WHY WOMEN ARE MORE LIBERAL

The human brain is comprised of about one hundred billion neurons, with an estimated one thousand trillion intercommunicating synapses, leading scientists to posit that this stunning biological marvel may be the most complex entity in the universe. Human brains are unique in the animal world. Ours is the largest brain relative to body weight, and the most densely packed with neurons. Our outsized cortex is considered the seat of complex thought, and the cortex's comparatively mammoth frontal lobe is what allows higher-level functions such as logic, planning, judgment, self-control, and abstract thought—basically all the faculties that make homo sapiens (which means “wise man”) uniquely human. Coming into existence with this organ was no small task.

One of the many challenges of growing an enormous brain was that our heads needed to safely pass through the birth canal. When humans began walking upright, the birth canal began narrowing, but at the same time the brain size began expanding. Various adaptations emerged, such as openings in the skull that allowed the head to compress at birth, and folds in brain tissue, which allowed greater surface area to fit within the confines of our skulls.

Another challenge was the time required to build this masterpiece organ. One solution was to start with the brain very early. Babies’ head-to-body size ratios are enormous compared to adults, which shows that the size and complexity of the human brain requires developmental priority. But the brain is not nearly done cooking at birth, and this fact has exerted major pressure on the evolved political psychology of women.

Consider the difference between squirming, mute, immobile, utterly helpless human infants and a wildebeest calf that can outrun lions only hours after birth. Our protracted development has inspired researchers to describe human infants as exterogestate fetuses1—that is, in humans, the unfinished brain continues a stunning rate of development not in the womb but in the real world. In the first year alone, the human brain doubles in size, and it continues to grow and interconnect until we reach our midtwenties. Notably, the “external womb” is a precarious world filled with predators, disease, the threat of starvation, and enemy males prone to infanticide.

In short, human infants and their brains take an epic amount of time to develop, and this period is incredibly costly in terms of attention, nurturance, protection, and cultural input. Women's political psychology reflects strategies for securing these crucial investments. In turn, greater liberalism among women reflects the high demands of bringing the wise man into being as a walking, talking, thinking primate.

Liberalism and Long-Term Mating

In the classic 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe popularized the song “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.” In the scene where she sings it, a cadre of admiring, well-dressed men surrounds her. At first the men swarm the lovely icon with heart-shaped cutouts. She rebukes them with smacks to the head, singing that she'd rather have a man who gives lavish jewelry. The men regroup and then follow her around the stage, competing to present her with collars bespeckled with massive, sparkling diamonds. This scene, among so many others, captures an intuitive, ageless dynamic between men and women, based on our reproductive biology.

A highly robust research finding is that women prefer men with resources. David Buss's international research, for example, has found that “women across all continents, all political systems (including socialism and communism), all racial groups, all religious groups, and all systems of mating (from intense polygyny to presumptive monogamy) place more value than men on good financial prospects. Overall women value financial resources about 100 percent more than men do.”2

But men with resources are only as good as their willingness to share them. Research shows that women prefer generous (and altruistic) men,³ and that this preference is ancient—for example, among hunter-gatherers, men who provide more meat to their clan have more sexual partners and younger (more fertile) wives.⁴ In one telling study, researchers in the United Kingdom presented women with hypothetical scenarios.⁵ In scenario 1, two people sitting by a river see a child being swept downstream and hear a mother screaming, “Help! Save my child.” One man jumps into the river to save the child, the other does not. In scenario 2, two people walking through a town find a homeless person sitting near a café. One man goes into the café and then purchases the homeless person a sandwich and a cup of tea. The other man pretends to use his mobile phone and quickly skirts past the homeless person. As you might have guessed, women in this study expressed a preference for the men behaving altruistically—those who showed willingness to share food and to protect children. The preference for these men as long-term partners was particularly strong, and it is not difficult to see how the resource demands of our extended development would shape women's desire for kind and giving men.

What may not be as obvious are the underlying traits that potentiate empathy and sharing among men. Strikingly, research implicates male femininity and suggests that women may subconsciously “know” this. In one type of study, researchers digitally overlay photographs of men to create a composite image. From there the images are manipulated to appear either more masculine (e.g., wider jaws, more pronounced brow ridge, smaller lips) or more feminine (largely the opposite features). In one such study, women were asked which of the two faces they would prefer for a long-term versus short-term relationship. In the context of long-term relationships, women chose the “feminine” face more often.6 Other studies using similar techniques have found that women were more likely to rate men with more feminine facial features as having higher “quality as a parent”⁷ and as a “good father.”⁸

Women's judgments appear to be right on. Testosterone shapes masculine facial features. The same hormone is responsible for aggression and sex drives, which have helped male primates violently compete for sex across our ancestral history. But fighting and womanizing are not particularly conducive to family life. Accordingly, research finds that testosterone levels are relatively high when men are single, but drop significantly when they get married and have children.⁹ Another study used various questionnaires to gauge men's interest in babies. The researchers then measured participants’ testosterone levels before and after watching a pornographic video. Men who expressed low interest in babies showed a higher testosterone increase after watching porn, whereas men who expressed higher interest in babies showed only slight increases, remained stable, or their testosterone actually dropped after watching porn.¹⁰ These results suggest that high-testosterone men may be geared toward mating effort, and lower-testosterone men toward parenting effort.

