Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (36 page)

Larry Summers, when president of Harvard, publicly said that because men are more variable, women might not have the same abilities in math and science as the best men—a statement that would barely have been noticed a few decades earlier. Given the proven impact of stereotype threat, his claim probably diminished the math and science performance of girls and women at his and other universities. He was led to resign (for this among other reasons) and replaced by Harvard's first woman president. In the fall of 2013, under pressure, Summers withdrew his name from consideration to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, probably the most important banking position in the world. Janet Yellen, his main rival, in 2014 became the first woman in that role. Her word, not his, is moving markets worldwide; her judgment will stabilize economies and determine the prosperity of millions.

An elegant 2013 study by psychologists Katie Van Loo and Robert Rydell showed that priming women with a sense of their own power protected them from stereotype threat effects. This reminded me of a
cartoon. Two nervous men in suits are sitting in the waiting room of a fancy office. One confides to the other, “They say if she tugs her earring, you’re done for.” That was in the early days of women in the executive suite, and it was funny because it was surprising. Now women run technical companies that employ thousands of engineers, as well as countless nontechnical ones that also employ technicians. The women on top understand more than enough of what the geeks have to say to them, but they get to the top because they also understand their customers and have a deft, nonconfrontational managerial style that many men can’t imitate. Women in business, as we’ll see, are better at keeping their egos and anger out of it, and that often makes for better judgment and better leadership.

Chapter 10

♦

Billions Rising

B
ut, you fairly object, power is power, and it corrupts, regardless of its chromosomes. I can’t disagree entirely, but I do disagree mostly. So how do I think the world will be different in the female-forward future? Well, for one thing, sexual abuse of either sex by people in power—something that dates back to the dawn of power itself—will decline by almost the same extent that women replace men.

As I began work on this book, the U.S. Senate was probing the recent antics of thirteen Secret Service men. While in Cartagena, Colombia, in advance of a visit by the president, they hired prostitutes, risking the security of the man they had sworn to take a bullet for, sullying the agency, and hurting their families.

At the same time, a former senator from North Carolina, almost elected vice president in 2004, awaited a verdict on the charge that he used campaign funds to support a child he’d fathered with an aide, whose parentage he’d tried to pin on another aide. All this became public while his devoted wife was dying of breast cancer; she responded with hysterical shame and grief. The only question in
the case was whether donated funds were campaign contributions; the jury was deadlocked due to lack of absolute proof that they were, and a mistrial was declared.

Just a month earlier France had chosen a new leader; a different man would almost certainly have become president of that country, had he not been accused a year before of sexually forcing himself on a New York City hotel maid, only the latest in a long series of similar allegations against him. At the time he held one of the world’s most important economic posts, in which he was replaced by the first woman ever to hold it: the brilliant and elegant Christine Lagarde, now head of the International Monetary Fund.

As I neared the end of my work on the book, the mayor of San Diego, previously in Congress for twenty years, was forced to resign from office and later sentenced to three months of house arrest and three years of probation. Nineteen women had accused him of sexual harassment while in one office or the other, although he pled guilty to only three assault charges, all while mayor: forcibly restraining a woman at a fund-raiser (a felony), kissing a woman on the lips without her consent, and grabbing a woman’s buttocks while posing with her for a photo op. The plea bargain included apologies, but when he resigned a few months earlier, he had said that he was the victim of “lynch mob” hysteria. He was released from house arrest on April 7, 2014, saying he hopes to regain his integrity.

Meanwhile, the embattled mayor of Toronto, who months earlier had admitted to smoking crack cocaine—his excuse was that he was in a drunken stupor at the time, so he didn’t know what he was doing—stood accused by staff members of having used drugs with a prostitute while celebrating St. Patrick’s Day—as mayor, of course. He blamed his enemies for persecuting him, and in April, 2014, he announced his run for reelection.

However, in September, trailing in the polls and diagnosed with cancer, he withdrew from the mayoral race and announced a run for City Council. He is swapping campaigns with his brother Doug, who
will pick up the dropped mayoral race as Rob runs for Doug's accordingly vacated Council seat.

These are only the most recent examples. Going back a little further: the governor of California, a famous actor who married into America’s most elite political family, fathered a child by his children’s nanny, who lived in his home for a decade without his wife’s knowledge of their connection. A sitting governor of New York, then said to have presidential prospects, hired a prostitute linked to a crime syndicate he himself had pursued; he soon resigned, and eventually his marriage ended. A sitting New Jersey governor was forced from office by his admission (preempting outing) that he’d had an affair with a man who had been his security aide and who was now planning to sue him for harassment.

A married, deeply religious South Carolina governor disappeared and was out of touch for five days, claiming to have been hiking the Appalachian Trail; he was instead in Buenos Aires with an e-pal he had fallen in love with. “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” became a euphemism for adultery, but he was returned to Congress in 2013. A married, sitting U.S. congressman texted half-naked photos of himself and explicit sexual messages to several women from his cell phone, lied about it, and then resigned from office. Two years later, in 2013, he ran for mayor of New York, claiming successful therapy, remorse, and rehabilitation, but it turned out he had repeated his former offenses a year after his supposed rehabilitation. As has often happened in the past, some public men cannot control their behavior even under intense media scrutiny.

