Men are more team oriented, so they build better institutions. By Lorenzo from Oz.

People’s stereotypes about differences between men and women tend to be highly accurate: unsurprising, in that we have a lot of experience with each other. …

Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities — lesbians and tomboys — who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.

The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. …

It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.

 

Even though the girls are bigger and more developed than the boys, the boy’s skill and decision making are still a lot sharper which is what got them the victory.

 

The political implication:

Institutions — to be functional — generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality.

For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.

The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.

One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional — and so moral — cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. …

That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression — passing it off as moral or social concern — can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.

Doesn’t that sound like today’s institutions?

More status conscious, leading to less social cohesion:

Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing — as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. …

For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.

Feminisation — that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns — thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.

Britain provides an extreme example of this lack of social solidarity, in how little public outrage or concern the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of mainly working class girls by Muslim (mainly Pakistani) gangs has generated among female university graduates, who otherwise can go from zero to outrage in 280 characters. …

Stronger in-group preferences, which again makes for a less trusting, less cohesive society:

Women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men. …

Men thus tend to be more socially inclusive, both across the sexes and across social levels, than do women. Conversely, an ostentatious commitment to “inclusivity” can be an excellent mechanism for not enforcing standards while insisting on opinion conformity. In other words, to greatly reduce actual social inclusiveness. …

Bad for men:

This has led female-dominated organisations to be much worse at catering to what interests and engages men than male-dominated organisations have been a catering to what interests and engages women. We can see this in how female-dominating publishing has largely lost male readers of fiction; female-dominated Hollywood writers’ rooms have regularly lost male watchers of cinema and television; and female-dominated schooling and education has been catering worse and worse for male students.

Similarly, increasing domination of discourse (including media) and management by female university graduates … coincided with the British state’s effective abandonment of working class boys in education and working class girls to so-called “grooming” gangs. The contrast with the public horror of Victorian Britain over the forced prostitution of poor girls is stark.  …

Don’t go overboard when generalizing:

It is important not to romanticise either sex. The Mongols under Genghis Khan and the Waffen SS were excellent at creating effective teams. Bad male behaviour is often criminal and men overwhelmingly dominate violent crime (except against children) and male sexuality can get very dark. But both sexes are capable of toxic behaviour.

With women, there are much more likely to be toxic cliques and networking, as we see in contemporary publishing. With men, you are much more likely to get toxic teams, as when police go bad and in criminal gangs.

Better team play by males is presumably also why elite sportswomens’ team are dominated by lesbians — who have more male characteristics than regular women.