Indeed, research has found that men with larger testicles and higher baseline levels of testosterone score lower on a questionnaire specifically designed to measure parental investment.¹¹ Having larger testes was also associated with less neural response to pictures of the men's own children while instructed to empathize with them, i.e., “try to share the emotions of the person in the picture.” By contrast, fathers with lower testosterone experience greater sympathy to sounds of crying babies.¹²

To review, higher-testosterone men are less empathic, make poorer nurturers, share less,¹³ and are better at enacting mating strategies that are short term, less invested, and ideally involve numerous sexual partners. Lower-testosterone men are more empathic, make better nurturers, and invest more in children.

The government, which has traditionally been run by men, has always played a role in determining how resources are dispersed. Given this role, it is perhaps not surprising to find that women's preferences for compassionate, sharing men are often mirrored by women's preference for provisioning policies, which are overwhelmingly championed by liberal politics. Research finds that women show greater support for social welfare and organized labor,14 student loan programs, wage control, and minimum wage laws.¹⁵ In the United States, women consistently prefer greater government spending than men on things like public schools, childcare, social security, welfare, aid to the poor, and food stamps.¹⁶ While some of these preferences may be accounted for by women generally being more empathic than men—which generates greater support for what have been termed domestic compassion policies—many of these government programs tie directly into provisioning offspring. All of which underscore our hypothesis that liberal policies are rooted in female reproductive strategies, aimed at ensuring a nurturing environment for vulnerable offspring.

This hypothesis comes into greater focus when we consider research on politics among fathers. One study found that American fathers were more likely to support liberal policies such as pay equity, affirmative action, and subsidized day care if they had only daughters.¹⁷ This relationship was not seen among fathers with only sons, which led the researchers to conclude that “when fathers have sons only, their commitment to patriarchy may strengthen to ensure their sons a piece of the patriarchal dividend.” A similar pattern was found in the United Kingdom, where having daughters was associated with voting for left-wing parties, whereas having sons was associated with right-wing parties.¹⁸

The relationship between having daughters and supporting more liberal policies even holds true among lawmakers. One study examining voting records of US congressmen found that the more daughters congressmen had, the more likely they were to vote in support of liberal legislation, and this pattern held among Republicans as well as Democrats.¹⁹ Tellingly, legislation in this study was grouped into seven topic areas: equal rights, safety, economic security, education, lesbian rights and health, and reproductive rights, including access to abortion and contraception. Among other fitness benefits, birth control allows women to choose when and with whom to reproduce. We learned in the preceding chapters how conservative opposition to birth control may benefit male genes. But for men with daughters, support of birth control can also benefit male genes—those residing in their daughters. Moreover, legislation supporting things like education and economic security benefits daughters in the long-term enterprise of raising human offspring. In other words, because we have a fitness incentive to favor strategies that benefit the fitness of our offspring, men with daughters tend to vote a lot more like women.

To summarize the key message here: (1) women prefer long-term mates and liberal political policies, both of which tend to contribute to the long-term enterprise of raising offspring; (2) liberalism in men is linked to feminine traits such as interest in babies, greater empathy, and lower testosterone, in keeping with our gendered brains hypothesis; and (3) men may shift to supporting more liberal policies when they have female offspring.

Indeed, as I explain below, both sexes may choose from a menu of reproductive strategies, depending on environmental conditions, which allows greater adaptability—an approach that evolutionary scholars have labeled strategic pluralism.20 This adaptability explains why partisanship is not perfectly correlated with biological sex.

Liberalism, Resources, and Short-Term Mating

Access to resources not only helps women raise children but also to engage in short-term mating. Recall that a bountiful natural environment allows our bonobo cousins to be more egalitarian, female-oriented, and to eat and mate relatively freely with one another. Humans are also responsive to local ecology. In more politically liberal societies—where women have greater access to resources via paid maternity leave, paid childcare, and greater participation in the workforce—women also have greater sexual freedom to engage in short-term mating. As David Buss explains, “Where women control their economic fate, do not require so much of men's investment, and hence need to compete less, women are freer to disregard men's preferences…. Men everywhere might value chastity if they could get it, but in some cultures they simply cannot demand it from their brides.”21

The scientific literature confirms this observation. In one US study, researchers analyzed economic factors across all fifty states and found that women's median income levels, and the amount of welfare benefits available to women, were negatively associated with both men and women viewing promiscuity as wrong.²² In other words, where women have greater direct access to resources, both men and women were less likely to view women's sexual freedom as immoral. Conversely, the researchers concluded that when economic dependence on men is high, both sexes have an incentive to reinforce monogamy—for men, to avoid cuckoldry, and for women, to assure males of paternal certainty in order to avoid desertion.

In a much larger study, David Schmitt administered a questionnaire called the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI) to fourteen thousand men and women across forty-eight (developed and developing) nations.²³ The SOI measures restricted versus unrestricted sexuality, by asking questions like, “How many different partners do you see yourself having sex with in the next five years?” and “I would have to be closely attached to someone (both emotionally and psychologically) before I could feel comfortable and fully enjoy having sex with him or her.” The inventory also includes a question on “extra-pair” mating (mating outside a committed relationship): “How often do (did) you fantasize about having sex with someone other than your current (most recent) dating partner?”

