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The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present Hardcover – Illustrated, April 29, 2012

by Paul Seabright (Author)
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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How our stone-age brains made modern society, and why it matters for relationships between men and women

As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes, Paul Seabright argues that there is―but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work.

Drawing on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, Seabright shows that conflict between the sexes is, paradoxically, the product of cooperation. The evolutionary niche―the long dependent childhood―carved out by our ancestors requires the highest level of cooperative talent. But it also gives couples more to fight about. Men and women became experts at influencing one another to achieve their cooperative ends, but also became trapped in strategies of manipulation and deception in pursuit of sex and partnership. In early societies, economic conditions moved the balance of power in favor of men, as they cornered scarce resources for use in the sexual bargain. Today, conditions have changed beyond recognition, yet inequalities between men and women persist, as the brains, talents, and preferences we inherited from our ancestors struggle to deal with the unpredictable forces unleashed by the modern information economy.

Men and women today have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve equal power and respect. But we need to understand the mixed inheritance of conflict and cooperation left to us by our primate ancestors if we are finally to escape their legacy.

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  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Princeton University Press
  4. Publication date
    April 29, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0691133018
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0691133010
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Economics Books of 2013"

"[A] witty, informative and cogent new book."---Jonathan Rée, Guardian

"Seabright zooms out and across history in an accessible mix of scholarly prose and chatty anecdote to explain why inequalities and disagreements persist beyond potty-training. . . . Turning to today, Seabright investigates everything from the effects of technology on gender-bias, to the various benefits of tallness, talent, and charm in the workplace." ― PublishersWeekly.com

"Throughout the book, Seabright is terrific company--entertaining and convincing."---John Whitfield, Nature

"Right off the bat, I can say that this book should not be collecting dust on your shelf. . . . [I]s War of the Sexes a challenging and interesting read? Undoubtedly so."---Sander Van Der Linden, LSE Politics and Policy blog

"The War of the Sexes is a fascinating read. I love its interdisciplinarity."---Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist

"Seabright, an economist familiar with evolutionary modelling, synthesises several disciplines in asking what our evolutionary heritage teaches us about men's and women's rights and roles in the modern labour market. Judicious in bringing Darwinism to bear on contemporary mores, he avoids the vulgar reductionism that often plagues this kind of popular science."---Camilla Power, Times Higher Education

"Seabright is unusual among economists in being a thoroughgoing Darwinian, and in this fascinating book he takes an evolutionary perspective to explore why there are still inequalities in economic power between men and women."---Jon Wainwright, Skeptic

Review

"The War of the Sexes is a delight to read. Paul Seabright launches a charm offensive on those who would prefer not to think that gender differences have any biological basis, and an intellectual offensive on those who think that these differences are large and intractable."―Terri Apter, author of Working Women Don't Have Wives

"From the mating habits of praying mantises to the battlefield of corporate boardrooms, Paul Seabright takes us on a fantastic journey across time and disciplines to uncover why―and how―men and women have learned to work together, and what forces still keep them apart in modern society."―Linda Babcock, coauthor of Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation―and Positive Strategies for Change

"Come on a journey from the Pleistocene to the present―a fascinating trip that uses the economic causes and consequences of our reproductive choices to explain relations between men and women through the ages. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the battle of the sexes (which is certainly everyone I know!)―it's a great read."―Anne C. Case, Princeton University

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; Illustrated edition (April 29, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691133018
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691133010
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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Paul Seabright

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3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
9 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Richard M. Wallace
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2013
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I very much liked Seabright's earlier work, "The Company of Strangers", and looked forward to his expanding on the illumination of economics by evolutionary theory. Unfortunately "The War of the Sexes" was disappointing. The first half, entitled "The Past" was a coherent summary of speculations in evolutionary psychology and explanations of human exceptionalism. He seemed to be off to a good start in developing the insights of his earlier book.

