Female leadership in an egalitarian society (the Chuba of Ethiopia)

Female leadership in an egalitarian society. Zachary H. Garfield, Edward H. Hagen. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

Abstract: Female leadership is receiving increased attention from researchers across the social and biological sciences, including evolutionary scholars. Very few studies, however, have systematically investigated female leadership or sex/gender differences in leadership among small-scale, gender-egalitarian societies. Evolutionary theories of leadership, which draw heavily on studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer and other small-scale societies, have proposed numerous traits that putatively characterize leaders in domains of sociality, productivity, reproduction, dominance, and cognition. We tested preregistered hypotheses and investigated many such traits among elected female leaders among the Chabu, an Ethiopian population of former hunter-gatherers who now subsist on hunting, gathering, horticulture, and cash crops. There were strong positive correlations among most traits, which, in turn, were positively associated with elected leader status among women. One clear exception to this pattern was dominance, which seemed to preclude women from leadership positions. Despite a history and relative persistence of egalitarianism, including gender-egalitarianism, Chabu women face constraints in their ability employ dominance-based leadership strategies that men do not, a pattern consistent with broader political institutions crossculturally, especially among Western societies. Revised evolutionary theories of leadership must account for the importance of women leaders and the strong covariation of traits.