Lionel Tiger

“But I have been stressing that there are other underlying species-regularities involved. First, that women leaders do not inspire ‘followership’ chiefly because they are women and not only because of the consequences of those factors noted above ; secondly, even if they want to, women cannot become political leaders because males are strongly predisposed to form and maintain all-male groups, particularly when matters of moment for the community are involved. The suggestion is that a combination of these two factors has been the basis for the hostility and difficulty those females have faced who have aspired to political leadership. This has been the basis of the tradition of female non-involvement in high politics, and not the tradition itself. Cultural forms originally express the underlying ‘genetically programmed behavioural propensities’. In their turn, such cultural forms maintain – as tradition – an enduring solution to the recurrent problem of assigning of leadership and followership roles. In this connection, Margaret Mead writes about ‘zoomorphizing Man’. ‘Culture in the sense of man's species-characteristic method of meeting problems of maintenance, transformation, and transcendance of the past is an abstraction from our observations on particular cultures.’? This is then another way of looking at how broad political patterns may predictably emerge from the more detailed and programmed patterns of different behaviour of males and females.

Some females may indeed penetrate some high councils. They become ministers of governments, ambassadors, and so on. A few may receive assignments which are not ‘feminine’ in their implication, such as Golda Meir, former Israeli Foreign Minister, and Barbara Castle, U.K. Secretary of Productivity and Employment. It is important to know what happens to the ‘backroom boys’ under such circumstances. Do they retire to an even more secluded chamber? Does the lady become ‘one of the boys’?”
― Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups