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 mostly 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 to work:
Feminization doesn’t have to be about women having more power in deciding whether to go to battle. It could also be a society that rejects a culture of masculinity, which allows for violence to retaliate for insults and toughening of boys through punishment and veneration of military glory.
Pinker wrote the following email
We’re seeing two sets of forces that can pull in opposite directions. The common interests of women and men make up the other set. Men are more concerned with dominance and status and are more willing and able to take greater risks to achieve them. Women are more inclined to value safety and health 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 sent me back an email:
When looking at sex differences and outcomes, it is important to remember that differences between men & women on values, cognitive abilities, and other aspects are usually small. However, differences between men & women in the activities they are most interested in, and in their relationship styles (especially those 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 pointed out 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:
Girls compete using strategies that minimize the chance of retaliation, and decrease 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.
Benenson summarized his thoughts as follows:
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 variety behaviors and characteristics. Benenson, Webb, and Wrangham argue that:
We found that females had stronger self-protective responses than males to important social and biological threats. They also had a personality that was more sensitive to threats and stronger emotional responses to threats. There were also more threat-related clinical conditions that suggested 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.
Benenson added an additional dimension to the discussion on sex roles within organizational politics in an email.
From an early age, women dislike groups of same-sex people more than men. While boys and men are more open to competing with people of higher and lower status, girls and women prefer to interact only with those with 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. These two conflicting motivations result in girls and women pursuing high status, but concealing their desire by avoiding direct competitions. This gender difference can have a significant impact on how women shape organizational culture.
Haidt pointed to the strategies Benenson describes with her colleagues.
Conflict can take a different form. It is easier to focus on the things someone said that hurt another person, even if they were not intentionally. A greater tendency exists to respond to an offense with mobilizing social resources in order to exile the accused 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 American National Election Studies’ surveys, Elder Greene and Lizotte discovered that the total number voting that they are feminists has increased from 28 percent to 34 percent in the past 24 years. The growth was greater among women (29 to 50 percent) than it was among men (18 to 25 percent).
The biggest gains were among young people aged 18-24 years old, where the number of women with college degrees doubled from 21 percent to 42 percent. Most striking is the data showing the antithetical trends between women who have college degrees and those who identify as feminists. This contrasts with men with college degree, whose self identification as feminist dropped from 37 to 35 per cent.
The authors discovered that anti-feminist identity was found.
This is not a reflection of feminist identity, but a unique social identity. The striking difference between feminist identity and anti-feminist identity is that gender is a significant driver for feminist identification in 2016, but there is virtually no gender gap for anti-feminists. Bivariate analysis shows that 16 per cent of women and 17 per cent of men identify themselves 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.”
Source: NY Times