It was in the second part on the present that Seabright failed to close the deal. He is determined to avoid anything smacking or biological roots of preferences to explain the different labor market outcomes for modern men and women and develops a model of socially constructed reality determining occupational and other labor market choices. That is all fine, but the failure to outline the range of possible explanations is not. He shows promise in discussion of the types of social network favored by men and women, but does not develop this fully enough to be convincing.
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Nelson Amaya
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative and well written, but rushed to the printing press
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2017
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If you want to know how -and why- conflict between men and women arises and persists, why anthropocentric perspectives miss out on most of the fun, and how to talk with those people that rush to fix problems between men and women that they don't really understand, you'll enjoy this book.

Paul Seabright is a rare economist. He uses a long-winded prose to display an impressive array of knowledge - breezing comfortably through economics, history, literature, game theory, biology, anthropology and zoology, seamlessly jumping between disciplines without losing the reader. His explanations are clear, and each chapter is full of historical, literary and animal behavior tidbits; he also uses clever narrative tricks, like the hilarious hypothetical ape anthropologists account on Homo Sapiens in the final chapter (which I dare not spoil here).

The main argument of the book is that conflict and cooperation can only be understood by looking at how men and women balance their asymmetric bargaining power: how men and women accomplish cooperation, despite everything each puts on the table and how much they have to hide from one another. Seabright writes that "the most interesting questions about economic relations between men and women are not about how much they respectively consume but about how much they each control" (Kindle Locations 125-126), and shows how men and women balance the sexual selection equation by cornering resources, lying, seducing, loving, engaging in costly signaling and many other clever tactics. (Dance flies and bonobos also do it, so don't hold your breath until we legislate their sex differences away).

Conflict between men and women, according to Seabright, is a by-product of the evolutionary leap that made us who we are: the long childhood. Time to maturity for human infants is one of the longest among mammals; babies are born long before their brains are fully developed, remaining vulnerable for most of their first years and requiring more protection and nourishment that either the mother or the father can afford. Upbringing shifted efforts, from the usual-suspects of sexual selection, into child-bearing capabilities, making long-term cooperation the definitive tool for human genetic fitness. The seemingly small difference of the long-childhood accounts for lots of behavioral patterns; women don't always go for the biggest, sexiest, richest guy anymore, but for the one who signals himself to be the most reliable long-term partner in bringing up the young - or at least he who convinces her that he will. No great insight there, granted: standard evolutionary biology/psychology. But this is just the start.

The crust of the matter is that, because of relative energy investment in gamete production, women have the default upper-hand in sexual selection: relative size and availability of eggs grants them first-mover advantage. To regain bargaining power, men re-balanced their sexual bargaining position by cornering economic resources; because the long childhood requires some division of labor and women invest more in a child than men do, men took to protein-gathering (i.e. hunting) as a way to balance the selection equation, so that "human males have had things to offer that human females needed much more than the females of those other species do, namely food and protection" (Kindle Locations 1449-1450). And there it is: men subverted the advantage of sexual selection bestowed upon women by nature by means of economics because "men's resources have been ones they controlled; women's resources have often controlled them, because they were physically vested in women's bodies" (Kindle Locations 1483-1484).

However, those same differences that explain most of the behavioral disparities between men and women also explain why so many expected differences are not there. Take the brain. Despite differences in division of labor, sexual selection strategies, body size and such, men and women are equipped with pretty much the same brain. As Seabright notes: "Brain tissue is far more expensive than muscle to grow and maintain, yet natural selection has nevertheless given equally sophisticated brains to men and to women" (Kindle Locations 1242-1243), which indicates that social needs for both sexes outshine differences from sexual selection and cannot account for inequalities. This leads him to conclude that "Overall, therefore, the claim that the major differences in economic rewards of men and women can be explained by differences in talent— either on average or specifically at the upper extreme of the distribution of talent— is entirely unconvincing." (Kindle Locations 1900-1902).

If talent cannot explain differences in outcomes between men and women, what can? The ideological chorus usually barges in, predictably shouting "discrimination!". Seabright offers two provocations to this crowd: preferences and networks. Take risk. If men take, on average, more risky decisions than women, the tails of most outcome distributions will be filled with men, which might not affect the average but certainly the dispersion; as Seabright, writes, "it seems plausible that if men are willing on average to take more risk, those for whom the risk pays off would end up systematically better rewarded than women of equal ability" (Kindle Locations 1965-1967). Now, if this risk-profile compounds with a reward system that pays no distinction to outcomes achieved through luck or effort, which apparently doesn't (see Robert H. Frank (2016) "Success and Luck"), these preferences in risk-taking might amplify differences in undesirable ways. In any case, differences in preferences for risk-taking help explain outcome disparities, and they don't fit in the discrimination narrative.