Tellingly, the study found that women across these many nations were more sexually open where there was a higher percentage of women in parliament, higher percentage of women-headed households, higher divorce rates, higher gender equality (as measured by the United Nations Gender Empowerment Measure, which assesses economic and political equality between men and women), and more progressive sex role ideologies. Across the board, greater political, economic, and social freedom was associated with less restrictive sexuality among women. These correlations were less strong or were absent among men, who tended to be sexually open regardless of political circumstance. These data suggest that when women enjoy more economic and political equality—which translates to, among other things, greater access to resources—they are less bound to male sexual control, and may then be more likely to engage in short-term mating.

Conversely, Schmitt's study also found that environmental strain leads women to adopt more sexually restrictive strategies. Across nations, lower gross domestic product, higher child malnutrition, higher infant mortality rate, lower birth weight, and lower life expectancy—all of which suggest harsh environments with fewer resources to invest in child-rearing—were associated with restricted sexuality among women. Overall, the study showed that women shift toward a monogamous strategy as environments become more demanding, and toward a less restrictive strategy when environments are favorable. Here we can see again how liberal policies like maternity leave, paid childcare, and equality in the workplace can provide more favorable environments for women, and also how women tend to trade short-term mating for a greater guarantee of male support when environmental circumstances are grim.

But why would women want sexual freedom in the first place? While most women tend to prefer long-term mating strategies, mating with multiple males in the short term can increase a woman's fitness, sometimes in the context of an extramarital relationship. Among other benefits, short-term mating can secure immediate resources in direct exchange for sex; produce children when a woman's mate is infertile; obscure paternity, which may secure investment from multiple males; and help women gain access to better quality genes than those of their current partners,24 and provide women with genetic diversity.

But a key point in understanding women's evolved political psychology is that women tend to prefer different traits when selecting short-term versus long-term mating partners. For example, in one study, women were presented with photos of an attractive man, with a description portraying qualities of a poor parent and poor cooperator:

5 inches taller than you…. Rainy weekends are great for reading up on pieces in his weapon collection. Sunny ones are best for playing rugby or rock climbing. Any time's great for jamming on guitars with the guys.25

Women were also shown an image of a less-attractive man described as a potentially good parent and good cooperator:

2 inches taller than you…. Likes carpentry, usually to build things for the house. Listening to live music in a pub with a close group of friends is also a favorite. Summer weekends are great for romantic walks on nearby trails and winter ones for downhill skiing.

Consistent with other studies, women were more likely to choose the taller, more attractive, less cooperative man over the shorter, less attractive, more cooperative man as an extra-pair mate, and the opposite for a long-term mate.

Another kind of short-term mating occurs in the context of extra-pair copulations. Research finds that when it comes to adultery, women tend to prefer masculine men, especially when they are ovulating.²⁶ This strategy has been observed in other social primates, such as female macaques and chimpanzees, who may mate with lesser males when less fertile, in order to confuse paternity, which would secure protection or favors such as grooming. These same females show a strong preference for dominant males when ovulating.²⁷

Aside from the fitness benefits of resources and reproductive choices, liberal policies can also counterbalance the reproductive strategies of men when, by their own success, they begin to impinge on the strategies of women. Certainly both men and women have a reproductive interest in provisioning children, and in general, men and women work well together toward that enterprise—if they hadn't, we wouldn't have made it as a species. However, when given the opportunity, men will leverage sharing to impose sexual control.

For one, conservative men tend to prefer “traditional” households, where men are the primary breadwinners and women stay home to raise children. Accordingly, conservative men show less support of equal pay for women, paid maternity leave, and other resources that would promote financial independence from men. In ultraconservative societies, women are forbidden to work, and under Sharia law, the testimony of women counts half that of men in property cases, and women get half the inheritance as men.28 All such policies ensure women's financial dependence on men, which men can use to secure women's submission to male reproductive goals—high birth rates and monogamy, the antithesis of short-term mating. As we have discussed before, these arrangements come at a far greater cost to women than to men.

Moreover, male financial control also creates economic disincentives for women who wish to leave them. In many social animals, including chimpanzees, the inability to leave a community—due to factors such as high risk of predation, violence from rival communities, or difficulty acquiring food—often forces physically weaker individuals to endure despotic relationships.²⁹ Rejecting liberal policies like equal pay, or social welfare, artificially creates environmental difficulties, whereas supporting such policies allows women economic independence from men, and a potential route of egress. Accordingly, we see the greatest opposition to divorce (a legal route of egress) in the most politically conservative societies. Recall too that in the prior chapter we explored the cruelties that are possible, including femicide, in societies where women are not allowed to leave their male “guardians.” Divorce and social welfare, on the other hand, safeguard against the brutalities of male overcontrol by giving women alternate means to feed themselves.

In summary, women may adapt their reproductive strategy to environmental circumstances, as shaped by their access to resources, their current partnership status, and their own fertility. When women are economically dependent on men, they are more likely to engage in strict monogamy. When they have greater economic freedom, they may be more likely to mate with more males to increase genetic diversity. Thus the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism are aligned with specific mating strategies and also create the conditions for them. Conservative ideology places higher moral value on monogamy, while also encouraging policies that create greater economic dependence for women. Liberal ideology is less sexually restrictive, while also supporting policies that encourage greater social and economic equality, allowing women more freedom in their choice of partner(s).

Seen through the lens of evolutionary science, the utility of liberalism to the female reproductive mission is clear and parsimonious. Nurturing human infants through the construction of their wondrous brains requires a marathon of provisioning, which is served by liberal policies. Liberal policies also inhibit the tendencies of men to use violence, oppression, or financial control to privilege male-typical fitness goals (more mates, less provisioning) at the cost of female-typical ones (greater stability, more provisioning). They also allow women to acquire good genes and genetic variation. On the surface, conservatism might seem anathema to the female endeavor. In some instances it is, and in some cultures women are forced to either adopt or feign conservative values. However, other women are drawn to conservatism freely and with some enthusiasm. The coming section will explore some of the reasons why.

