The evolutionary explanation of gender states that humans evolved to maximise the likelihood that individuals will pass on their genes to future generations. Males and females therefore developed optimal mating strategies to promote the conception, birth and survival of offspring.
Males have evolved to be promiscuous. As paternity can be uncertain to males, it is logical that they maximise the number of potential pregnancies. Various male strategies have developed, such as searching for females displaying signs of fertility such as young, health, and childbearing hips. SINGH’s evidence supported this as it found that men are attracted to women with low waist to hip ratio, a sign of childbearing potential. Mating with women displaying the features described above enhances the chances of reproduction.
Women have evolved different strategies to maximise their chances of sexual reproduction. As a woman spends nine months carrying a child; she must be careful to choose a mate whose genes are healthy, and whom will be committed to her during pregnancy and child rearing. Females therefore tend to value qualities such as health, ability to protect, and resource process, males invest resources, time and effort in the female, thus increasing the chance that the male will not desert the female and her offspring.
The development of sex roles also gave an evolutionary advantage. Most societies divide activities between men and women e.g. hunting for men, child rearing for women. This led to the formation of bigger groups and helped the homo-sapiens to avoid starvation. The lack of gender roles in Homo-erectus society may therefore explain why they became extinct.
As the key to adaptive behaviours is a reproductive success. In terms of mate choice, men look for partners who are physically attractive, whereas women are additionally interested in the resources a partner might be able to provide. Males select women who are more young and healthy – smooth skin, glossy hair, red lips and thin waist are all indicators of this and add up to what we see as physical attractiveness. Females also seek this to an extent, although are more concerned to find a partner who can provide resources.
BARON-COHEN (2002) calls a theory the emphasising –systemising – E-S theory. Research has shown that women are better at empathising whereas men are better are systematising. They have proposed that this gender difference may be the result of selection pressure for males, who develop better hunting strategies, and females, who focus on rearing children. Baron-Cohen suggests that males who are able to systematise with greater precision would have gained an evolutionary advantage.
BARON-COHEN found that only 17% of men had a female empathising brain and the same percentage of women had a male systematising brain. This could show individual differences, in addition this research shows alpha bias, this theory sees there to be real and enduring differences between male and females.
KUHN ET AL (2006) suggest that the division of labour may have been the reason why humans survived, whereas the Neanderthals died out. The Neanderthal diet was mainly animals and both women and men were hunter gathers, Neanderthals were large and needed high calorie foods; when hunting was unsuccessful the groups starved, suggesting a more adaptive division of labour evolved in humans but didn’t in Neanderthals.
A key criticism from this is that evolutionary perspective is speculative, for example, the division of labour may be a plausible explanation for the disappearance of Neanderthals, but we have no direct evidence – other theories are equally as plausible, for example, climate change in Europe around 30,000 BC.
There is a large body of evidence supporting this theory, including that conducted by BUSS, who found that men value physical attractiveness more than women, whilst women value earning potential and status in prospective mate. In all 37 cultures studied, women preferred an older partner. This supports the theory that men search for fertility, whilst women value resources and status. As Buss’ study drew information from 37 cultures, the results gained possess high cross-cultural validity; showing that the traits desired by men and women are universal rather than culturally specific. This implicates an evolutionary link. However, Buss’ use of questionnaires to collect data could reduce the validity to the study due to social desirability issues and linguistic barriers. People may not have felt that they could give answers and others may simply have misread the questions.
DAVIS’ findings support Buss’ conclusion that men and women value different qualities in potential partners. Davis studied personal ads from newspapers, and concluded that men advertised their own wealth and status to attract females. By advertising their resources, the men were attempting to appeal to the women. Women, tended to advertise their own physical attractiveness, supporting the idea than men use physical signs to predict fertility. There may however, a sample bias here, as those who submit personal ads may not be representative of the general population. This would reduce the study’s overall ecological validity.
Other studies contest the evolutionary theory, one being DALY AND WILSON’S. They found that all cases of female-female murder in Denmark over a period of 28 years were cases of infanticide. HARDY argued that this challenges the role of women as nurturers, and suggest that women respond to their environment in a way that enhances their environment in a way that enhances their own survival chances. Therefore, sometimes due to poverty – female gender roles involve favouring one child over another, abandoning infants or even murdering the. This does not fit with the accepted role of women, but still supports the theory that we evolve to keep ourselves alive. This theory may also have a culture bias in that it was conducted in Denmark. This means that the results gained cannot be extrapolated outside their culture.
The theory however, has been considered reductionist in that it does not consider other factors affecting the development of gender roles such as socialisation and cognitive factors. This seems absurd, as it is usually thought that socialisation forms much of our early gender behaviour and attitudes. To be a comprehensive theory, it would have to account for the influence of such factors on our behaviour.
The theory is also extremely deterministic. It states that gender roles are biologically inevitable and disregards the role of free will in breaking stereotypical roles. For example, it cannot explain how women are successful; stating that they should be nurturing children and advertising themselves to men.
Some cross-cultural studies contradict the theory. For example, MEAD found that gender roles across 3 cultures in Papua New Guinea varied immensely. In one culture, the men were extremely feminine, wore makeup and were not trusted with making decisions. These people do not fit the stereotypical gender roles, and therefore contest the idea that they are a product of evolution.
The theory has also been criticised for its lack of predictive power. There are so many possibilities regarding human evolution, so the theory cannot predict how and why we will evolve in the future. It is stated that this predictive power is a key element in making a theory scientific, thus suggesting that the evolutionary theory is not a scientific one.
The evolutionary theory has some positive implications. For example BARON-COHEN proposed that autism may be an example of the extreme male brain which excels at systematising and lacks the ability to emphasise. He has found that autistics score high at systematising and low on emphasising.