Why throughout almost every society through out history are men always in charge?

Scientificus · 2012-09-20T06:23:07+00:00

http://www.heretical.com/wilson/rkibbutz.html

In this social experiment the women picked the jobs they wanted and men did everything else (including politics).

empirical_accuracy · 2012-09-20T06:52:03+00:00

It's important to note first that this question is really two different questions. First, why, historically, have many societies settled on requiring male leaders? The answer to this question is prescribed gender roles, which were still occasionally violated. Second, why, in the modern age, in countries with do men still occupy a high percentage of leadership positions?

The answer to this is complex, but contains many more details. And the answer is "maybe that's changing, right here, right now." Current trends suggest this is in the process of changing.

For senior leadership positions, it takes a very long time to get there. CEOs and senators usually spend decades just getting into their leadership role. Barack Obama entered college in 1979, and he's very young for a senior leader. Title IX had been on the books for less than ten years at that point. It will be another ten or twenty years before our senior leadership types are mostly ones who graduated from college in majority-female classes.
Women are more likely to quit or take a break from a career to raise children. Since you have to generally be dedicated and ambitious for decades without stop to reach the top, this filters out more women than men, and will continue to do so to a certain degree in the future. If we don't just look at upper-level positions, the answer is "women are leaders in significant numbers."
In business ... to quote the GAO: "In 2007, women comprised an estimated 40 percent of managers and 49 percent of nonmanagers on average for the 13 industry sectors we analyzed." (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-1064T)
In schools ... we see female students occupying leadership positions in extracurricular organizations, or clubs, tied to schools, in disproportionate numbers.

To a degree, the answer is "no." To the degree that it's "yes," which is to say talking about upper-level leadership positions, it's similar parts "women voluntarily exit careers to pursue motherhood" and "there's a large time delay on senior leadership positions."

chocoboat · 2012-09-20T06:23:56+00:00

In prehistoric times, people lived in small groups just like apes and wolves and other animals. The strongest individuals (which due to nature, were always males) were the best providers, and used their strength to force the group to follow their orders. These alpha males had the group's respect and their dependency, so they ran the show.

As centuries passed, humans eventually built small towns, and eventually small cities. The strongest and most forceful leaders, always males, are still in charge. Most women don't want to risk contesting this situation, and the few who try are shamed or outcast because of their gender. The societies simply would not allow a woman to lead... at best, a wife can be an advisor to her husband.

As we developed into modern times, men stayed in charge the whole time because nothing happened to make that situation change.

Only just now in the past few decades has society been re-educated to understand the fact that many women are capable leaders and that excluding women from leadership positions due to their gender is wrong.

cthulufunk · 2012-09-20T07:27:18+00:00

Because men don't have babies.

2012-09-20T14:09:52+00:00

Because women are generally risk averse, and leadership involves taking risks.

rapiertwit · 2012-09-20T08:16:28+00:00

None of these are meant to be definitive, just some pithy nuggets to provoke thought:

Men are the military sex. Left to ourselves, we naturally form pecking orders: captains, sergeants and privates. When a man exhibits the qualities of leadership, other men will push him toward a position of leadership. Women tend to form circles. They prefer consensus, and tend to snipe at and drag down anyone who gets too bossy.
It could be as simple as this: we tend to forget too often that we're just animals that got a bit clever recently. Both men and women find it easier to accept and follow male leaders (a pretty well-documented phenomenon). Maybe there's a deep animal remnant in all of us that associates size and strength with being "boss" material. If you look at the history of the US presidential elections, the shorter man has rarely won.
One of the things that women excel at, empathy, is actually a hindrance at higher levels of responsibility and power. Lots of people say that "if women ran things, X would be better, because empathy" but they're not picturing the myriad decisions that have to be made where you basically have to pick who gets fucked over. Generally, people at ground level, who can't see the big picture, are more forgiving of action-takers who step on a few toes than leaders who are paralyzed to inaction waiting for the win-win opportunity to show itself.

MRB2012 · 2012-09-20T12:28:30+00:00

Men are almost never in charge. Individual men are.

2012-09-20T06:42:41+00:00

Its been said by some that its that women have been charged not men, as behind every male leader there was always a woman. That said men in general have always been more aggressive and society dictating them to take charge if you will. Today that is changing tho. Question tho and its left to be seen is can women take on such position and not burn out.

C0CKPUNCHER · 2012-09-20T07:30:02+00:00

Men sieze power, normally against great opposition, women are given comfort for doing nothing. That said there have been powerful women, queens, pirates, serial killers etc.

Pregnancy is time consuming when you have large families and high infant mortality - this investment sort of demands the woman then put in equal time raising her children. Contraception is a recent invention etc.

typhonblue · 2012-09-20T07:54:40+00:00

Because the most expendable members of your group go first.

Celda · 2012-09-20T05:39:22+00:00

A variety of reasons. Probably mostly because men work harder (in fields related to leadership / professional sphere) than women.

Demonspawn · 2012-09-20T13:59:33+00:00

Why are men at the top? Because the best are men.

