I had occasion recently to be struck again by the difference between male leaders and female leaders – especially as it pertains to aggression. Neither the information nor the insight is new. It’s all over the relevant literature, including that on primates. Male leaders and their followers are much more often and much more overtly aggressive than their female counterparts – despite the distinction being one to which it appears we’re inured.
Among the reasons we forget it exists is the nature of work has changed. In large parts of the world the advantages male humans used to have of physical strength have diminished or even vanished. If you’re leading a company or a university, for example, physical strength plays little or no role in how you perform. Even if you’re leading a country, it plays no part or, more precisely, not one that is obvious. Joe Biden was not elected president of the United States in 2020 because of his physical strength or warrior-like personality. And it’s conceivable that though Kamala Harris is far smaller than Donald Trump, and cannot possibly replicate his inveterate swagger, she will defeat him in the November election.
But national leaders differ from other sorts of leaders in that they have proxies who are warriors. They have at their disposal militaries, and intelligence services, and weapons, many deadly. So, it is males leaders at the national level who are most likely to emulate their great ape analogues: males who are prone to aggression either because they want more sex or because they want more territory.
In both current wars in which the United States is most directly engaged – one between Ukraine and Russia and the other between Israel and Hamas – the leading actors are all male. Moreover, their primary prompt is for more territory. President Vladimir Putin’s original intention was to swallow Ukraine whole, to effectively annex it to Russia. And in response to the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been determined to if not take over then rule over Gaza.
In Sudan the civil war in which millions are being displaced and more are going hungry, males predictably are the protagonists. And the Democratic Republic of Congo – which for two decades has endured brutal civil strife – has the awful distinction of being known as “rape capital of the world,” with on average 48 women raped every hour, all by men determined to dominate them.
This is not to suggest that female leaders are never aggressive. Sometimes they are, certainly when it comes to defending their young. Nor is it to imply that at the national level female leaders are weak or that they are pacifists. While their sample size is extremely small, women leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir remind us that gender is not, or at least not necessarily, a determinant.
But it is to remind us of what we know. That among great apes – of which humans are one – males are more aggressive than females and that they are much more prone to violence. American politics is a current case in point. This is chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, Peter Baker, writing in yesterday’s paper.
“At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump….He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threating to shoot looters and undocumented immigrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker, and suggested that a general he deemed disloyal be executed…. He even suggested that the mob [on January 6th, 2021] might be right to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.”
In his landmark book On Human Nature the preeminent sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson wrote that “males are characteristically aggressive, especially toward one another,” and that the “physical and temperamental differences between men and women have been amplified by culture into universal male dominance.” Wilson’s book was written some fifty years ago, which means that some of what he wrote has been supplanted by different experts with different findings. But if there is evidence that his conclusion has been disproven, I’ve not seen it. Either in print or on the world stage.