And, of course, a president of the United States got oral sex in the Oval Office from a twenty-two-year-old intern bringing him pizza; this, and his lies about it, resulted in his impeachment, greatly damaged his last years in office, and probably prevented his vice president from succeeding him, with momentous consequences for the economy, social policy, and war.

Then, too, there was the all-male, theoretically celibate hierarchy of the
Roman Catholic Church, which for decades (at least) perpetrated, permitted, and covered up systematic child sexual abuse throughout the world. Child molesters in New York’s Orthodox Jewish community have also been in the news; we don’t need to be told the gender of the perpetrators, including a rabbi and a religious school official, nor that of the leading rabbis in the community, most of whom joined the cover-up and shunned parents who dared to report their children’s abuse to civil authorities. The trial of a football coach at a major university, accused of raping many boys over many years, some on his school’s premises, resulted in the school paying $60 million to twenty-six victims and in a thirty- to sixty-year prison sentence for the perpetrator. And revelations about New York’s Horace Mann School, one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, brought victims out of the woodwork day by day, exposing another huge cover-up of sexual abuse; in this case, the statute of limitations prevented prosecution.

These are just a few examples. All have to do with sex. But there are other kinds of scandals, of course: a former governor of Illinois recently went to jail for fourteen years for corruption, arrogant and unrepentant throughout. (Incidentally, four of the last seven governors of that state, all male, have done prison time for corruption, fraud, bribery, racketeering, or related charges.) A Louisiana congressman is serving thirteen years after a similar conviction; he had $90,000 in ill-gotten cash stored in his freezer. Three years earlier, a four-decade New York congressman and hero of the African-American community was severely censured for corruption by the House Ethics Committee and lost his most important positions in Congress.

Women can be corrupt, too—many have been convicted of embezzling, for instance, and Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading—but they do these things much less frequently, even in proportion to their much more limited access to opportunities for high-level crime. More importantly, women are not as apt to drift into the clash of collective egos that leads to war—and worse. At
this writing, at The Hague, General Ratko Mladic, ex–army chief of the Bosnian Serbs, is on trial for murdering more than seven thousand boys and men in Srebenica in 1995, among other crimes; he has taunted survivors from the defendant’s box in his genocide trial. Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, was recently sentenced to fifty years in prison for crimes against humanity. And for six years Omar al-Bashir, still president of Sudan, has been under indictment for the genocide in Darfur. Others, like Pol Pot, who murdered millions in Cambodia and died of heart failure at seventy-three—although there were also rumors of suicide, since the Khmer Rouge was about to turn him in—and Slobodan Milosevic, who died of natural causes while on trial at The Hague, escaped punishment. For the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when at least 800,000 people were murdered in one hundred days, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has indicted ninety-three people, of whom sixty-one have been convicted. And at this writing, armed men are ravaging the Central African Republic, raping and killing large and growing numbers of victims, as is the ISIS terrorist army, which as we have seen has made rape a routine part of its own genocidal campaign in Iraq and Syria.

These people come from many different cultures and religions on three continents, with varied histories, backgrounds, and political views, but almost none of them are women. Most are implicated at least indirectly not just in murder and maiming but also in rape. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was, it says, “the first institution to recognize rape as a means of perpetrating genocide.” The International Criminal Court has also applied this to Sudan. Because throughout history rape has been an integral part of war and of the process of genocide—the attempt to physically eliminate a whole people—we can only welcome this recognition of one of the most important ways men have brutalized women. Rape in these situations is almost invariably a male crime, overwhelmingly committed against women, and some of the victims are raped in such a
way as to destroy their reproductive capacity or murder them. In any aspect of genocide, women are seldom the criminals, often the victims; in the rare cases when they do participate in these crimes, they are almost always following men’s lead.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s great speech, the one that launched a quest for women’s rights, predicted much about how the world would improve with increased power for women. Recall that every argument, she said, mounted to justify extending the vote to landless men, to new male immigrants, and finally to men who had been slaves a few years earlier must equally be seen to justify women’s suffrage. And she did not stop there: “All these arguments we have to-day to offer for woman, and one, in addition, stronger than all besides, the difference in man and woman.”

But she did not stop there either.

She said that the “aristocracy” of sex is the most hateful and unnatural, “invading . . . our homes, desecrating our family altars, dividing those whom God has joined together, exalting the son above the mother who bore him, and subjugating, everywhere, moral power to brute force.”

She described government by men as social, civil, and religious disorder. “The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal!” She referred to the slavery and slaughter, “inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds” with which the human soul has had to contend over the centuries, “while mercy has veiled her face.”

She said, “The male element has held high carnival” and “run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere.” She described society itself as a mere reflection of men, without any real influence by women, resulting in “the hard iron rule” that
obtains in state, church, and home. There is no surprise, she argued, at the fragmentation and disorder of everything, “when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on every subject, has . . . absolute control.”

She said, “The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored” as dependent women strive to mimic men in order to gain any influence at all. “She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right. . . . She must believe his theology, though it pave the highways of hell with the skulls of newborn infants, and make God a monster of vengeance and hypocrisy.” Women are forced to make the best of whatever world men offer them. “To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense.”

And she pointed to the greatest irony of all, the fact that “now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments, but a new evangel of womanhood.”