Humans tend to assume that across species it’s males that are most able to shape the behavior of others—that is, to wield power.
But a review published today (May 18) in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that in many species, that’s not the case. The authors propose a new framework for evaluating power distributions between the sexes that takes into account the ways in which they say females often wield power.
Although males are typically the dominant sex in mammals, the authors note that females obtain power differently than their male counterparts, and that this power depends on the type of mating system the species employs. For example, males in polygynous systems (in which male animals have more than one female mate) are typically in power because they are larger than the females and can use physical force to control them.
On the other hand, females in polygynandrous systems ...
