#BeBoldForChange marked the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day observances, which culminated in the annual march and parade Saturday, March 11. The call “to take bold pragmatic action to accelerate gender parity” has never been more urgent with Donald Trump in the White House.
On the heels of January’s Women’s March on Washington, in which millions took to the streets on all seven continents in support of the largest national demonstration ever in the history of the United States, it’s important to keep the momentum going.
But the women’s marches were not just protests against regime change – they represent a seismic shift in cultural evolution and human civilization. Trump’s election was, in part, a backlash against a shift in the power balance between the genders, as exemplified by the adverse reaction to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
The challenges currently facing our species – nuclear war, climate change and population growth – have never been more pressing. And it’s female instinctual traits favouring co-operation over competition that are more conducive to meeting them.
Women have gone further in formal education, moved into work areas previously inaccessible to them and radically altered patriarchal family structures. But we are witnessing something well beyond an American election we are witnessing Darwin’s idea that culture, the things that humans create and their social patterns, evolve along the same principles as biological evolution.
The first human societies were hunter/gatherers. The genders had distinct but equal roles and responsibilities coming out of their evolutionary biology. With the advent of agriculture, hunter/gatherer societies evolved into patriarchal ones. Patriarchy endured for 6,000 years until the beginning of the women’s movement of the last two centuries, which is just a blink of an eye in comparison to the time that human civilization has existed.
Evolutionary psychology, the study of how the environment produces biological changes in the human brain, has demonstrated that males have tended to focus on manipulating the physical environment, while females focused more on the social one. There’s a growing belief that managing the social environment is as important as managing the physical one.
In dealing with the threats to human survival, dealing with interpersonal relationships as well as substantive issues is essential. This is the antithesis of the thinking of the Trump administration, an almost exclusively male coterie focused entirely on competitive advantage and financial profit.
The women’s marches have ignited a powerful global purpose to drown the corrupted vestiges of patriarchy. Why are we witnessing this shift at this juncture in human cultural evolution?
The answer is that gender parity is necessary for meeting the problems we have created that threaten our survival.
Mark Leith is a psychiatrist and member of Physicians for Global Survival Canada.
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