WHY ALL WOMEN AREN'T DEMOCRATS

Germs

Despite the fact that women tend to lean liberal,30 clearly not all women are liberal—there are many millions of politically conservative women in the world today. While various factors influence conservatism among women, our evolved reproductive psychology lies at the heart of them. Across history, infectious disease has posed one of the greatest threats to child survival and, therefore, to successful transmission of genes to the next generation. The fight against microorganisms itself plays a role in women's mate selection.

Testosterone, which drives both dominance behaviors and the formation of masculine features, is also an immunosuppressant.31 High testosterone, then, can signal not only physical prowess but also resistance to disease, another crucial marker of genetic fitness.³² In other words, if you're able to maintain high levels of testosterone, your immune system has to be strong enough to fight off diseases even while hampered by excess testosterone. This strong immune system is a desirable trait for potential offspring. Research has found that germ resistance is something humans subconsciously look for in mates. For example, American psychologists Steven Gangestad and David Buss examined mate preference among men and women in twenty-nine cultures around the world.³³ They found that a higher prevalence of pathogens predicted greater emphasis on mates who were physically attractive, which suggests physical health. Tellingly, in another study Gangestad also found pathogen prevalence was negatively correlated with women's desire for attributes associated with greater parental investment: “dependable character,” “pleasing disposition,” “emotional stability and maturity,” and “desire for home and children”—all characteristic of empathic, “feminine,” lower-testosterone, liberal men, as we have been discussing.³⁴ This suggests that in high-pathogen environments, women may trade off parental investment for fit genes. A similar study of 186 societies found that higher-pathogen prevalence is associated with greater polygyny.³⁵ Researchers have argued this is evidence of women trading off exclusive parental investment for disease-resistant offspring.³⁶ Perhaps not surprising then, we see more polygyny practiced in the world's most male-oriented, most politically conservative societies. Finally, one large worldwide study (4,794 women across thirty countries) found that in nations with poorer health, as measured by various indices including death from communicable diseases, women preferred men with more masculine faces.37 Microbes may be tiny, but their moral, sexual, and political influence is not.

Let's pause for a moment to briefly summarize the complex interplay between germs and our reproductive and political psychologies. As we discussed in chapter 2, germy environments drive conservatism—conservatives tend to be more germophobic and fearful of potential human vectors of disease. The further we move from high-pathogen environments, the more people show personality traits associated with political liberalism, such as sexual openness among women. Germ-ridden environments also can drive women's attraction to high-testosterone males. But seeking a high-testosterone mate comes at a cost: higher testosterone is also associated with lower parenting effort and higher likelihood of having multiple partners (including through polygyny), meaning that women in high-pathogen environments may exchange a degree of male investment for disease-resistant children. Women may also exert more sexual restraint in high-pathogen environments to avoid disease. Germs, in other words, fuel conservatism in women by multiple pathways—encouraging choice of higher-testosterone mates, giving disease-resistant males greater advantage in the mating market, and also by increasing monogamous sexual behavior.

Women and Their Male Alliances

Another font of women's conservatism is female mate competition. Women are increasingly bringing financial capital to the mating exchange. But women also bring genes, and fertility, including the physical attributes required to endure the high risks of pregnancy and childbirth. For most of our history, the most reliable route to assessing these assets in women has been physical appearance, which explains the relatively high value men place on good looks.³⁸ The fact that women use their beauty to compete for mates is uncontroversial. However, what is less known is that beauty among women often translates to political conservatism. Does this mean all conservative women are gorgeous or that all liberal women are not? Certainly not. But beauty and conservatism are linked nonetheless, and by competition.

In one study, researchers measured sex-typical features among congresswomen in the 111th US House of Representatives.39 The researchers found that Republican congresswomen had far more feminine faces than Democratic counterparts—what became known as the Michele Bachman effect, after the attractive and feminine former Republican representative from Minnesota.⁴⁰ In addition, the researchers also discovered that the more feminine the congresswoman's face, the more conservative her voting record. Remarkably, the researchers also found that among faces that were previously rated as highly masculine or highly feminine, undergrads could guess congresswomen's political affiliation with high accuracy.

But what do we make of these findings? Why would feminine, attractive congresswomen be more conservative—or, conversely, why would women with masculine faces affiliate with liberal parties or support liberal policies? Research consistently finds that people belonging to ethnic or racial groups that hold more power, or those in higher socioeconomic classes, tend to endorse more favorable views of social inequality.⁴¹ The idea is that if you have an advantage, you are inclined to support the conditions that help you maintain it. Research even finds that this effect can be experimentally manipulated—when subjects are assigned to a hypothetical economically advantaged group, they endorse higher social dominance orientation (SDO).⁴²

Just as belonging to a privileged ethnic group or economic class can provide a competitive advantage, so can good looks. Research finds, for example, that “beautiful” men and women get hired faster, move up in the corporate ranks more, and make more money.⁴³ And so, as with money or power, people will use beauty to their advantage in competition. This sort of nature-driven opportunism translates into politically conservative ideology, which is generally positioned against redistribution and in preserving high rank status. Conversely, if you have fewer assets—whether power, social class, money, or beauty—you are more likely to support redistribution, share resources, and reject group-based hierarchies.44

In another study, subjects rated the attractiveness of both male and female politicians in Australia, the European Union, Finland, and the United States. Across this wide breadth of political cultures, politicians on the Right were rated as significantly more attractive than those on the Left.⁴⁵ This study also found that when information is limited, voters use beauty as a cue for candidates’ political ideology and that voters will infer that more beautiful candidates fall more to the Right. In other words, we seem to know, instinctively, that beauty means conservatism, which may translate to “social dominance.”

