Across the anthropological record, no purely matriarchal society has ever been documented.

Even in egalitarian societies, women's social influence typically remains less than that of high-status men.

Coercive dominance is a viable path to leadership for men but often a liability for women.

Among the Hamar, women serve as third-party mediators in interpersonal and inter-gender conflicts.

In Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells the story of a community long isolated, home only to women who reproduce without men. There are no wars, no conflict, and little inequality. Her 20th-century story of a feminist utopia is a critical commentary on the nature of patriarchy and a science-fiction thought experiment on women’s leadership and social behavior. Although the concept of an asexually reproducing community of women is (still currently) in the domain of science fiction, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that a society ruled by women, a matriarchal one, could or could have existed. If so, such a society would likely be qualitatively distinct from the patriarchal societies we are accustomed to today and from those found in the ethnographic record.

Across the anthropological and historical record, there is no documented “Herland.” Available evidence suggests that, across all rural, non-industrial, and Indigenous societies, women are substantially less likely to occupy formal political leadership positions, including among the most gender-egalitarian societies, such as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Among so-called egalitarian societies (that is, groups lacking institutionalized social stratification and substantial economic inequality), women are more likely to have greater social influence. Yet, this influence is typically less than that observed among high-status, influential men. Anthropologists still refer to such societies, which are most typically mobile hunter-gatherers, as “nominally egalitarian.” However, I have come to find this qualitative label at the societal level not particularly useful for understanding the relationship between psychology and ecology as they relate to social hierarchies and inequality, but that’s another story.

Across societies, influence and status are not the same, and both manifest in diverse forms and contexts. Status is an index of individual differences in value. Influence is the capacity to shape the behavior or cognition of others and the group. And it is influence, more so than status, that may provide a better lens for understanding women’s roles in the politics of their communities.

A persistent challenge for the study of influence, or leadership, stems from this male bias in political leadership at the community level. This is, however, only one arena in which leaders emerge. Scholars have also tended to use models and stereotypes derived from our expectations shaped by male leaders at the community level to focus on female leadership.

Many philosophical approaches and evolutionary theories of leadership have long grounded human politics in the dominance hierarchies we see among non-human animals. Humans are less sexually dimorphic than many other primates, but sex differences in physical strength between men and women are pronounced. But this framing obscures women’s strategies for attaining social influence. A more holistic framing of the processes that promote social influence within communities and across contexts helps reveal the complexities of women’s social influence.

In my own research, two case studies demonstrate how women’s agency operates through channels that formal political models tend to miss, and how the social ecology of a community shapes what those channels look like.

Among the Chabu, a population of former hunter-gatherers living in the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia, my colleague Edward Hagen and I studied elected leaders within a recently adopted system of local governance. In a remote highland forest village, I had community members rate their peers on traits drawn from evolutionary models.

Given the Chabu’s history of relative egalitarianism, we expected the trait profiles of male and female leaders to be similar, and they were. Male and female elected leaders shared strikingly similar trait profiles. Both women and men leaders were rated highly on expertise, decision-making quality, prosociality, and spouse quality. What we did not expect was the degree to which dominance would distinguish male leaders specifically.

Male leaders were more likely to be feared and were rated higher on aggressiveness. Female leaders were not. Dominance, in other words, was a viable path to influence for men but a liability for women, even in a society with a history of relative gender egalitarianism. For women, the path to leadership was exclusively based on prestige.

If women’s influence depends on prestige rather than dominance, then where, exactly, does that influence show up? In a patriarchal, gerontocratic pastoralist society, you expect opportunities to be rare, if they exist at all. But my colleague Luke Glowacki and I found, among the Hamar, agro-pastoralists in the arid lowlands of Ethiopia's Omo Valley, that conflict resolution was one such path.

In inter-gender conflicts, women were just as likely as men to resolve the dispute. Women’s disputes were more often interpersonal in nature, such as disagreements over borrowed household goods, personal insults, and relational friction. The domain in which women are particularly active as mediators is, arguably, the most significant one for maintaining the cooperative relationships a community depends on.

Gilman imagined removing men from the picture entirely to reveal women’s capacities. When evolutionary and anthropological models of leadership move beyond dominance hierarchies and formal political positions, women’s influence is more easily realized. It’s not as a lesser version of men’s, but often a distinct and consequential form of social power that operates through prestige, mediation, and the daily maintenance of community life.

Garfield, Z. H., & Glowacki, L. (2023). Interpersonal conflicts and third-party mediation in a pastoralist society. Evolution and Human Behavior, 44(6), 613–623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.10.003

Garfield, Z. H., & Hagen, E. H. (2020). Investigating evolutionary models of leadership among recently settled Ethiopian hunter-gatherers. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.03.005

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