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.

                                           

                                                      Math genius, Emmy Noether (credit: Wikipedia) 

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 reasoning 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 If they work counter to the needs of a society’s survival in certain areas, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value.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, for centuries, 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 biologically 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.

                                       

   

                                               Young dad with infant daughter (credit: Wikipedia) 

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.