Indeed, one study found that both men and women who rate themselves as more attractive tend to score higher on SDO.⁴⁶ This relationship was also found when self-perceived beauty was manipulated. The researchers primed subjects’ perception of their own attractiveness by having them write an essay recalling a time when they felt attractive or a time when they felt unattractive. Subjects primed to feel attractive were more likely to feel that they had more power, higher social class, and greater status, and they scored higher on SDO. In addition, these manipulations appeared to impact one's attitudes about economic inequality; subjects primed to feel attractive were more likely to claim dispositional reasons for inequality, such as “ability and skills,” “money management,” “hard work,” “ambition,” “talent,” and “effort,” whereas those primed to feel less attractive tended to claim contextual reasons, such as “economic policy,” “prejudice and discrimination,” “political influence,” and “inheritance.” Moreover, the researchers found that those primed to see themselves as more beautiful were less likely to donate to a hypothetical social equality movement.

So women's good looks translate to better-paying jobs, which may induce support for conservative policies that allow women to maintain their hierarchical advantage. But women's route to higher socioeconomic status doesn't always come by way of the job market—it may also come from wealthy men. Unequal pay for women, discrimination in the workplace, the absence of social services such as paid maternity leave or childcare, and the time and energy demands of child-rearing all may contribute to women choosing wealthy men as a route to acquiring resources. In such circumstances, rather than supporting liberal policies that benefit women, women may be inclined to support policies that benefit their husbands. Indeed, longitudinal research has found that after women get married, they tend to develop more socially conservative attitudes.47 Marriage may lead to different voting habits as well, with married women tending to vote conservative more often than unmarried women.⁴⁸

In many cases around the world, married women are influenced or coerced into adopting their husbands’ conservative political views. But this is not the whole story. Research has found that married women tend to see their fate as less linked to that of other women, asking them questions such as, “Do you think that what happens generally to women in this country will have something to do with what happens in your life?”⁴⁹ In the words of our competitive biology, when women form alliances with men in the context of marriage, the politics they espouse may shift toward those based on male alliances (i.e., conservatism), sometimes at the expense of single women, who may have a greater incentive to lobby for resource redistribution. Once again, attractiveness connotes good genes, which have bargaining power.

But the demands of child-rearing, disease, and female mate competition have not been the only pressures shaping the political psychology of women. Women have also had to contend with male violence. Men have developed groupish, hierarchy-favoring, authoritarian psychologies in order to contend with the tyranny of outside males—men who would gladly kill them and sexually enchain their wives and daughters. But the same psychologies also evolved to perpetrate such tyrannies. The resulting cycles of war and oppression have in turn shaped the political psychology of women. In many ways, women's political psychology reflects efforts to survive the maelstrom that male competition has always been.

Sexy Sons: How Women Can Love a Despot

Donald Trump has had a complex relationship with women, and one that has left mouths agape across the political spectrum. In January 2017, millions of women in the United States marched in the streets to protest Trump's election, fearing he and the Republican-led Congress posed a credible threat to reproductive, civil, and human rights. Millions of women around the globe joined the march in solidarity. Throughout the campaign that preceded his election, Trump's history with women was also a bone of contention. Adding to the groping, and trying to bed married women, in a 1991 interview with Esquire magazine, Trump said of the media, “You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” In an interview with New York Magazine, Trump said of women, “You have to treat them like shit!”50

Trump's ownership of the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants also drew scrutiny. For instance, in a radio interview with Howard Stern, Trump bragged that he used his high status to gain entrance to contestant dressing rooms while they were naked: “You know they're standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”⁵¹

One of the contestants, Tasha Dixon, who was eighteen years old at the time, complained that Trump's employees pressured the girls to “fawn over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention” before fully dressing. Dixon told CBS that she believed Trump owned the pageant for so long (nineteen years) because he could “utilize his power around beautiful women” and that there was no one above him to make him stop.⁵² Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe 1996 pageant winner, complained that Trump continually demeaned her about her ethnicity and weight, calling her “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Piggy.” Twenty years later during the 2016 campaign, Machado said, “This man behaved like a tyrant when I was Miss Universe and has behaved like a potential despot during this campaign.”⁵³

There have been far different reactions to Trump. For one, he won 42 percent of the women's vote,54 and for many women Trump had a mesmerizing draw. As one example, before the 2016 election, an NBC reporter interviewed two women at a Trump rally in Novi, Michigan, both wearing pink T-shirts reading, “Trumpette.” The reporter asked the Trumpettes to weigh in on Trump's history with Machado. One replied, “It doesn't matter. She got overweight. It's true. He wasn't lying.” The other woman added, “So we finally have this god who's going to come down and help us all.” Seeming incredulous, the reporter replied, “You just referred to Trump as a god.” Smiling, she responded, “Yes, he is. Well, like she just said, ‘Jesus, then Trump.’”⁵⁵ How can some women see men like Trump as despots while others see them as gods? Once again the answer may lie in our genes.

