🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE In some mammal species, females lead the pack. What can they teach humans?
Among social mammals, lions are one of just a handful of species with females in charge. There’s something amiss with— aside from talking, singing animals. Disney’s smash hit of stage and screen tells the tale of young male lion Simba’s rise to power. But, in the real circle of life, lionesses lead.
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.
He “might even hold onto the fruit while she’s eating … just crying the whole time because he doesn’t want to lose it,” says Lewis.During the dry season in Madagascar, baobab trees provide a crucial source of sustenance for Verreaux’s sifaka lemurs: thick-shelled fruit. Not every social mammal species led by females has the same structure. For spotted hyenas, females are warriors that take on rival clans and lions.
Leadership is a special kind of power: influence over the entire group. Dominant animals can be leaders, capable of directing collective action. Or they may just be lone bullies at the baobab tree.Leadership Quarterly 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’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies.
Probing the data further, von Rueden’s team found factors beyond a Y chromosome that predicted political sway, including a person’s size, education and number of allies. The authors concluded that these qualities, rather than gender per se, elevated individuals to become leaders. It just so happens that Tsimane men generally place higher on those metrics than do women. For example, the female participants received, on average, 3.9 years of formal schooling, compared with 5.8 years for men.
Based on metrics like wage gap, share of labor force and percentage of women working, gender equality rose beginning in the 1960s, peaked in the ’90s and then stagnated for the past two decades. As Chilazi sees it, research has a clear message for organizations trying to level out gender ratios in leadership: Company policies are “much easier to change and much easier to de-bias than our human brains.”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.
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