27 September 2023

Leader of the pack: What we learn when women lead

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Bridget Alex* says researchers are charting the pathways and barriers to female power among mammals, including our own species.


There’s something amiss with The Lion King — aside from talking, singing animals.

Disney’s smash hit tells the tale of young male lion Simba’s rise to power.

But, in the real circle of life, lionesses lead.

The lion queens, however, are an exception.

Among mammal species that live in social groups, only about 10 per cent have strong female leaders.

They include another fierce predator, killer whales, as well as bonobos, famous for their peaceful promiscuity.

Humans, on the other hand, are part of the mammal majority: our leaders are mostly male.

It’s undeniable that males have more sway across institutions, societies and mammal species.

But what explains those lionesses, literal and figurative — the females who lead?

A multidisciplinary movement to study these outliers is gaining momentum.

From hyena clans to corporate hiring culture, researchers are charting the pathways and barriers to female power among mammals, including our own species.

Female leaders in the animal world

For the Verreaux’s sifaka lemurs of Madagascar, there’s no question which sex is dominant.

“Females beat up the males,” says anthropologist Rebecca Lewis of the University of Texas.

For more than 20 species of lemurs, female rule is the rule, not the exception.

Few mammal females attain the same degree of dominance — defined by biologists as an animal’s ability to subordinate another through force or threat.

Among the roughly 5,400 mammal species, in just a couple of dozen do females routinely outrank males during dominance contests.

“The fact that females are socially so powerful in [lemur] societies shows us that more traditional division of sex roles is not some inevitable destiny of mammalian biology,” says Peter Kappeler, a zoologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

“That gives rise to all kinds of questions, why that might be the case, why lemurs are so different.”

One obvious consideration is what Kappeler and others call the lemur syndrome: females have physical traits that are typical of males in other mammal species, including the fact their bodies are the same size or slightly larger than a male’s.

A similar pattern is found in African spotted hyenas: females are larger and stronger, with “masculinised” genitalia.

But body size and form aren’t enough to explain power dynamics in these species.

A 2019 Nature Ecology and Evolution paper on spotted hyenas suggests that disproportionate social clout, rather than physical strength, fuels female dominance.

Over 75 per cent of the time in all encounters, victory went to whichever animal had more potential allies close enough to call for backup.

And, in spotted hyena society, high-ranking females have the most allies.

Another 2019 study, published in the International Journal of Primatology, looked at several hundred dominance contests between sifaka lemurs of varying ages.

They found juvenile females won about a quarter of the bouts and adolescents about half, regardless of body size.

Adult females who had offspring past weaning age triumphed nearly 100 per cent of the time.

Sexual maturity and successful motherhood give these females status.

The findings challenge the idea that “male-like” traits gave rise to female dominance in these species.

Follow the leader

Lewis has pushed researchers to look beyond physical dominance when investigating power relations.

She contends that power — one’s ability to make another creature do something — can be reached by alternative means or expressed in other ways.

Leadership is a special kind of power: influence over the entire group.

Female leaders in our own species

In the 1970s, a review of historical descriptions of 93 nonindustrial societies found only about 10 per cent permitted women to hold political posts — and women were generally less powerful than male counterparts.

Contemporary scholars attribute this in part to the mentality of past researchers, who were predominately Western men.

But even in more recent, less-biased research, “it hits you in the face how disparately represented men and women are in positions of leadership, particularly more overt political leadership,” says Christopher von Rueden, an anthropologist at the University of Richmond.

Through his research, von Rueden seeks to explain how the evolution of sex differences affects access to leadership across human.

Evolutionary anthropologists think the answer lies at the intersection of biological sex differences and the particular history, customs and environment of any given society.

Thanks to our mammalian roots, women bear and nurse babies.

Men are generally larger and stronger.

These biological realities set the stage for sexual division of labour, common across cultures.

From this evolutionary background, sex-based stereotypes emerged, which then became amplified or dampened by the particularities of a given society.

For example, it’s been proposed that the invention of the plough deepened gender divisions because its use requires substantially more upper-body strength.

This relegated men to fields and women to household labour.

According to a 2013 study, the plough’s effects persist.

Descendants of plough-farmers have fewer women in the workforce and politics, and less-favourable views about gender equality.

Understanding the evolution of male-skewed leadership, says von Rueden, “puts us in a better position to act on behalf of putting more women in positions of power”.

Leading the nation

Research runs thin when it comes to what is arguably the ultimate glass ceiling: elected national leadership.

Starting in 1960 with Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, 115 women have served as President, Prime Minister or Chancellor of 75 countries, from Brazil to Bangladesh.

But gender gains rose steeply through the 1990s — and then recently reversed.

Oklahoma State University political scientist Farida Jalalzai’s found that in the 11 nations with female executives during her 2018 study’s time frame, people were more accepting of female leaders, interested in politics and likely to vote, especially female respondents.

In another 2018 study, researchers found that after the election of female mayors, those municipalities saw more women assuming top and middle-management positions in public organisations.

The studies suggest that, while gender equality does not beget female leaders, the reverse may be true: Women in high offices promote gender equality, either directly through policies and appointments, or indirectly by acting as a prominent reminder that women can lead.

* Bridget Annelia Alex is an anthropologist and science writer. She tweets at @bannelia.

This article first appeared at www.discovermagazine.com.

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