Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (31 page)

The work is ongoing. Julia Sacher and her colleagues, in a 2013 summary of brain-imaging studies, found differences beyond the hypothalamus. Controlling for brain size, women have more gray matter and a thicker cerebral cortex. Women show stronger connectivity in the left brain, men in the right, contradicting expectations about men’s logic and women’s emotionality. Some studies find differences in the corpus callosum, a huge highway across the brain, which could mean the hemispheres collaborate better in women. Many studies show brain differences in activation of particular circuits in emotional and mental states, although this need not be causal. In 2014 Amber Ruigrok and her colleagues reanalyzed 126 brain-imaging studies and found several anatomical differences, although even such structural differences could theoretically result from upbringing. However, Sacher also showed in 2013 that there are many functional changes in brain activity over the menstrual cycle.

It’s important to understand that the
similarities
between men and women’s brains are much greater than any differences; the differences that exist are unrelated to general intelligence, but they are tied to specific dispositions. A key finding is that the male amygdala is relatively larger and dotted with testosterone receptors, while the prefrontal cortex, which inhibits aggressive and other impulses coming from the amygdala, is larger and develops earlier in women. These differences, combined with hormonal effects on the prenatal hypothalamus, could help explain why men greatly exceed women in violence and driven sexuality.

Incidentally, it used to be said that women could not be airline pilots or heads of state because of the supposed emotional swings of
the menstrual cycle. That was before a landmark study, “Body Time and Social Time,” by sociologist Alice Rossi and economist Peter Rossi, the first and perhaps the only major menstrual cycle study that included men. For one thing, weekends had a much bigger impact than cycle phases. More importantly, men had the same number of bad days a month as women, except that the women’s were cyclical. So, would you rather have your airliner or your country piloted by someone who has bad days at random or someone who has the same number of bad days coming around like clockwork?

As for women being more emotional in general, we have seen that it depends on which emotions we are talking about. Women cry more easily, but male politicians tear up quite frequently in public. Women show more empathy in most situations, but men are far more likely to have violence on a hair trigger in international relations, and to feel and succumb to inappropriate and even destructive impulses while in office. Men are far more often distracted by sexual impulses and fantasies, even if these don’t result in problematic behavior. And if egotism and exaggerated ambition are emotional, which sex has more of those? All in all, the world will become safer and more efficient as women take their proper roles in leadership.

Chapter 9

♦

Developing Daughters

M
en have ceded some power to women partly because we have daughters and want them to succeed. It’s not that we don’t love our boys, but girls have been kept down for thousands of years. I have a son, two daughters, and a stepdaughter, and I want them all to do well. Boys today are running into serious trouble, and they need certain kinds of protection. But in terms of who runs things, in the present as well as the long course of history, the odds remain stacked against girls. So this chapter’s title has two different meanings: it’s both about how girls develop into women and about how
we
can develop
them
into great achievers without making them mimic boys and men.

Journalist Hanna Rosin’s provokingly titled book
The End of Men
made the case that among younger women, a replacement process is well under way. I agree—but anthropologists take the long view. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her stunning speech about the difference, a devastating war had just freed the slaves, but the nonviolent struggle for women’s rights was only beginning. Half a century later women would vote, control property, find out about and use barrier methods of birth control, and begin to infiltrate the professions.

Half a century after that, women realized how far they had to go and created second-wave feminism. At stake were equal pay for equal work, equal access to education, the media, the military, and the professions, new and full reproductive rights, sexual freedom of choice, the end of the double standard of sexual morality, a real voice in the public square, the option to escape from an abusive or otherwise bad marriage, an end to rape and other violence that kept women down and out, and a final expiration of
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
.

Now we are closing in on yet half a century more, and we should take stock. Rosin’s hard-hitting book was criticized by many for predicting male demise, of course, but not all women’s advocates welcomed it, either. Rosin, they said, grossly exaggerated progress. I don’t think she did. Although I don’t want to see the end of men, I think progress for women is now steady and irreversible. Rosin reasonably looked back as well as forward, but on a time scale of decades. In this book I have asked you to look back millions of years, then thousands, then hundreds; we can look forward generations at least, but even centuries and millennia start with decades.

I acknowledge the limitations. As of 2014, women were CEOs of only 4.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 5.2 percent of Fortune 1000 firms. They held only 78, or 18 percent, of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and only 20 of the 100 Senate seats. Women headed only 20 of some 190 nations. Only 26.4 percent of colleges and universities had women presidents. This looks bad. But with one exception—there were also 20 women heads of state when Rosin wrote—every one of these numbers was better.
In two years.
Not one of them slid back.

The CEO percentage is the smallest but the fastest rising. It was 3 percent in 2011. That’s a 60 percent increase in less than the time it took for one of my kids to go through middle school. And by the way, women are not just running cosmetics, apparel, and food corporations. They've been running General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Archer Daniels Midland, Lockheed Martin, DuPont, General
Dynamics, Oil States International, Xerox, Duke Energy, Gannett Company, Yahoo, Alliant Energy, Schnitzer Steel, ITT, International Game Technology, Clearwater Paper, and Benchmark Electronics. Boy stuff—the machinery of the world. And on average,
they outearn males
on the same list. On May 9, 2014, Susan Story became CEO of American Water Works Company, the largest water and wastewater utility company in the United States. What is more, the proportion of women in the next tier, ready for
future
CEO positions, is 14 percent, and there are still more in the next tier after that. CEOs are not usually young, and most started in a time when barriers to entry for women were much higher. This means, in my view, that the future is wide open.

By the way, since corporate boards are overwhelmingly male, men must have voted to make women the CEOs of all those companies, just as male legislators had to vote to give women the same right. Politics is complex, but in these massive companies the boards were not appointing women out of the goodness of their hearts; nor were they risking billions of dollars for political correctness. They were picking the best person.