In 1930, British biologist Ronald Fisher realized that, across the animal kingdom, females choose mates whose genes would produce male offspring with the greatest potential for reproductive success, sons who in turn would deliver the most copies of her genes into the gene pool (for all the reasons we've discussed, male offspring have an exponentially larger potential to disperse genes than female offspring).⁵⁶ This became known as the sexy son hypothesis. A common example is the male peacock, which drags a weighty, enormous, but brilliantly iridescent tail plume behind him. The ability to maintain such a costly display signifies good health, which peahens prefer. If the peahen chooses the male with the most impressive plume, she is more likely to have impressively plumaged, sexy sons. Her future sons are more likely to be successful in mate competition, attracting peahens with their sexy tails and passing on her genes in turn.

“Sexy sons” provide a fitness advantage to female humans as well. This advantage may explain the seeming paradox of how some women may deify Trump, despite his unsavory track record with women. First, mate competition requires dispensing with rivals. Research has found that during the most fertile phases of their menstrual cycles, women tend to prefer men displaying competitive behaviors, such as derogating their rivals.57 Recall that Trump called his competitors, variously, “pussy,” “little Marco,” and “weak” on live television.⁵⁸ Also during the fertile phase, women rate the odors of men scoring high on measures of social dominance as more arousing and more masculine.⁵⁹ Research also finds that women who rate their partners as being dominant have more frequent and sooner orgasms,⁶⁰ a pattern associated with greater sperm retention,⁶¹ which may suggest a similar sort of “alpha son” effect in which domineering men would on average produce more competitive male offspring. In this light, Trump's braggadocio, while repellent to many women, may suggest future fitness in male mate competition.

Because successful male mate competitions involve acquiring females, for some women Trump's womanizing may also be viewed as a sign of fitness. Mate copying is a widely observed pattern among nonhuman animals in which females prefer males who have previously mated, and reject males that other females have rejected.⁶² Research has consistently found similar patterns among humans,⁶³ with mate copying more pronounced in women.⁶⁴ Studies also show that women rate photographs of men who are surrounded by women as more attractive than photographs of men who are alone,⁶⁵ and that women's attraction to men increases when they are seen with attractive women.⁶⁶ And so, Trump's association with models and beauty contestants, his multiple wives, and all his other womanizing behaviors may convey signals of great interest to female reproductive psychology. The brutal truth of nature is that mating with a womanizing man has the potential to produce womanizing sons with a greater capacity to pass on a woman's DNA. Mating with a dud, however, runs the risk of producing sexually timid, awkward, or otherwise unappealing sons ill-equipped to pass on a woman's genes.

However disturbing it is to ponder, similar evolutionary fitness advantages have been suggested of sexually aggressive men. Female sexual resistance has been examined as a strategy for mate selection among nonhuman species.⁶⁷ The idea is that males who demonstrate high motivation for sex by pushing past some degree of sexual resistance may have a selective advantage to be passed on to their sons. American psychologist Linda Mealey has put forward the possibility that “male coercive sexuality is actually selected through the process of female choice.” She goes on to propose that whatever traits led to this form of mate choice among women would be passed on to daughters, which would benefit their fitness as well. Continues Mealey,

Evidence that this form of selection might occur in humans rests in the fact that an identifiable minority of women (women labeled “hyperfeminine” based on their scores on personality and sex roles questionnaires) are specifically attracted to “macho” and “sexually coercive men.”

Canadian psychologist Martin Lalumiére further explains how a trait for sexual coerciveness might persist:

Compared with other women, those who preferentially mated with men who exhibited the ability to overcome some degree of female resistance had more offspring, who also had more offspring than other women; and therefore the tendency for women to “test” their potential sexual partners became widespread in the population.

Importantly, Lalumiére goes on to note,

The hypothesis really says little about the subjective feelings of women when doing the testing. Finally, even if this testing sometimes occurs, it remains absolutely appropriate for society to legally and morally proscribe the use of sexual coercion and force by men.

Of course, Lalumiére is correct—even if there were evidence for this kind of mate testing among humans, it would in no way suggest that it is somehow morally acceptable for men to ignore sexual boundaries. But this dynamic could at least partially explain why a man who bragged of grabbing women “by the pussy” without consent, forcing his way into women's dressing rooms, and trying to sleep with married women could garner such a large percentage of women voters.68

By this same dark logic, taken to its fullest extreme, females also stand to gain from mating with infanticidal males, even after those males kill their offspring. The evidence for this conclusion is worth repeating here, if only to show how deeply the psychology of women seems to have been shaped by the selective pressure of violent male mate competition.

Like our chimpanzee cousins, our species’ past was characterized by frequent, savage regime changes, and our female ancestors were pressured to adapt to these changes. Many mammals, numerous monkey species, all the great apes, and humans are all known to commit infanticide. This is almost exclusively a male behavior, and it most commonly occurs during takeovers. As we've already discussed, males stand to gain by killing off potential competitors to their offspring. Killing them sends females into estrus more quickly, and also removes the males’ offspring's potential competitors from the gene pool. This is startling but effective evolutionary logic.