Now for the second reason, the most insightful in the book: personal network composition. Seabright claims that men and women structure differently their relationship networks, and the weak ties that go with them, which can make up for large differences in outcomes. Drawing from relationships in primates, where “Among males, most cooperation seems of a transactional nature; they help one another on a tit-for-tat basis. Females, in contrast, base their cooperation on kinship and personal preference.” (Kindle Locations 2192-2193), and from this he extrapolates that differences in men-to-men opportunistic vs women-to-women loyalty relationships can involve network externalities that work against women in the labor market. While men have unstable but flexible relationships, women have stable and inflexible ones so that, through weak ties, these relationships can help explain a large chunk of outcome disparities. Evidence is scant (Seabright co-authored a paper in 2011 estimating these effects on top-earning executives) and these type of network effects are difficult to measure, but the logic looks sound.

And right there, when the discussion is at its peak, when the ground is laid down for the encore: the end. The last chapter cuts the narrative abruptly, as if it was rushed out to print. It might be the need for story-telling structure that leaves the reader hanging, but the reason why this book doesn’t deserve the fifth star is incompleteness: the credits roll before the ending.

As I said before, the book excels in drawing, and explaining, naturalistic sources of differences between the sexes that your feminist acquaintance, or your chauvinistic uncle, will never fathom. The extent to which these reasons account for most differences remains an open, empirical question, but they dent those convenient narratives that reduce all differences to calculated, oppressive discrimination. The book is tightly-knit up until the end, so if you can ignore that, a fun and informative read lies ahead.
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Herbert Gintis
5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Informed, and Sensitive Interpretation of the Data
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2015
Modern technology and the social economic organization of contemporary advanced societies have combined to initiate a vast and comprehensive restructuring of the social roles and cultural values that relate the relationships between men and women. Technological changes in the Twentieth century undermined household production of food, sanitation, education, and health care, thus destroying the traditional division of labor between the sexes and rendering mother and wife relatively free to explore alternative uses of her time and energy. The logical alternative has been the workplace, where other technological changes reduced the importance of upper body strength in the workplace, thus undercutting the previously crippling disadvantage of women in attractiveness to employers. We are still dealing with the adjustment to a new modus vivendi between the sexes in the advanced societies around the world.

A second seeming inexorable movement has been the development in the less developed societies of urban areas in which technology and social structure follows a similar trajectory, undermining the forms of patriarchal authority characteristic of the tribal, clannish, and unaccountably authoritarian societies that have dominated human social life since the advent of settled trade and agriculture some 10,000 years ago.

Writers and researchers of various stripes have expended huge amounts of effort to understand this dynamical process and predict its future. Much of this effort is completely worthless, being based on an arbitrary theological prejudice or philosophical speculation. Approaches applying the scientific method, in particular those starting from evolutionary biology and modern behavioral game theory, have been more promising, but even here many writers have embraced untenable principles and thus produced unpersuasive analyses.

Paul Seabright’s new book is an entertaining, well written, highly informative, and persuasive book is dedicated to countering the major pitfalls in the evolutionary analysis of the relations between the sexes, and providing a balanced treatment that asserts positively what can reasonably be asserted, and speculates creatively in dealing with the questions (there are many) that remain unresolved.

Perhaps the two most common errors are to consider all differences in the behavior of men and women the pure product of culture and socialization---the so-called “tabula rasa” or “blank slate” assumption (incorrectly) attributed to the English philosopher John Locke and ably debunked by Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The fact is that humans are moderately sexually dimorphic, with males different from females not only anatomically, but also is size, strength, and behavior in every society ever studied. Seabright correctly argues that while it is possible that all behavioral differences are due to social rather than genetic forces, the fact that there are many known differences between the male and female brain suggest that this is not the case, although there appears to be no significant difference in general cognitive capacity between the two. Seabright attributes this fact that in the period of evolutionary emergence there was a marked sexual division of labor, but the challenges were equally complex for men and women.