The worst too, but nobody competes to find the worst. The truth is that in any mammalian species, the males are more diverse than the females. Because of that increased diversity, the top and the bottom are both dominated by men. The further out you go, the more male dominated it is. As an example, an IQ of 120+ is 6:1 men, but 170+ is 30:1 men.

Why this happens can be summed up with how I like to explain it: Mother nature was too wise to waste reproductive potential on environment testing.

The_Patriarchy · 2012-09-20T08:19:45+00:00

You're not going to get a definitive answer because we don't know enough to say definitively whether it's X, Y or Z. With that being said, I think there are two primary reasons. Before I get into this, I'm speaking broadly about men and women (there will always be outliers, but WRT to OP's question, outliers aren't all that relevant), and this is just my own speculation...in no way should it be viewed as an assertion of fact.

The first, more obvious reason is that men are physically stronger than women. When the tribe/pack/etc. was threatened, the males would likely be the ones defending it. As we see with all sorts of other animals, when it fights off another animal for something (let's say food), it seems to treat that thing as a possession. In prehistoric civilizations, the males defending the group likely came to feel they had a sort of ownership of that group. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. I mean, they're not going out there and risking their lives just to be nice guys...they're getting something out of it. I suspect that thing is something resembling ownership.

Since the more violent groups likely wiped out the more peaceful groups, the violent groups were more likely to spread. Groups that broke off from these groups and spread out likely continued this system whereby the males defended the group and felt ownership for it. Some of these groups eventually evolved into the large societies we see today, and retained many remnants of their original societies...remnants which were better suited for the environment when compared to other groups.

The second, less obvious reason is that men and women evolved in tandem with our social organizations. Men and women who were better suited for these organizations -- thanks to a multitude of factors (the most chronologically persistent being heredity and ancestry) -- would likely do better and produce more offspring (i.e. be more successful and fuck more). As a result, those with traits reinforcing the dominant social system would be more numerous, and those beneficial traits would be honed to a greater degree of specificity over time (e.g. men getting lager and larger and larger...but not too large, etc.).

Basically, I believe it comes down to evolution. Men have been in power across history/etc. because that produced groups which were strong enough to evolve into the societies we see today, and because the people comprising those groups evolved to better serve the needs of those groups. Evolution isn't a thing of the past though. Modern societies are constantly tinkering with their formulas, and those which become better suited for the environment do better, while the others stagnate, or even die out. The same goes for the humans making up those societies, and the traits they possess.

In a thousand years (assuming we don't wipe our species out), we will see many amplified traits of the existing world societies and the humans inhabiting them, while other traits will be nonexistent. Which traits will be amplified and which will die out may not be so obvious right now...but perhaps this can be discerned if we look at the inter-societal trends affecting A) reproduction and B) the heartiness of our societies.

zyk0s · 2012-09-20T16:44:46+00:00

Why do fish swim, birds fly, snakes crawl and kangaroos jump? Why do wolves assemble in packs and ants in colonies?

We've evolved that way (i.e. human societies have tried alternatives and failed). It's been said a few times: feminism is the denial of the theory of evolution at the social level.

linearThinker · 2012-09-21T06:01:50+00:00

They're not.

ErasmusMRA · 2012-09-20T10:12:39+00:00

Because men make better leaders.

Point one: Men want to be leaders. Men have the reward circuitry in the brain when it comes to leadership. Positions of power attract mates, thus leadership is something men are very motivated to do. At the same time such positions of power mean nothing to women -- they attract mates mostly through looks.

Point two: Men can handle being leaders. Women avoid politics because there's too much public pressure. Their every move is criticized. Few women can handle that.

Point three: Men have what it takes to be leaders. Men's system of ethics is universal. They apply rules equally to everyone and from one situation to the next. Women have pack ethics and their application of ethics changes from situation to situation.

Point four: Men make natural leaders. When two men are in a room, one of them is king. That is, men form hierarchies and naturally defer to those above them. Women also defer to male authority.

Point five: Women trust emotion. Men trust logic. Emotion based decisions can work for a small group. But what works for a group of five fails spectacularly for a group of five hundred. This ties in with the universalizable system of ethics above.

For these reasons women will never be as good leaders as men. There might be individual exceptions, and of course the standard NAWALT and NAMALT disclaimers apply. Each characteristic is not absolute but is present to some degree in each person, whether male or female. What I'm describing here are trends and certain inclinations that men and women diverge on.

rightsbot · 2012-09-20T05:30:17+00:00

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melb22 · 2012-09-20T09:40:52+00:00

Because for aeons it has been the role of men to defend the tribe. In more primitive societies that would have meant not only the military defence of the tribe but also basic forms of governance. In more sophisticated societies, the role of securing the perimeters of a community to give a protected space for women and children becomes more complex, but the same instincts and drives still exist.

Title	Why throughout almost every society through out history are men always in charge?
Author	ChrisHernandez
Upvotes	7
Comments	30
Date	September 20, 2012 5:30 AM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/106gp9/why_throughout_almost_every_society_through_out/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/why-throughout-almost-every-society-through-out.1013182 https://theredarchive.com/post/1013182

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