The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,320

racism, militarism, and comfort with inequality.147 But men are more likely to find themselves at the receiving end of racism too. Contrary to the common assumption that racism and sexism are twin prejudices propping up a white male power structure, with African American women in double jeopardy, Sidanius and Pratto found that minority women are far less likely to be the target of racist treatment than minority men. Men’s attitudes toward women may be paternalistic or exploitative, but they are not combative, as they tend to be with other men. Sidanius and Pratto explain the difference with reference to the evolution of these invidious attitudes. Sexism ultimately arises from the genetic incentive of men to control the behavior, especially the sexual behavior, of women. Tribalism arises from the incentive of groups of men to compete with other groups for access to resources and mates.

The gender gaps in overconfidence, personal violence, and group-against-group hostility raise a frequently asked question: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? The question is just as interesting if the tense and mood are changed. Has the world become more peaceful because women are more in charge? And will the world become more peaceful when women are even more in charge?

The answer to all three, I think, is a qualified yes. Qualified, because the link between sex and violence is more complicated than just “men are from Mars.” In War and Gender the political scientist Joshua Goldstein reviewed the intersection of those two categories and discovered that throughout history and in every society men have overwhelmingly made up and commanded the armies.148 (The archetype of the Amazons and other women warriors owes more to men being turned on by the image of strapping young women in battle gear, like Lara Croft and Xena, than to historical reality.) Even in the feminist 21st century, 97 percent of the world’s soldiers, and 99.9 percent of the world’s combat soldiers, are male. (In Israel, which famously drafts both sexes, women warriors spend most of their time in clinics or behind desks.) Men can also boast about occupying all the top slots in history’s list of conquering maniacs, bloodthirsty tyrants, and genocidal thugs.

But women have not been conscientious objectors through all of this bloodshed. On various occasions they have led armed forces or served in combat, and they frequently egg their men into battle or provide logistical support, whether as camp followers in earlier centuries or industrial riveters in the 20th. Many queens and empresses, including Isabella of Spain, Mary and Elizabeth I of England, and Catherine the Great of Russia, acquitted themselves well in internal oppression and external conquest, and several 20th-century heads of state, such as Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Chandrika Kumaratunga, led their nations in war.149

The discrepancy between what women are capable of doing in war and what they typically do is no paradox. In traditional societies women had to worry about abduction, rape, and infanticide by the enemy, so it’s not surprising that they should want their men to be on the winning side of a war. In societies with standing armies, differences between the sexes (including upper body strength, the willingness to plunder and kill, and the ability to bear and raise children), combined with the nuisance of mixed-sex armies (such as romantic intrigue between the sexes and dominance contests within them) have always militated toward a division of labor by sex, with the men providing the cannon fodder. As for leadership, women in any era who find themselves in positions of power will obviously carry out their job responsibilities, which in many eras have included the waging of war. A queen in an age of competing dynasties and empires could hardly have afforded to be the world’s only pacifist even if she were so inclined. And of course the two sexes’ traits overlap considerably, even in those for which the averages might differ, so with any trait relevant to military leadership or combat, many women will be more capable than most men.

But over the long sweep of history, women have been, and will be, a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: tribal women never band together and raid neighboring villages to abduct grooms.150 This sex difference set the stage for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece go on a sex strike to pressure their men to end the Peloponnesian War. In the 19th century, feminism often overlapped with pacifism and other antiviolence movements such