be easier to achieve as the pool of appropriately experienced women increases. That pool grows fast as you go down the executive ranks. But this no longer means that women are being kept down. The larger cohorts of women who have the necessary experience are moving relentlessly up. The glass ceiling is becoming a golden ladder.

What about the dark side of corporate behavior? In December 2013, sociologist Darrell Steffensmeier studied 83 real corporate frauds involving 436 defendants. A very small number of the defendants were women, some involved only through an intimate relationship with a male defendant. A few women committed fraud independently, enabled by their roles in company finance. No women were involved in conspiracies (such as that of the infamous Enron executives); women had minor roles and profited less from their crimes. The authors conclude, “Sex segregation in corporate criminality is pervasive. . . . Our findings do not comport with images of highly placed or powerful white-collar female criminals.” They consider the obvious hypothesis that men have more opportunity to commit these crimes but argue that since women now make up about half of mid-level management, they should theoretically make up half the criminals at that level, instead of only 25 percent. At the upper levels, women have 15 percent of the jobs but commit only 8 percent of the crimes. In most cases they were acting with men and not independently or with other women. So women are greatly underrepresented in crime even after taking account of their more limited opportunities.

This research is consistent with the finding published by economists David Dollar and his colleagues in 2001, showing that cross-nationally, the more women there are in a country’s parliament, the less corrupt the country is. They cite “a substantial literature in the social sciences which suggests that women may have higher standards of ethical behavior and be more concerned with the common good. Consistent with this micro-level evidence, we find that at the
country level, higher rates of female participation in government are associated with lower levels of corruption.”

They of course accept that women should play a greater role in government for the sake of fairness, but they add that “our results suggest that there may be extremely important spinoffs stemming from increasing female representation: if women are less likely than men to behave opportunistically, then bringing more women into government may have significant benefits for society in general.” Corruption being one of the most intractable obstacles to progress in the developing world—the great majority of humanity—the future of the species may depend in part on the number of women in parliaments. Given that corruption has been one of the great obstacles to economic development in Africa (among other places), it has been deeply encouraging to see a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in parliaments on that continent during the past few years—often because of quotas, at least initially. Rwanda leads the world with 64 percent women representatives, and a dozen other African countries have 30 percent or more. Gretchen Bauer has summarized evidence that this trend is intensifying and spreading and tends to enhance both the position of women and the quality of democracy generally in sub-Saharan Africa.

These kinds of studies, not just in Africa but throughout the world, leave little doubt about what is happening to women and men, and not much more doubt about what the consequences will be. At the grass-roots level, the education of girls and the empowerment of women promotes, within ten years, the democratization of countries, as well as smaller families, better health for women, children, and husbands, more education for both boys and girls (with a multiplier effect for future generations), a less burdened natural environment, and more prosperous families and nations. The gender gap in voting means that as women increasingly come to the polls, governments will tend to reduce inequality, improve health
and education, reduce family size, combat pornography and abusive sex, and diminish male supremacy.

More women at the top will mean governance that is more communicative and collaborative in legislatures, more candid, transparent, and open to change in executive offices, and much less corrupt. In the private sector, more women on boards of directors will make corporations less friendly to personal achievement and power and more open to universalism and benevolence. They will be somewhat less risk-averse and less committed to company traditions, show more concern about environmental protection, and be more willing to incur small losses in short-run profits to avoid mass layoffs. And when there are more women in top executive roles (CEOs, vice presidents, middle management, and so on), leadership will be more effective overall, with improvements in about 80 percent of corporate divisions and leadership skills, but especially in taking initiative, practicing self-development (this is about self-improvement, not power), integrity, honesty, and driving for results. Corruption and, especially, conspiracies to commit corruption will dramatically decline. Men will face difficulties as they adjust to this new world, as boys have long had to do in the female-forward world of school. But with a certain amount of care they will adapt and will reap many benefits.

First, the mass of men at the bottom of the pyramid will gain from it being less steep, so that the weight above them will be easier to bear. Second, they will live in a less violent world and, therefore, the weaker majority of males will not become victims of the blood sport that has dominated history. Third, boys and men will be allowed to be themselves and not constantly pressured to live up to a typecast masculinity; those with a strong nurturing side who want to share the care of children or even largely take it over, and to live more of their lives in private rather than in public will not be ridiculed. Fourth, just as the rise of women puts to rest the bad old stereotypes of female sexuality—not just that it is less driven (true on average),
but that it is sweet, adorable, passive, virginal, and meekly admiring of men—so it will soften the stereotypes of male sexuality, lessening the pressure on men to perform or to prove themselves by “scoring,” sequestering, dominating, or otherwise controlling women. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, and transgender people will stop having to hide who they are.

Now, many objections can be raised to these predictions. Women in the studies done so far have felt they had a lot to prove, have been minorities in their organizations, and have had lots of men around to mentor, help, balance, and complement them. These studies can’t say for sure what women will be like when they are done with the struggle for acceptance and when their power and responsibility truly equal those of men. They certainly don’t tell us what would happen in an unlikely future world
without
men. And of course, some women who come to power will be in the mold of former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin—gun-toting women who try to out-macho men and care little for women’s rights. But they are a minority, and women voters in general don’t seem to like them. In any case, we can have only so much certainty about the future. If you are going to make any predictions at all, one of your best bets is going to be on the one in my admittedly flawed crystal ball: empowering women will make a better world.

Epilogue: #YesAllWomen

I
n late May 2014, a deeply disturbed twenty-two-year-old man murdered four young men and two young women on his college campus in Isla Vista, California, before killing himself. He was typical in one way: of eighty mass killings involving guns between 1984 and 2014, men perpetrated seventy-eight. But he was unusual in being completely explicit about his motive: his resentment and hatred of one class of people. He left voluminous videotapes and writings in which this motive was unambiguously stated. He was launching a “war on women.” In one representative video segment he said,

Girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because, I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy. I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male.

The “perfect guy” who will take great pleasure in slaughtering women is the “true alpha male”—a chilling use of the language of biology and a thoroughly twisted, yet not entirely false, view of human evolution. Also reflecting history, his frustration focused on women, but he killed even more men.

Rebecca Solnit, an author and historian, in her 2014 book
Men Explain Things to Me,
puts it this way: “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” The perpetrators are male.

There are varying accounts of how the hashtag #YesAllWomen came about, but according to the
New York Times,
it was a response to #NotAllMen, the gist of which was that not all men are misogynistic murderers; the response was no, of course not, but
yes, all women
are and need to be afraid, really afraid, of that minority of men. There were a million #YesAllWomen tweets within a few days. Here are some of those early ones:

• #YesAllWomen because “I have a boyfriend” is more effective than “I’m not interested”—men respect other men more than my right to say no

• Because I’ve already rehearsed “Take whatever you want, just don’t hurt me.”

• because every time I try to say that I want gender equality I have to explain that I don’t hate men.

And here are some that appeared or were retweeted in the first week of June:

• Because what men fear most about going to prison is what women fear most about walking down the sidewalk.

• Here’s to the day when I can pump gas at 10pm and not be absolutely terrified.

• Because a smile back can get you followed, but no response can get you killed. And neither one guarantees the harassment ends.

It’s impossible to read even a sampling of these anguished messages without understanding how the weight of a thoroughly
male-dominated human past continues to oppress and intimidate women, how the peculiarly male viewpoint on relations between the sexes has distorted and still distorts every woman’s life every day. But what I would like to do now is turn the hashtag around, to make it positive: “#YesAllWomen are equals, not just objects of men’s desire.”

Or maybe, when all is said and done, better than equals. How about a world in which women mainly rule? Or even, on some more distant day, a world without men?