by Xiang Xiang Liew

Created on: December 04, 2009   Last Updated: December 05, 2009

Why are women less likely to enter politics? You can say that it's because of gender-based discrimination, or because of the roles society generally expect women to play, or because politics has traditionally been a male-dominated sphere. And you would be right. But these answers don't approach the true cause of this phenomenon.

If you are female, you might have, at some point in your life, asked yourself something along the lines of: "Why is this world so unfair to women? Why are women discouraged from entering politics and punished for being assertive? Why have females always been expected to cook and care for children, while males are traditionally the ones going out to work and provide for the family? Why do men get all the power? Why is the world like this? Why?" Evolutionary psychologists believe they have partial answers to some of these questions.

The dominance of males in politics ultimately stems from the fact that females have wombs. More accurately, females are the ones who have to go through a nine-month pregnancy and invest huge amounts of time and resources in order to create and raise offspring.

Fertile women are, therefore, a precious reproductive resource that men have to compete for. But on what basis is this "competition" carried out? Studies have shown that women have a tendency to pick mates who have the ability to provide them and their children with resources.

In the environment in which humans evolved, having a male partner who loyally invested a lot of resources, time, and protection on offspring, would greatly increase the chances of their children surviving to reproduce. Not surprisingly, males with higher status and power will have more resources, and therefore females are more likely to pick high status males to mate with.

Or, to put it the other way, males have to have high status in order for their genes to be passed down to the next generation. A low ranking male might not have a chance to reproduce at all. You can reach this conclusion using just your common sense: a homeless bum living on the streets seems less likely than a billionaire to have a wife, or multiple affairs.

In fact, throughout human history, high status has often been correlated with higher reproductive success. Just look at all the emperors and sultans and kings with their harems full of young, fertile women. Even in modern times, in legally monogamous cultures, "men who are high in status indeed gain greater sexual access to a larger number of women", and

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