In the 1950s, Hilda Margaret Bruce discovered that pregnant mice will spontaneously abort fetuses upon exposure to outside males.⁶⁹ The Bruce Effect, as this phenomenon became known, has also been found to occur in other animals, including nonhuman primates, when a new male overthrows the reigning alpha.⁷⁰ The most common explanation for this effect is that in species where females risk infanticide by usurper males, spontaneous abortion allows females to avoid investing precious time and energy in offspring with a high likelihood of being killed.⁷¹

Research has found a significant male birth decline in humans in times of stress, such as periods of economic downturns or collapse, or war.⁷² More recent male birth declines have allowed researchers to identify causes. For example, there were significant declines in male births across the United States after the 9/11 attacks, and research has tied those declines to an increase in the deaths of male fetuses.⁷³ We humans have a long history in which male children have been killed in human warfare, whereas female children were taken as spoils. Jettisoning male fetuses, then, while costly, is less costly than pouring resources into a male infant likely to be murdered.

The takeaway message is that women's reproductive biology is tied to the vicissitudes of living among violent males. The ugly math of evolution, driven by the violent history of our species, has imparted women with the capacity to, under the right circumstances, opt for womanizing, sexually aggressive, or even infanticidal males. The high and bloody stakes of male competition have forced that preference.

Rape Fears

Getting raped comes at fitness cost to women, particularly those made pregnant by rape. Researchers Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup have enumerated those costs: “(1) inability to exercise mate choice, (2) lack of provisioning and protection by the father, (3) possible abandonment or punishment by her current mate, and (4) reduced likelihood of attracting future mates.”74

Rape by out-group males appears to have been common enough in our ancestral history that today women's rape fears are linked to fear of outside men. And so another path to women's conservatism may be the same path as for men—xenophobia.

One study by American anthropologist Carlos Navarette and his colleagues presented white women with a scale designed to measure fear of being raped; it included agreement on statements such as, “I am wary of men,” and “I am afraid of being sexually assaulted.”⁷⁵ The researchers also presented scales measuring race bias and fear of out-group men—e.g., “Black men are dangerous.” The researchers then gave subjects an identical version of the out-group men scale but replaced “black men” with “white men, white women, and black women.” The researchers found that black men were more fear inducing than the other demographic categories, and that fear of being raped uniquely explained fear of black men. Also revealing, one study found that during the fertile phase of their cycles, women showed more unconscious bias against an outside race, rated men from an outside race more frightening than men from the in-group, and rated out-group men as less attractive.76

Another study found that the impulse to avoid out-group rape is so strong that it extends to arbitrary, meaningless group differences. In this study, women who filled out a rape fear questionnaire were randomly assigned to either a red, blue, or yellow group, and wore corresponding colored T-shirts. The researchers then digitally enhanced a photo of an attractive man to include either a red, blue, or yellow border. The women chatted online with confederates posing as the attractive man, who, following a script, asked the women on a date. When fertile, women with high rape fear were less likely to date men from a different-color category. Interestingly, rape fear was positively associated with willingness to date the “in-group” member.⁷⁷

How can this fear translate into political stances? Ann Coulter, a hardline conservative political commentator, offers one striking example. Coulter has gained a rather notorious reputation for her racially charged comments, as well as her enthusiasm for attacks on the out-group—after 9/11, for example, she suggested, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”⁷⁸ Coulter also wrote a book about Donald Trump. With a play on the maxim “In God We Trust,” Coulter titled her book In Trump We Trust.⁷⁹ In an interview, she disclosed that Trump's alpha god status stems from a single issue—his protection from rape by outsiders: “My worship for him is like the people of North Korea worship their Dear Leader—blind loyalty. Once he gave that Mexican rapist speech, I'll walk across glass for him. That's basically it.”⁸⁰

Coulter's writing suggests high rape fear. In Coulter's earlier book, Adios America: The Left's Plan to Turn America into a Third World Nightmare,⁸¹ she argued that “America is just bringing in a lot of rapists.” The book is full of references to “Latin American rape culture” and “the gusto for gang rape, incest and child rape of our main immigrant groups.” She even writes, “The rape of little girls isn't even considered a crime in Latino culture” and “Another few years of our current immigration policies, and we'll all have to move to Canada to escape the rapes.” Sidling next to Trump, in the context of Coulter's rape fears, then, makes sense, since she perceives him as a strong man who can protect her from what she perceives as threats from an out-group.

The impulse to seek the protection of alpha males is old and observable not just in Ann Coulter but also among other female primates. For example, primatologist Frans de Waal reported of chimpanzees that “a female who is feeling threatened may run to the most dominant male and sit down beside him, whereupon the attacker will not dare proceed.”82 Primatologist Barbara Smuts reported female savanna baboons will befriend and offer sex to males who protect them and their offspring.⁸³

It should be no surprise, then, that women tend to be attracted to larger, more physically formidable men, particularly in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle.⁸⁴ These men would likely be more able to provide protection. Studies have also found that women prefer men with light facial scars,⁸⁵ which suggests a fighting history, and soldiers, particularly if the soldier had won a medal of honor for bravery in combat, the most brutal form of competition between rival males.⁸⁶ In this light, Donald Trump's boisterous promise to protect against rape has ancient, emotionally intuitive appeal that may have drawn in xenophobic females.

WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT

Before we explore the choices women make when they govern, it is worth remembering that men have historically blocked women from the political process. It was only recently that women were allowed a voice in US politics—the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women equal voting rights, was ratified in 1920. In other parts of the world, women's suffrage was granted far later. Waiting until 2015, Saudi Arabia was the last nation to give women the right to vote.

