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Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, writes in his book “The Better Angels Of Our Nature,” that “the most fundamental empirical generalization about violence” is that
it is mainly committed by men. From the time they are boys, males play more violently than females, fantasize more about violence, consume more violent entertainment, commit the lion’s share of violent crimes, take more delight in punishment and revenge, take more foolish risks in aggressive attacks, vote for more warlike policies and leaders, and plan and carry out almost all the wars and genocides.
Pinker continues:
Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory.
In an email, Pinker wrote
We’re seeing two sets of forces that can pull in opposite directions. One set comprises the common interests of men on the one hand and women on the other. Men tend to be more obsessed with status and dominance and are more willing to take risks to compete for them; women are more likely to prize health and safety and to reduce conflict. The ultimate (evolutionary) explanation is that for much of human prehistory and history successful men and coalitions of men potentially could multiply their mates and offspring, who had some chance of surviving even if they were killed, whereas women’s lifetime reproduction was always capped by the required investment in pregnancy and nursing, and motherless children did not survive.
“Mapping the Moral Domain,” a 2011 paper by Jesse Graham, a professor of management at the University of Utah, and five colleagues, found key differences between the values of men and women, especially in the case of the emphasis women place on preventing harm, especially harm to the marginalized and those least equipped to protect themselves.
I asked Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business about the changing political role of women. He emailed back:
In general, when looking at sex differences in outcomes, it is helpful to remember that differences between men and women on values and cognitive abilities are generally small, while differences between men and women in the activities that interest them, and in their relational styles (especially involving conflict) are often large.
When the academic world opened up to women in the 1970s and 1980s, Haidt continued, “women flooded into some areas but showed less interest in others. In my experience, having entered in the 1990s, the academic culture of predominantly female fields is very different from those that are predominantly male.”
Haidt noted that:
Boys and men enjoy direct status competition and confrontation, so the central drama of male-culture disciplines is ‘“Hey, Jones says his theory is better than Smith’s; let’s all gather around and watch them fight it out, in a colloquium or in dueling journal articles.” In fact, I’d say that many of the norms and institutions of the Anglo-American university were originally designed to harness male status-seeking and turn it into scholarly progress.
Women are just as competitive as men, Haidt wrote, “but they do it differently.”
Haidt cited a 2013 paper, “The development of human female competition: allies and adversaries,” by Joyce Benenson, of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.
In it, Benenson writes:
From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.
In summary, Benenson wrote,
From early childhood through old age, human females’ reproductive success depends on provisioning, protecting and nurturing first younger siblings, then their own children and grandchildren. To safeguard their health over a lifetime, girls use competitive strategies that reduce the probability of physical retaliation, including avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals and disguising their striving for physical resources, alliances and status.
In a separate November 2021 paper, “Self-Protection as an Adaptive Female Strategy,” Benenson, Christine E. Webb and Richard W. Wrangham, all of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, report that they
found consistent support for females’ responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life’s dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males.
These differences manifest in a number of behaviors and characteristics, Benenson, Webb and Wrangham argue:
We found that females exhibited stronger self-protective reactions than males to important biological and social threats; a personality style more geared to threats; stronger emotional responses to threat; and more threat-related clinical conditions suggestive of heightened self-protectiveness. That females expressed more effective mechanisms for self-protection is consistent with females’ lower mortality and greater investment in childcare compared with males.” In addition, “females more than males exhibit a lower threshold for detecting many sensory stimuli; remain closer to home; overestimate the speed of incoming stimuli; discuss threats and vulnerabilities more frequently; find punishment more aversive; demonstrate higher effortful control, and experience deeper empathy; express greater concern over friend’s and romantic partner’s loyalty; and seek more frequent help.
In an email, Benenson added another dimension to the discussion of sex roles in organizational politics:
From an early age, women clearly dislike group hierarchies of same-sex individuals more than men do. Thus, while boys and men are more willing to compete directly with both higher and lower status individuals, girls and women prefer to interact with same-sex individuals of similar status. This does not mean however that girls and women don’t care about status as much as boys and men do. For both sexes, high status increases the probability that one lives longer and so do one’s children. The result of these two somewhat conflicting motives is that girls and women seek high status but disguise this quest by avoiding direct contests. This gender difference likely impacts how women seek to shape organizational culture.
The strategies Benenson and her colleagues describe, Haidt pointed out,
lead to a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.
In “Feminist and Anti-Feminist Identification in the 21st Century United States,” Laurel Elder, Steven Greene and Mary-Kate Lizotte, political scientists at Hartwick College, North Carolina State University and Augusta University, analyzed the responses of those who identified themselves as feminists or anti-feminists in 1992 and 2016.
Based on surveys conducted by American National Election Studies, Elder, Greene and Lizotte found that the total number of voters saying that they were feminists grew from 28 to 34 percent over that 24-year period. The growth was larger among women, 29 to 50 percent, than among men, 18 to 25 percent.
Some of the biggest gains were among the young, 18-to-24-year olds, doubling from 21 to 42 percent. Most striking is the data revealing the antithetical trends between women with college degrees, whose self-identification as feminist rose from 34 to 61 percent, in contrast to men with college degrees whose self-identification as feminist fell from 37 to 35 percent.
Anti-feminist identity, the authors found,
is not just a mirror image of feminist identity but its own distinctive social identity. A striking difference between feminist and anti-feminist identification is that while gender is a huge driver in feminist identification in 2016, there is essentially no gender gap among anti-feminists. Indeed, bivariate analysis shows that 16 percent of women and 17 percent of men identify as anti-feminists.
In addition, Elder, Greene and Lizotte wrote, “while young people were more likely to identify as feminists than older generations in 2016, young people, particularly young women, also have a higher level of anti-feminist identification compared to older groups.”