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: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons)      

             

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 surgeons, 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 If they work counter to the needs of a society’s survival in certain areas, they will be superseded by what the society will come to call a “higher” value.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—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/support the work required to nurture 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. Let me say again that this cultural design wasn’t fair. But it was effective. It made population and, thus, power. 

"Made." Past tense. Today, in post-industrial society, patriarchy is one of the cultural designs that has become obsolete. It therefore should be allowed to simply go extinct. We will discuss this point more in coming chapters.