When his book came out, the data around women in leadership leaned in Goldberg’s favour. But in the decades since, it has moved in the other direction. The first woman in the world to be elected prime minister was in Sri Lanka in 1960. Sirimavo Bandaranaike ended up serving three separate terms. After 1960, the number of countries in which the highest position of executive power was held by a woman rose steadily, with only the occasional dip, reaching eighteen in 2019. according to the United Nations, by the start of 2020 fourteen countries also had governments in which at least half the ministers were women: Spain, Finland, Nicaragua, Colombia, Austria, Peru, Sweden, Rwanda, Albania, France, Andorra, Canada, Costa Rica, and Guinea-Bissau.

“Science speaks only of what is and what, within the limits of mathematical probability, must be,” Goldberg wrote in 1973, fully convinced that the data would turn out to be on his side. In light of fifty years of social change, mostly the other way, ‘the tendency has been to move away from what my book argues’, he admits. ‘When you have a theory, you always have to be prepared to be incorrect.” But he still believes that he’ll be proven right in the long run. ‘I think it’s a somewhat muddier situation now,” he tells me. “If things remained the way they were a hundred years ago, my theory would be stronger, but I think it’s still strong.”

He leaves me with a prediction: ‘We’re never going to come to the point where any society completely lacks patriarchy.’ For him, male domination is a biological tide that cultural pressure can stem only so far. Sexual equality is something that must be fought for against our natural instincts.

Goldberg’s argument, then, falls back again on instinct. His implication is that female power is something new, a modern interference with a universal, timeless order. Patriarchy is the way life has always been. But the problem remains one of hard evidence. What proof do we have that life has always been this way? If it were universal and timeless, we should at least be able to find some of the same patriarchal patterns we see in humans among other species, particularly the ones closest to us on the evolutionary tree.

But as primatologist Frans de Waal explains, when animal researchers talk about male dominance, they’re almost always referring to males trying to assert dominance over each other – not over females. ‘Even in a chimp society where males dominate, you have female leaders,’ he says. Sexual coercion of females does happen, but how violently and to what degree varies enormously between species. And between males, size and aggression don’t necessarily give them the deciding edge. The alpha wins not always by beating others into submission, but by building networks of strategic allies. Primates, it seems, don’t like to be ruled by bullies or treated unfairly: some of the key traits linked to dominance are kindness, sociability, and cooperation. Even the physically smallest chimpanzee can end up being the alpha if he shows an ability to win trust and loyalty, adds de Waal.

When compared with other primates, the ‘patriarchal’ human family – with the father at its head – is actually quite weird. In a special issue of a Royal Society Journal in 2019, anthropologist Melissa Emery Thompson of the University of New Mexico found that ‘no primate species provides a direct analogue to humans’. On the contrary, she found that kin relationships in other primates are consistently organised through mothers rather than fathers. This may not be hugely significant – it could well be that humans are just different – but it was so persistent a feature that it led Thompson to wonder whether scientists who had studied humans might have underestimated the importance of maternal links through generations.

Experts were so sure that human patriarchy could be explained using biology that they had become blind to the possibility that mothers could hold power as well.

Images: courtesy of publisher

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule is published by (4th Estate; £20) is out now.

A man’s world: what’s really at the roots of patriarchy?