The reluctance to recognize female dominance saw it swept aside as strategic male ‘chivalry’ or demoted to simply female ‘feeding priority’. According to Lewis, the study of female dominance remains ‘intellectually isolated’, often dismissed as ‘a weird quirk of Madagascar’ – the ultimate untestable hypothesis. But given that 10 per cent of lemurs are not female dominant, this decidedly unscientific argument doesn’t hold a lot of water. It also ignores the global range of mammals, from carnivores to rodents and hyraxes, that have also been described as female-dominant, suggesting it can’t just
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