Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

how smart you are affects how likely you are to stay alive. If you have an IQ even fifteen points higher than the average when you’re eleven years old, you’ll have a 21 percent higher chance of surviving into your seventies. That’s a bigger boost to longevity than just about anything you can think of—bigger than what’s provided by your level of wealth and your access to medicine combined.

For a fetus, and the child who comes after, malnutrition is an undeniable force—destructive, long lasting, and in some cases irreversible. Poor nutrition in early childhood is famously linked to lower IQ, even when you control for the mother’s IQ. Behavioral outcomes suffer, too. Malnourished babies tend to become adolescents who have difficulty with self-control, long-term planning, violent impulses, and other social aggression. Malnourished mothers are far more likely to have malnourished babies and are also likely to give birth to underweight newborns—another factor in lowered IQ and stunted cognitive development—and/or they give birth before their due date, yet another proven factor that compromises baby brains. These kids meet their cognitive benchmarks later in life and tend to score lower overall in math, in spatial reasoning, in language.

But feeding a growing brain isn’t the only thing that influences its potential. There’s also the matter of how it learns. We know that brains assemble themselves as they grow: building crucial networks, learning social norms, paving shortcuts for language and math and problem solving of all sorts. When a growing human brain is neglected, it’s probably not going to reach its full intellectual potential. Over time, a brain can easily learn that it doesn’t need to be “smart”—or worse, that it isn’t “supposed” to be smart—and to some degree will build itself accordingly.

wide disparities in childhood education between boys and girls cripple the future workforce. More studies than I could possibly list support this idea. Not only is half the population significantly less educated than it should be in places like Niger or Mali, but because future mothers are neglected when it comes to education, those mothers’ ability to fully support their future children’s education is also compromised.

This isn’t just about having communities in places such as Niger and Mali and rural India “catch up” to more egalitarian societies. There’s also a ton of evidence that more sex-egalitarian education tends to be associated with the golden ages of human civilizations in our past. Our societies seem to be at our best, in other words, when we’re educating girls.

Remember, this is the Middle Ages. At the time, Islam wasn’t just more egalitarian than European societies. It was also more intellectually productive. Because Muslims believed reading the Quran was vital for the soul, these societies expected all children, male and female, to be literate and well educated—not just in the Quran, but in a range of topics they found valuable: visual arts, mathematics, the sciences, even music. Public education was both available and well funded. Public schooling didn’t take hold among the Christians of Europe and North America until the Industrial Revolution. If you were a child born between 1100 and 1400, you definitely wanted to be born in an Islamic society, whether you were male or female. The payoffs were enormous. Islam’s golden age produced algebra, chemistry, the magnetic compass, better modes of navigation, and all sorts of advancements in medicine and biology. While Europe was busy telling itself the plague was caused by an evil fog, Islamic doctors had already figured out that copper and silver instruments were best for surgery (the metals are antimicrobial). Philosophy also flourished, with new ideas about humane government and social interdependence, many of which directly influenced the rise of the European Enlightenment. The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profoundly influential societies of its time. And women were right there at the fore, contributing...

Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls’ education is a sign of a civilization’s decline. You can neglect half the brains in your community for only so long.

Getting rid of sexism is hard. Maybe even impossible. But we have to try because, frankly, it just doesn’t work anymore. Or at least not how it used to.

When you rip a hijab off a woman’s head somewhere in France, the story immediately fuels massive amounts of rage in the Middle East—rage that drives extremists’ agendas. When ISIS rapes little girls under the false mantle of religion, the rest of the world becomes outraged—as well we should. Yet we don’t get nearly outraged enough when countries deny contraceptive services to their female citizens. Not even when that denial keeps those women poor, which fuels social unrest, which leaves entire populations vulnerable.

Because while innovations on human culture are created by randomness—environmental pressures, local mutations, individual decisions that get adopted or nixed—it’s not actually true that human cultures develop in entirely random directions. For example, once your culture’s gynecological knowledge and traditions reach a certain level of effectiveness, they rapidly outstrip sexism’s usefulness. And when there’s finally enough gynecology, like safe contraception and abortion and proper prenatal and postnatal care, but there’s still a lot of sexism, being sexist can even undermine gynecology. Screwing up women and children’s health inevitably hinders the population doing it.

And I wish I could tell her, as I will tell my own children someday, that every power men have ever had over women is something we gave them. We just forgot. We forgot we can stop.