Two of the companies mentioned above, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, are mostly devoted to defense. Does this negate the idea that increasing numbers of women leaders will make for a more peaceful world? Not at all. Women have every right—in fact, they have a responsibility—to play a role in defending their country, including joining the armed forces, fighting, rising in rank in the services, and becoming leaders there and in the military-industrial complex. The positive influence of women on the safety of the world is a matter not of their avoiding certain professions but of the added stability they and their priorities will bring to whole societies benefiting from their judgment and their leadership.

But how should we think about the percentages? How are women faring across the board in becoming leaders? Is the Senate glass 80 percent empty or 20 percent full? How about the CEO glass—95
percent empty or 5 percent full? And the head of state glass—90 percent empty? Having lived from the 1940s until now, I have absolutely no doubt about the answer. What would my mother say, who never saw a woman delivering the TV news, being asked for an expert opinion, or sitting in a cabinet meeting? Or my European immigrant grandmothers, who couldn’t vote until they were about forty years old and for whom the idea of a woman prime minister of Britain or Germany would have sounded like a hurtful joke? What would
they
say to my daughters—their great-granddaughters—about the changing prospects for women?

When I went to college, in the 1960s, professional schools had a handful of women in an entering class of one hundred. Today women make up 47 percent of medical school classes, and law schools are similar. More than 40 percent of students entering MBA programs—the pool of future CEOs—are women. Women are 30 percent of federal district court judges, 32 percent of federal appeals court judges, and one-third of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, there is a long way to go, and women
should
be impatient. If not for their impatience, I would be much less optimistic. But change has been happening steadily for 150 years in the Western world. The questions are: How do we make it happen faster here? And how do we help the rest of the world catch up?

I happen to live in Georgia, not a bastion of women’s rights. A young friend of mine, Anna Beck, just served four years as executive director of Georgia’s WIN List—“WIN” stands for Women in Numbers. The organization puts pro-choice women in office in the state by campaigning and fund-raising but also by training a cadre of young women as future candidates who will know what it takes to win. During Anna’s four years alone, Georgia’s WIN List protected 96 percent of women incumbents in 2010, added four new women to the statehouse in that year, protected 90 percent of women incumbents in 2012, and added four new women to the statehouse in 2011 and 2012. WIN’s programs
have been mounted in a hostile male environment in one of America’s least educated and least feminist states, in the face of redistricting that favors right-wing male candidates, and amid initiatives to roll back reproductive rights. Grass-roots organizations like this are emerging in many places. They are holding the line for women’s rights, and they are advancing women’s power.

Nationally there is EMILY’s List, named for a saying:
Early Money Is Like Yeast.
By raising more than $50 million for 2012 U.S. Senate campaigns, this PAC helped incumbent Claire McCaskill of Missouri beat a man who had claimed that rape victims can physiologically prevent pregnancy. It elected Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and consumer leader, who defeated the popular, handsome, gun-loving male incumbent by a comfortable margin; Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the first woman senator from her state as well as the first Asian-American and the first Buddhist in the Senate; and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the first openly gay person ever to sit in that body. These victories created the largest class of Senate women in history.

In 2012 EMILY’s List also helped elect Maggie Hassan, the only pro-choice Democratic woman governor in the country, as well as nineteen new women to the House and five Senate incumbents besides McCaskill. EMILY’s List was founded in 1985 with twenty-five members; they soon helped elect Barbara Mikulski, who brought the number of women Senators to two. By now, they have helped bring one hundred women to the House, nineteen to the Senate, ten to governorships, and more than five hundred to state and local office.

President Barack Obama, on the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, paraphrased King, who’d said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Obama said it “may bend towards justice, but, it doesn’t bend on its own.” Hillary Clinton, in conceding the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Obama and endorsing him, said that as a woman, she was well aware of the biases still in place. But she also said she ran as a daughter whose mother never dreamed of such opportunities, and
as a mother worried about her own daughter’s future. It so happened that at that moment, the fiftieth woman to leave the planet for outer space was orbiting overhead. “If we can blast fifty women into space,” she said, “we will someday launch a woman into the White House. Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before.” But she also looked back to the suffragists, abolitionists, and civil rights heroes. Because of them, she said, she grew up taking it for granted that women could vote, and her daughter took it for granted that schools could be multiracial. “Because of them and because of you,” she continued, “children today will grow up taking for granted that an African-American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States.”

In the summer of 2013, three years before the 2016 presidential election, EMILY’s List held its first “Madam President” town hall in the early primary state of Iowa. The event’s organizers say they intend to hear that phrase in the White House in 2017 whether or not Hillary Clinton runs. They are already investing in that outcome. Early money is like yeast, and this bread is rising.

But a book about the whole sweep of evolutionary history must look at the world, not one country, and at a broader range of political views. Angela Merkel (a former quantum chemist) is chancellor of Germany, the population center and economic powerhouse of Europe; recently elected to a third term, she will be one of the longest-serving modern European heads of state. Norway and South Korea, both also leading democracies and economic powers, are headed by women, as are Brazil and Argentina, the two giants of South America. (By September 2014 Brazil’s leader was facing one serious challenger—also a woman.) India, the world’s largest democracy, was led by Indira Gandhi from 1966 until (except for 1977–80) her assassination in 1984. The prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990 was Margaret Thatcher, who spearheaded dramatic change as she presided over a country pivotal in
the Atlantic alliance and the Commonwealth of Nations. Julia Gillard, as prime minister of Australia, protected a key Pacific economy from the Great Recession; Australia fared better than almost any other advanced nation. And Israel was led by a woman prime minister, Golda Meir, during some of the most difficult years of her country’s history.