Evolutionary explanations of gender

Adaptive in the EEA because it enhanced reproductive success and also helped avoid starvation, by maximising food production. 

• Men were hunters - if women spent time hunting this would reduce reproductive successs. 
• Men physically equipped to be hunters
• Women contributed to the provision of food by growing veg, milling grain and producing clothing.

• Stanford - males use control of meat as a means of attrating female interest.
• Hill and Kaplan- modern hunter-gatherer societies have found that men use meat as a means of gaining access to women. 

• Determenistic
  • explain behaviour as directed solely through the biological approach with genes and nature.
  • assumes men will always be the hunter and women always the provider.
  • does not factor the role of social and cultural factors.
  • assumption that genes alone guide behaviour is determenistic as nurture and environmental elements are not factored into behaviour yet known to play a role.

• Men - mate as frequently as possible with females who are most fertile.
  • Look for indications of youth and healthiness i.e. physical attractiveness - indicates greater fertility. 
• Females - sought status and resources e.g. wealth and posessions. - need to be cared for during childbearing and rearing.

Buss et al;

• 37 different cultures - provide high cross sultural population validity
• Men placed higher importance on physical attraction while women sought status and resources.
• Showed traits sought were universal rather than culturally specific showing a possible evolutionary link.

Waynforth and Dunbar;

• used personal ads
• more men sought a physically attractive partner than women did (44% vs 22%)
• more women sought resources than men did (50% vs 34%)
  • Strength - represented an individuals ideal bid in the process of selection.

Baron-Cohen;

• assumes women are better at empathising and understanding what people feel - make better mothers by being empathisers
• men are more adapt at systematising and building and understanding things - make better hunters.

Baron-Cohen;

• created the systematising quotient questionnaire which measured whether a person was pre-disposed to be systematic in their thinking or empathetic. 
  • Men = majority were geared to think more systematically
  • Females = majority were empathisers.
• Supports E-S theory men and women’s gender roles may have formed due to evolutionary pressures shaping different patterns of thinking supporting evolutionary gender roles.

Evolutionary explanations are speculative - do not have a firm factual basis.

Gender related division of labour may be a plausible explanation for the disappearence of Neandathals however - no direct evidence. 

Other theories are equally plausible - climate change in Europe around 30,000 BC