Maybe in a society where leadership is based on challenges of physical strength (i.e. 1v1 combat for the right to rule). But that hasn’t been true of most cultures for millennia. It goes deeper than that.
Against my better judgment, I'll comment in this thread.
I think the mistake in the post above is saying that physical strength has not been an issue for a millennia.
The strong have been using the threat of physical violence to take power right up to and including today. In the home, at work, and in society at large.
To put it bluntly, men are dumber. They're wired for task-to-task thinking, and their purposes are heavily motivated by challenges.
Women, by contrast, are wired for safety, which is a far more holistic approach to purpose because they consider connections men wouldn't even _consider_.
The downside of being smarter, though, is more unease about things you see that may present as a risk. It keeps females away from the bottom of the performance bell curve (men rank lowest in most metrics), but also from the top (men rank highest as well).
All of it is reprogrammable by operant conditioning (a large part of it often happening within marriage), but those are the biological primitives.
That’s not what’s being said here at all. As has been said in multiple comments pregnancy and everything associated with it physically and biologically is the most likely factor. It’s not bigoted to point out that women are biologically different in ways that make them unlikely to be rulers.
We need to lay to rest the idea that patriarchal societies arise just because men are physically stronger. There are known quite a number of matriarchal tribal societies where inter-tribal warfare was a significant focus of their society, so physical violence was strongly tied to social status. I"m thinking of pre-contact North America in particular.
It’s probably less the strength and more the fact that before contraception women would be pregnant a substantial amount of the time. Hard to be engaged in the world when you’re having to do a bunch of pre-scientific rituals to try and ensure a safe and healthy birth a lot of the time.
But that doesn’t really mean they weren’t involved in decision making, it just means they aren’t involved in the sorts of places where people will write any of it down for posterity.
I don't think it's that simple. The fact that women give birth, have periods, and have a hormonal cycle that has wide ranging impact upon their psyche and decision making processes also has probably had a major impact on most cultures trending patriarchal.
What do you mean by 'impact on their psyche and decision making processes'? They are less mentally capable in some sense? I'd like you to spell it out.
This comment doesn't make the point that you think. Yes, people in physical pain tend to be more emotional than they otherwise would, but there is no comparison across sexes that is relevant here. It is possible that women are generally more aware of their emotional state and remain better able to deal with it than men, even with hormonal fluctuation. Men also experience emotional cycles powered by hormones.
A woman’s mental state is altered by their hormonal fluctuations during their menstrual cycle. This is documented scientific fact. Sorry that it’s not politically correct or convenient to the current narratives. There are biological differences between men and women associated with their ability to give birth to children.
Men also experience hormones that affect their mental state, including periodicity. Men’s primary hormone is also associated with aggressiveness and risk taking. Given that, I would say (as a man) men are at least as emotionally affected by their hormones as women are! We just don’t have an obvious and painful reminder the same way women do.
If you plot human height by sex, it's roughly a normal distribution for each sex, and the women are a few inches shorter than the men.
Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is how much the two populations overlap. In other words, a man who is the height of an average woman is unremarkable. A woman who is the height of an average man is also unremarkable. If there's any innate psych or cognitive differences -- an idea I'm not fully opposed to -- it's likely a distribution like that. But probably even more overlap. Not really something that would allow you to predict something about the person. No more than knowing someone is 5'8" would allow you to guess their sex with confidence.
It's because men are physically stronger than women. That's it. That's all it is.