Women have played their part in the workforce even in the most patriarchal times. Photo / Getty Images
The premise behind “trad wife” culture is a myth, an evolutionary psychologist has warned.
Dr Steve Stewart-Williams, an expert in the field of nature versus nurture, said that women have always worked, and the idea that historically they stayed at home raising the children and cooking was inaccurate.
The “trad wife” or “traditional wife” trend has spread through social media and promotes a lifestyle in which the husband is the sole financial provider, leader and protector, while the woman is dependent and submissive.
The phenomenon is perpetuated by influencers who show off their homemaking and parenting skills in glossy online videos.
It is supposed to be based on historical gender roles, which proponents claim have been lost in modern life.
But Stewart-Williams, of the University of Nottingham Malaysia, whose book A Billion Years of Sex Differences is published on June 4, said there was little evidence to support the phenomenon.
“The idea that this is the natural arrangement for our species is, I think, very, very weak,” he explained.
“For most of our evolutionary history, women weren’t just at home with the kids; they had jobs outside the home, gathering food and the like.
“For most of evolutionary history women were not isolated. They were hanging out with other adults most of the day.”
Stewart-Williams said he accepted that men and women naturally gravitate towards different types of work – with women often preferring people or language-focused roles, such as psychology, the humanities, teaching and caring professions.
Conversely, fields that are less people-oriented, such as computer science, physics, and mathematics, tend to naturally remain male-dominated.
As societies become more developed and women gain more rights and opportunities, the gender divide in careers becomes greater not less, a phenomenon known as the “gender equality paradox”.
In wealthier nations, people have the financial freedom to follow their dreams and individuality, which ends up giving natural, innate differences more room to grow, he argues.
By contrast, in less affluent nations, people are driven more by economic necessity than personal fulfilment, which shrinks the sex gap in lucrative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
“For a lot of sex differences, you’d expect them to be smaller in gender-equal nations, wealthier nations, nations with higher levels of human development, but instead they’re often larger,” he said.
Stewart-Williams said individuals should be able to pursue whatever interests them, whether that meant women choosing STEM professions or men entering teaching and caring professions.
But he warned that because the sexes have different average interests, trying to force a strict 50-50 gender balance in every occupation is unnatural.
And he said there were clear sex differences between men and women which are apparent from early childhood.
Studies have shown that boys engage in more play-fighting and prefer toy guns, while girls tend to prefer play-parenting and will choose dolls.
Asked why girls instinctively want to play with dolls, Stewart-Williams said: “I think it’s probably the first glimmer of women’s stronger parental motivation. A lot of sex differences, and a lot of reproduction-related traits, appear after puberty, but some appear earlier.
“Most boys and most girls would probably want to do things that are fairly gender-typical, but there’ll always be the exceptions who want to do atypical stuff.”
A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women is published by Swift Press on June 4.
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