Harbored inequities

I have been speaking to AI a lot recently in a bid to familiarize with prompts and learn more about how it receives, processes and gives information. Deepseek AI is particularly interesting as it highlights the 'thought process' before it gives you a result which is a marvel. So I told the chatbot about my reading preferences; a mixture of history, psychology and economics and it recommended a few books for me. One of them was Sapiens by Yuval Noah, this book also peaked my interest when I heard Gachau Njoroge, a physical fitness influencer speak about it in one of his videos. I will show you an excerpt from which I came across in the book and found interesting, especially now in these times where gender differences are at the center of most discussions online. The context of the following is a chapter in the book where Yuval is attempting to explain how female oppression became a part of many early societies spontaneously. It did not spread from one part of the world to another. Yuval challenges a hypothesis that a difference in survival strategies, men being naturally competitive and ambitious, whereas women tended to move out of the way and dedicate their lives to raising children.

" 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 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 competing and fighting . Their social skills and social bonds remain underdeveloped. Bonobo and elephant societies are controlled by strong networks of cooperative females, while the self-centered and uncooperative males are pushed to the sidelines. Though Bonobo females are weaker on average  than males, the females often gang up to beat males who overstep their limits.

If this is possible among Bonobos and Elephants, why not average homo sapiens? Sapiens are relatively weak animals, whose advantage rests in the 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 out-maneuver and manipulate aggressive, autonomous and self-centered 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 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 characterized not by physical strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness, but rather by superior social skills and 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 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 significant events have been moving at a breathtaking speed. at the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of giving women voting rights 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 it could not be openly discussed. At the beginning of the 21st century women's voting rights are being taken for granted; female cabinet secretaries are hardly a cause for comment; and in 2013 five US Supreme court judges, three of them women, decided in favor of legalizing same sex marriages (overruling the objections of four male justices).

These dramatic changes are precisely what make 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?"