This comparatively limited tenure in the political world has constrained our time frame to empirically examine how women govern. Moreover, women are often expected to assimilate to the traditionally masculine political cultures they join. These social pressures may obscure women's true political nature. Yet what we have learned in recent years about women in government is consistent with evolutionary theory.

There is a notorious trope that if you ever go to prison, the first thing you need to do is go up to the biggest, meanest-looking inmate and punch him in the face. In starting this fight, you establish a place in the prison hierarchy. This advice seems to show a keen understanding of primate psychology. In the brutal world of male hierarchies, men will fight for rank, and if you are pegged as weak, you risk being forced down to the very lowest rung on the ladder. In prison, as in the chimpanzee troop, this is assuredly not where you want to be.

In a similar vein, scholars have observed that women entering political leadership positions often display excessive hawkishness, which may help to establish themselves within the male primate hierarchy that politics has always been. US secretaries of state Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton, and British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, and Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, among others, all gained reputations for a hawkish male style in dealing with other states. When we recall that women politicians may dress in a manner that makes them appear “broad-shouldered,” we can begin to appreciate the value of primal strength displays within the ranks of male primates. We can also see why female leaders may at times adopt strategies that seem more similar to men's.

But most other times, women across all levels of society are less hawkish. A large body of research shows that women citizens are less likely to support the use of military force.87 Perhaps not surprising, then, research has found that when the ratio of women in legislatures increases, nations are less likely to use military force to solve conflicts with other nations.⁸⁸ In one study, researchers examined defense spending and conflict behavior of twenty-two nations over a thirty-year span (between 1970 and 2000) and made a number of interesting findings.89 First, as the number of women legislators increased, nations were less likely to engage in an extensive list of conflict behaviors with other nations, such as threats, sanctions, demands, or actual military engagements. The researchers also calculated Right-Left orientation of nations based on the percentage of government seats that parties held. As we might expect, Right-oriented nations spent more on defense overall. But as the percentage of women legislators increased, defense spending decreased. This decrease occurred at the same rate across nations that were Right-oriented, such as the United States, and those that were Left-oriented, such as Norway, and the results were quantifiable. For example, in 2000, every 1 percent increase in women legislators in the United States produced a $314 million reduction in defense spending (out of $311 billion in total military spending that year). Similarly, a 1 percent increase in women legislators in Norway saw a $3.34 million decrease (out of $3.3 billion that year).

The study also found that when women were in chief executive (or ministers of defense) positions, there was an increase in defense spending and conflict behavior with other nations, demonstrating the compulsory hawkishness noted above. However, when there were more women legislators, women chief executives were less likely to spend money on defense or engage in conflict behavior. Surrounded by men, which is often the case for women executives, women may be pressured to display their toughness. But when bolstered by the presence of other women, women may feel less obligated to play by male rules. These findings suggest that if women were freer to behave politically according to their evolved inclinations, the gap between the political behaviors of men and women would broaden.

Rwanda offers a case study of women in control of government. In 1994, Hutu tribesmen took to the streets to slaughter rival Tutsis with machetes, bashing them with clubs, seizing Tutsi land, and raping an estimated 250,000 women. Over a short one hundred days, more than 800,000 Rwandans lay dead, most of them hacked to pieces.⁹⁰ In the end, Hutus more than tripled the death toll wrought by American atomic bombs in Japan during World War II, using cheap, Chinese-made machetes. One result of this blot on humanity was a population comprised of over 70 percent women. In the years following the genocide, women began filling the power vacuum left by their dead men, and by 2008 Rwanda became the first nation in history to have a female majority in parliament.91

The shift of power to women resulted in laws to limit male sexual control. Domestic violence became illegal, and harsh prison sentences were legislated for rape. Further, birth rates and maternal mortality dropped, doors were opened for women to own land and open bank accounts, daughters were allowed to inherit property, and the percentage of women in the labor force surged. In 2009, the women-led government mandated basic education for all Rwandan children.⁹² In 2016, the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report ranked Rwanda fifth in the world on gender equality (again, the United States ranks forty-fifth).⁹³

Before male competition destroyed 20 percent of Rwandan males, it oppressed Rwandan women. In the years leading up to the massacre, women lived under patriarchal control. Women's property ownership was practically unheard of, literacy among women was low, and maternal mortality was high. Evolutionary science suggests there is an important lesson to learn here—namely that much of the suffering that humans force on one another, whether oppression or genocide, can be attributed ultimately to male mate competition.

But a population of men need not be decimated to improve conditions for women. Scandinavian countries, which do exceptionally well at gender equality—Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden show the greatest gender equality on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report—use quotas for women. Norwegian law, for example, requires that all public companies listed on the Norwegian stock exchange must appoint boards that include at least 40 percent women. The same goes for state-owned companies.⁹⁴ These countries tend to score high on a large number of measures of societal health, such as life expectancy at birth, years of education, gross national income per capita, gross domestic product, crime, literacy, healthcare, rate of university enrollment, years of education, and political stability.95

A clear conclusion of the scientific literature is that when women are allowed greater political and economic power, which is inseparable from the power to control their own reproduction, quality of life measurably improves for everyone. Affording that power requires placing thoughtful limits on male reproductive drives, which too often result in violence and oppression. This empirical observation is in direct contrast to foundational cultural doctrines that portray women's sexual agency as the cause of the world's misfortunes, as the story of Eve, who dared taste forbidden fruit. Once we see that those stories are based on male mate competition, a path to more stable human societies comes into greater focus.