Sex differences in political leadership in an egalitarian society.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: von Rueden C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6178229 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians' sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women's stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people-as well as men's higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men's and women's leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to the sexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease outbreaks or intergroup aggression. Early evidence indicates that against the invisible viral foe that can bring nations to their knees, the strategic circumspection of empathic feminine health "worriers" may bring more effective and humanitarian outcomes than the devil-may-care incaution of masculine risk-taking "warriors".
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Project description:Background and objectivesLow social status increases risk of disease due, in part, to the psychosocial stress that accompanies feeling subordinate or poor. Previous studies report that chronic stress and chronically elevated cortisol can impair cardiovascular and immune function. We test whether lower status is more benign in small-scale, relatively egalitarian societies, where leaders lack coercive authority and there is minimal material wealth to contest.MethodologyAmong Tsimane' forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia, we compare informal political influence among men with urinary cortisol, immune activation (innate and acquired), and morbidity as assessed during routine medical exams.ResultsAfter controlling for potential confounds, we find that politically influential men have lower cortisol, and that this association is partly attributable to access to social support. Cortisol is positively associated with men's income, which may reflect chronic psychosocial stress from market involvement. Greater influence is also associated with lower probability of respiratory infection, which is a frequent source of morbidity among Tsimane'. Among men who lost influence over a 4-year period, cortisol and probability of respiratory infection were higher the greater the decline in influence.Conclusions and implicationsDeleterious effects of low status on health are not merely 'diseases of civilization' but may result from how (even subtle) status differences structure human behavior.
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Project description:Sex differences in religion are well known, with females generally being more religious than males, and shared environmental factors have been suggested to have a large influence on religiousness. Twins from opposite-sex (OS) and same-sex (SS) pairs may differ because of a dissimilar psycho-social rearing environment and/or because of different exposures to hormones in utero. We hypothesized that OS females may display more masculine patterns of religiousness and, vice versa, that OS males may display more feminine patterns. We used a web-based survey conducted in Denmark, which is a secular society. The survey included 2,997 twins aged 20-40 years, identified through the population-based Danish Twin Registry. We applied la Cour and Hvidt's adaptation of Fishman's three conceptual dimensions of meaning: Cognition, Practice, and Importance, and we used Pargament's measure of religious coping (RCOPE) for the assessment of positive and negative religious coping patterns. Differences between OS and SS twins were investigated using logistic regression for each sex. The analyses were adjusted for dependence within twin pairs. No significant differences in religiousness and religious coping were found for OS and SS twins except that more OS than SS females were members of the Danish National Evangelical Lutheran Church and fewer OS than SS females were Catholic, Muslim, or belonged to other religious denominations. Moreover, OS males at age 12 had higher rates of church attendance than did SS males. This study did not provide evidence for masculinization of female twins with male co-twins with regard to religiousness. Nor did it show any significant differences between OS and SS males except from higher rates of church attendance in childhood among males with female co-twins.
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Project description:This study examined the role of women's political leadership at the community level in China, a context that has experienced recent political and socioeconomic change and has a distinctive rural-urban divide. Drawing on longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (N range = 40,918-52,406 person-year observations), we found that female community directors outnumbered male directors in urban China but were much less common in rural areas. Female community directors had higher levels of human capital regardless of rural or urban location. Residents living in female-directed communities reported better mental health but not physical health or life satisfaction compared to those living in male-directed communities, and this association was most robust among rural women. For rural women, the mental health benefit of living in female-directed communities was partially explained by reduced personal experience of gender discrimination, suggesting that female leadership fosters ideational change toward women that lowers discriminatory behaviors among constituents.
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