| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
When these biologists watched what animals were doing, their bias against women became a bias against females: They spent more time watching and describing male behavior, and attributed more significance to it than to female behavior. Writers used such biased information to refer back to women; because female animals were reported to be passive in mating and unaggressive in general, it was concluded that women should be this way too.
Linda Marie Fedigan (1982) and Shirley Strum (1987) have also documented this problem.
Female animals were made to seem inferior to males in three ways (Dagg, 1983):
1. Animals and their relationships were described by words and concepts that were biased and represented stereotyping against females rather than fact. For example, if a few females hung out with one male, they would often be referred to as his harem despite a lack of any reproductive activity.
2. Aggression in female animals was downplayed in accordance with the presumed nonaggression of women. This perception continued long after female rather than male lions were found to be the hunters and killers of their pride, just as female hyenas are of hyena groups.
3. Females’ active role in sex was denied. This was more difficult to do after Jane Goodall (1986) described the libidinous chimpanzee Flo, who in her older years and while feeling sexy had 14 males trailing after her for sex on one occasion, and who years later copulated 50 times in one day.
Now, in 2011, such sexual bias is almost gone, thank goodness. Women are at least as numerous in behavioral animal research as are men, and both men and women describe what really goes on in the wild. Women often chose different topics to study (such as those concerning females and cooperation rather than competition), but their articles are published in the most prestigious journals (Adams & Burnett, 1991).