Guest editor Dr. Maryanne L. Fisher discusses implications of the January 2020 special issue of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, which addresses women’s representation in evolutionary-based research and theory.
What is the special issue about?
This special issue examines how women have been studied from an evolutionary perspective, with a particular focus on areas that may have been neglected in past work.
We invited authors to report on research that addressed women as active agents, to provide analyses that questioned past assumptions about women that have influenced the discipline, or to detail how the discipline has limited explorations of women.
The articles show that women are not simply passive entitles but instead play significant and active parts in human evolution and theories about evolutionary bases of behavior.
What is the significance of the issue?
This special issue reflects the growing interest in women’s representation in evolutionary-based research and theory. Evolutionary perspectives have often been openly criticized in fields such as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, to the point of being dismissed outright in favor of sociocultural explanations for behavior, motivation, emotions, and cognitions.
Evolutionary-minded scholars typically do not take such a hard stance and indeed consider sociocultural explanations as relevant to a degree. Moreover, evolutionary scholars remain open to discussions about the limitations of their views.
The sort of questioning seen in this special issue may become even more inclusive and encapsulate a variety of sexualities and genders. Thus, this special issue marks an important development in the field that may ultimately lead to new and critical areas of investigation.
Research is not performed in a vacuum; it relies on the constant influx of new ideas, revisiting past findings and extending beyond assumptions that somehow become doctrine. This special issue addresses previous findings.
Authors also talk about how some theorists have been ahead of their time and then ignored, much to the detriment of the discipline. Others present how popular books and children’s literature show us limitations in how women have been depicted in evolutionary perspectives and the wider range of representations that exist.
Many scholars, including those working from an evolutionary perspective, have misrepresented women at times in their past work. This special issue is interesting because it adds to the corpus of existing work that hopefully other scholars can correct, build upon, or integrate as needed.
Tell us about a few key takeaways.
- Media provide mixed messages about human evolution, especially women’s independence, power, and ability to achieve their goals. However, some media may effectively serve to highlight women’s long-standing resistance to control over their sexuality.
- Women engage in physical violence, such as domestic abuse and sexual assault. It is important to acknowledge that these actions are at times inappropriately labeled as self-defense.
- Men have routinely been presented in the literature as exploiting their mates; yet the literature has neglected the possibility that women are able to identify men who are easy targets for exploitation.
- Some behaviors that seem straightforward, such as electing to breastfeed, may have alternative explanations.
- The way men and women create representations of heroes in children’s literature is different, especially in relation to the use of physical violence, but women still actively achieve their goals.
- The topic of asymmetrical parental investment (i.e., how much mothers and fathers invest in their children) is worthy of further scrutiny.
- The way women are represented in introductory evolutionary psychology textbooks is concerning. The textbooks often omit topics pertaining to older women, characteristics such as intelligence, or independent resourcefulness in favor of focusing on youth and appearance.
What are some practical implications of the articles featured in the issue?
The special issue highlights the very real need to explore alternative explanations for sex- or gender-related behavior, question issues surrounding women’s representation, and be wary of textbooks as an ultimate, definitive source of information. None of these issues are new per se, but they warrant being stated.
Further, media’s depiction of human evolution is not necessarily accurate but can be useful for highlighting gaps in what we know about evolutionary history or drawing attention to areas that require better scrutiny.
Note: This article is in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area. View more articles in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area.