The second serious error is that of biological determinism. If the blank slate view is characteristic of mindless liberalism, biological determinism is the refuge of mindless conservatism. According to this view, there are extreme behavioral differences between men and women, and these cannot be papered over by a veneer of egalitarian cultural ideology. Perhaps the most compelling example of biological determinism is that women are naturally attracted to pair bonding and sexual exclusivity while males are naturally attracted to promiscuity. This dichotomy is largely true in many birds and mammals in which the female bears most of the cost of producing and rearing young and is virtually assured of having her eggs fertilized, whereas males bear little of the cost, can produce vast amounts of sperm at will, and whose major task is that of successfully inseminating females. But, as Seabright stresses, there are many examples of sexually adventurous females in various species, and this behavior can easily be the product of evolutionary adaptation. I agree with Seabright that it is very likely that under the proper social conditions, the sexual preferences of men and women may be virtually identical.

Seabright correctly concludes that there are no known biological difference between men and women that preclude full gender equality, that the sexual division of labor is likely to become more egalitarian for the foreseeable future, but there is no reason to believe that behavioral difference between the sexes will ever disappear completely.

Part of the power of Seabright’s book is that he is a truly transdisciplinary behavioral scientist. His training is in economics, but his knowledge of evolutionary biology and his acquaintance with contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science is extensive, deep, and mature.
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Top reviews from other countries

William Jordan
3.0 out of 5 stars enormously learned and it's also well written - but still not as enlightening as I'd hoped
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2014
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There are two main themes to Seabright's book. One is an attempt to place human beings in an evolutionary context. The other is an examination of the question why women are less well paid than men in today's workplace in developed countries.

While I learned something from both parts/themes of the books, neither was quite as enlightening as I'd hoped it would be.

The point from which it starts, and the main theme of its first part, is placing human being in the context of evolution and the behaviour of other species. There's a role for 'salesmanship' as Seabright puts it (deception and self-deception is the way in which I've seen it described by Robert Trivers) in many species - you big up your offerings, they're not altogether without truth but you're definitely putting the best spin you can on things, whether you are human or some other species. We are 'hard-wired' through our emotions for 'rule of thumb' type judgements - and for example think people who can produce genuine smiles will be more trustworthy and richer than those who can't (and actually we are right). We also rate tall people (who are actually smarter than those who are shorter, for the most part) but we over-rate them. We carry in our bodies the traces of our evolution - judging by comparisons with chimpanzees, bonobos etc, we've certainly had periods when we weren't uniquely monogamous and women, in particular, had relationships with many men...We both compete and cooperate in our lives generally and in our love lives and our signalling reflects that - how much of our signalling is like the male peacock and its displays or male song-birds (those who are good at singing do have better brains!) - is not terribly clear, though. (Presenteeism ind the office is like this though, Seabright suggests.)

But, moving on to the theme of the second part of the book, we are social animals and our societies are many and various (hunter gatherer, farmer, modern day). A puzzle that Seabright works on is why, in the modern world, do women have a lower share of resources than men. He thinks maybe they take time out for children (men who take time out from their careers also earn less than those who don't). And maybe they have different kinds of network (more strong ties, fewer weak ties) that don't serve them so well in the workplace when it comes to getting back on or up to the top of a career ladder. Moreover, we need to reflect that the nature of jobs changes - and that what will be uniquely rewarded are jobs that only you can do well and others can't do so well (ie jobs that it's hard to commoditise - Seabright refers to this as jobs that require 'charm').

So, there is some interest here and I certainly learned something from this book. But for a practical book about women in the workplace, Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In would be a strong recommendation. And for a theoretical book based on statistical research. Alison Wolf's The XX Factor is full of interest.
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cynthia.campbell@oslo.online.no
3.0 out of 5 stars Some interesting ideas and facts about the reasons for Early ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2016
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Some interesting ideas and facts about the reasons for Early societies to have inequality between the sexes, but I did not find much that was new in the discussion of present day situations.
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