The Evolution of Men and Women
Roy F. Baumeister asks Is There Anything Good About Men? (Via HN.) He begins with this wonderfully interesting idea: biological differences result in a different payoff for risk-taking behavior. For men, taking risks, striving, fighting other men can payoff brilliantly in terms of reproductive success, but the same actions don’t help women much:
Experts estimate Genghis Khan had several hundred and perhaps more than a thousand children. He took big risks and eventually conquered most of the known world. For him, the big risks led to huge payoffs in offspring. My point is that no woman, even if she conquered twice as much territory as Genghis Khan, could have had a thousand children. Striving for greatness in that sense offered the human female no such biological payoff. For the man, the possibility was there, and so the blood of Genghis Khan runs through a large segment of today’s human population. By definition, only a few men can achieve greatness, but for the few men who do, the gains have been real. And we are descended from those great men much more than from other men. Remember, most of the mediocre men left no descendants at all.
What we have here is a very thoughtful, scientifically rigorous piece on the difference between men and women. Baumeister asserts that men and women have the same abilities but different interests. That is, the intellectual capacity to do challenging tasks is present in equal measure in men and women, but due to different evolutionary strategies, pressures, and physiologic capabilities (partly described above), men and women choose different paths to navigate their interpersonal relationships and society as a whole:
The conclusion is that men and women are both social but in different ways. Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations, economic networks, and so forth.
The narrow sphere versus larger group has big consequences:
Cross and Madsen covered plenty of research showing that men think of themselves based on their unusual traits that set them apart from others, while women’s self-concepts feature things that connect them to others. Cross and Madsen thought that this was because men wanted to be apart from others. But in fact being different is vital strategy for belonging to a large group. If you’re the only group member who can kill an antelope or find water or talk to the gods or kick a field goal, the group can’t afford to get rid of you.
It’s different in a one-to-one relationship. A woman’s husband, and her baby, will love her even if she doesn’t play the trombone. So cultivating a unique skill isn’t essential for her. But playing the trombone is a way to get into some groups, especially brass bands. This is another reason that men go to extremes more than women. Large groups foster the need to establish something different and special about yourself.
So, whither all these hyper-competitive, differentiation-seeking, glory-oriented men? From an reproductive perspective, men are more expendable than women:
If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs.
And, you can even scale these species-oriented sociological conclusions back down to psychological conclusions:
All-male groups tend to be marked by putdowns and other practices that remind everybody that there is NOT enough respect to go around, because this awareness motivates each man to try harder to earn respect. This, incidentally, has probably been a major source of friction as women have moved into the workplace, and organizations have had to shift toward policies that everyone is entitled to respect. The men hadn’t originally built them to respect everybody.
So, I quote extensively not only to lead myself back through Baumeister’s thought process, but to save these ideas for posterity (links tend to go dead in this ephemeral online world). Anyhow, these are interesting ideas: men and women are much more different in their goals and interests than in their abilities.