Further examples of morés that illustrate this generalization are easy to find. The fact that so many of the world’s cultures are patriarchal in design, for instance, is worth pondering.

Female humans appear, in general, to be slightly less capable than males in some areas such as large muscle strength and coordination, and in spatial and numerical reasoning ability.⁸ 

However, these differences are slight compared with the differences among members of the same gender, and compared with the differences between males and females in other species. In addition, they are differences that exist between mythical beings called the “average man” and the “average woman.” Real individuals, male and female, vary considerably from the mean. 

Some women are bodybuilders and some are mathematical geniuses, while some men are weak and moronic.

                                U. of Georgia (steroid-free) cheerleader Anna Watson

Furthermore, objective, scientific analysis reveals that, on average, females are superior to males in other ways, such as in coordination of the muscles of the hands and in verbal communication skills. That they have not become the majority of doctors, lawyers, and political leaders in most of the world’s societies, jobs for which they seem better suited, is puzzling to say the least. (Women are finally beginning to achieve parity in medicine, for example, which has been long overdue.⁹)

Why have females been relegated to positions of lower status and pay in nearly all the world’s societies? This seems not only unfair but illogical and inefficient. Aren’t such tribes wasting human resources? Unfortunately, logic and fairness have not been the determining factors. Cultural efficiency, it turns out, is subtler.

Actually, logic and fairness are just values themselves. In other words, like all values, they’re tentative. They must serve a society’s survival in order to become entrenched in the value code of that society. If they work counter to the needs of a society’s survival in certain areas, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value. In the case of women, motherhood was a higher value.

Women bear the young, and a society’s children are its future in the starkest, most final sense. Women become pregnant due to anatomy and hormones. We are programmed by our genetics to find sex pleasurable. We seek it without needing instruction. The biological drive toward sex is often harnessed and redirected by society’s programming to serve several of society’s needs at the same time, but these do not have to concern us for now. Our line of reasoning has to continue to follow the developing child—society’s future—now in the female’s womb.

Human females, like almost all mammalian females, are not as capable of running, hiding, gathering, and fighting when in advanced pregnancy as when they are not pregnant. After delivery, the child, to whom the mother usually bonds deeply, requires years of care and nurturing before maturing, becoming able to fend for itself, and making adult contributions to society. In short, for thousands of years, if a society was to survive, its males had to protect its females and to assist, at least indirectly, with the work required in nurturing children. A male was simply more likely to provide assistance and protection when he believed that the children were his. Individual males who loved all children were not numerous enough to make a difference to the long-term odds. Those odds were improved significantly when most of the men knew, or thought they knew, which kids were theirs.

Note also that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation; female orgasm is not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies that didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate that enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful and generally submissive to their husbands. Hunting, agricultural, and industrial societies all grew steadily stronger under patriarchies.

In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with supporting values and morés that, in most matters, gave the community’s approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated or were assimilated by expanding, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Whatever increased male commitment to child nurture raised the tribe’s odds of going on. Again note that little of the history of these societies was shaped by a gender-neutral concept of justice.

 

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can now simultaneously contribute children and work other than child nurturing to most areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated girls had to adopt submissive roles to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. the oral contraceptive) and in child-rearing and nurturing technologies (e.g., artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and even for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society’s stigmatization.

In post-industrial societies, there is no survival-oriented reason for women not to be afforded as large and varied a range of career and lifestyle choices as those previously open almost exclusively to men. There is no compelling, survival-oriented reason for any person’s not receiving pay and status commensurate with the value of his or her contribution to the nation’s ongoing life and development.

In fact, what appears to be true is that any limitations placed unduly or unequally on the opportunities of any citizens in the community on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, or race is only reducing the community’s capacity to grow and flourish. Computer technology and the oral contraceptive have made a higher degree of gender-neutral justice possible. If we wish to maximize our human resources, become as dynamic a society as possible, and compete ever more successfully in the environments of our planet and perhaps beyond, we must make education and careers of the highest quality open to all capable citizens. If we are to maximize our human resources, then access to education and careers should be based on merit alone. At least, such is the conclusion we must draw from all the reasoning and evidence we have before us today.

Furthermore, the authorities of society, if only for efficiency’s sake, will probably have to find ways of ensuring that quality nurturing of children receives pay and benefits matching the pay and benefits given to all other kinds of jobs in a society traditionally driven by these incentives. Having kids will have to be a reasonable option if we are to maintain a stable base population for our society in this new century.

Driving women back into a domestic zone would be retrograde and counterproductive, like locking our bulldozers in sheds and digging ditches by hand in order to provide more jobs. For women and men who choose it, the nurturing of children must be given real respect and pay if we are to continue on the path of knowledge-driven and technology-based evolution that we have chosen. Logic says so.

It remains unclear whether future societies will see a profound and enduring redesigning of gender roles and child-rearing practices and a concomitant redesigning of the roles of worker-citizens that will make women equal partners with men. Moves toward gender equity, in work and citizenship, and real change in the everyday life experiences of women and men have been suggested and tried (to varying degrees) before and have faded away before. But the trends in the West, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, look widespread and strong. The question will be whether societies that contain a high degree of gender equity will outperform those that do not. That question will be answered, but the answer will only emerge gradually over the next hundred years or so.

To sum up this digression, let me reiterate that the point of illustrating the sociocultural model of human evolution with some example morés that we are familiar with and that we can imagine being revised is to emphasize the fact that our morés and values are programmable. At least in theory, we can rewrite them for the betterment of the whole of society by processes of rational discussion and debate, processes that are based on reasoning, evidence, and compromise. Difficult, yes, but preferable to the blind, trudging, painful methods of social change that we have been using for centuries.

It is time for reason to take over. The hazards of continuing the old ways of prejudice, revolution, and war are too large. We have to find another way, one that rights gender injustices and so many others without resorting to the horror of war. And if we can find a way to base our values on our best models of physical reality, ones we can all see the sense of, it can be done. Rational thinking and evidence-gathering can tame our atavistic urges. Difficult, but not impossible.