Gender & Belonging, Part 2: The Social Roots of Patriarchy

I have something in common with biology professor at Boise State University.  We both published articles espousing the virtues of femaleness this weekend.  Mine on my humble little blog; his on the New York Times.  Chock-full or Y-chromosome shaming, Greg Hampikian’s partially satirical article “Men, Who Needs Them?” might get him kicked out his fantasy football league this year:

It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing... Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?

For the record, I would buy the man car because it’s cute and has a nice rear.

Even with these pro-women articles, including my own, it’s hard to feel bad for men, isn’t it?  They have it pretty good these days, at least from the vantage point of my couch. The two folks running for President are both men (though I wouldn’t mind if Hillz was added to the ticket); men lead 488 of the Fortune 500 companies; and even influential women in academia and government struggle with gender discrimination.

So where did patriarchy come from?

Patriarchy's theoretical roots are numerous and oft-debated. But one interesting explanation for the origin of male-dominance of our societies comes from Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University. He credits the evolution of patriarchy to the structure of men’s social groups.  While women prefer smaller, more intimate social groups, men seek larger, shallower groups.  Being part of a larger group encourages individuals to specialize and take risks to distinguish themselves from the rest:

…[M]en think of themselves based on their unusual traits that set them apart from others, while women’s self-concepts feature things that connect them to others.  [S.E. Cross and L. Madsen] thought that this was because men wanted to be apart from others. But in fact being different is vital strategy for belonging to a large group. If you’re the only group member who can kill an antelope or find water or talk to the gods or kick a field goal, the group can’t afford to get rid of you.

As specialization occurred, culture developed around men's social groups, and hence evolved patriarchy:

…[I]t’s just that the women’s sphere remained about where it was, while the men’s sphere, with its big and shallow social networks, slowly benefited from the progress of culture. By accumulating knowledge and improving the gains from division of labor, the men’s sphere gradually made progress.

Even today, this gender discrepancy of social ordering may be holding women back.  Take the wage gap, for example.  A study published in Organization Science called “Engendering Inequity? How Social Accounts Create vs. Merely Explain Unfavorable Pay Outcomes for Women,” found that the perception of women in the workplace puts them at a disadvantage.  Kerry Hannon wrote about this study here:

“Research on stereotyping shows that people assume that women care more than men do about communality and belongingness and that men care more than women about their own attainment and self-interest,” wrote Maura Belliveau, the study’s author, an associate professor at Long Island University. For this reason, the managers generally felt that the women would be able to recognize the need for the cutbacks and would not feel as personally offended as the men if they received small raises.

So women may be willing to accept less pay because of their strong social desire to belong. 

This intimacy/attainment trade-off has interesting implications for both genders. If women value intimate relationships, they may bring home less bacon; if men attain positions of power, they may have more shallow relationships.

In second grade I asked everyone on the playground a precocious question: “If you could go back to when you were born, would you rather be a boy or a girl?”  All the boys said boy, and all but one of the girls said girl. (The dissenter said in all seriousness that she would have rather been born a boy, which was quite the playground controversy back then.  It may have been a playful hypothetical on her part, but I can’t help but wonder if that little girl might have known that something was different about her sexual orientation, even at 6 years old.)

Even with the wage gap, gender discrimination, and all the feminist literature sitting on my bookshelves, I think I’d still answer “girl” because, in a most significant way, I feel more valuable than a man.  Maybe patriarchy is really just a backlash against a fundamental male insecurity: that they’re disposable.  I’ll explore male expendability in Part 3.