Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

What does any of this have to do with women today? Everything, it turns out. In a uniquely comprehensive analysis published in 2013, a group of Harvard and UCLA economists established that the plough has had as great an impact on our beliefs about men and women and about female self-determination as it did on the soil it tilled so efficiently. Where there is or has been plough agriculture, the effects are deep and wide-ranging: these societies have markedly lower levels of female participation in politics and the labor force, and they rank high on the embrace of markedly gender-biased attitudes. Perhaps most remarkably, the researchers discovered that even generations later and thousands of miles away, in utterly changed ecologies and regardless of religion, income, and intervening progress—medical improvements, economic development, technological change, and the production structure of an economy—we continue to reap attitudes sown by historical use of the plough.