Why it took until the 1990s to figure out that female birds can sing too...
- And what it tells us about the economy
Charles Darwin hated peacocks. Even just one of the colourful feathers in the tail of the male peacock made the English biologist “sick whenever I gaze at it”.
Why on earth would a male bird need to make such a colourful spectacle of himself?
Eventually Darwin came up with a theory: it was all because of sexual selection, he thought.
The flamboyant feathers are for attracting female peacocks to penetrate. The driving force behind male beauty is COMPETITION. This turned the extravagant glamour of the peacock tail into something much more compatible with the straight male gender role.
- The feathers aren’t even about the female birds: it’s about winning against other males. Relax!
And Darwin did…
COMPETITION was also the reason why only male birds sang, Darwin thought. Male birds sing to attract a mate. Female birds don’t, because they don’t need to.
But this isn’t true. Female birds sing too.
It just took us until the 1990s to figure this out!!!
Up until then it was white men working in countries of the Northern Hemisphere that conducted much of the research on bird song. When more women started entering the field they started asking different questions. Maybe we shouldn’t just study male birds in the Northern hemisphere? How about looking at female birds in the tropics?
And yes, it turned out that female birds could sing too.
This changed the whole story. If female birds sing, birdsong can’t simply be a product of male COMPETITION. It must be something else.
The world suddenly became more complex. (Which undoubtedly annoyed a lot of people…)
And it’s the same with the economy. When you only look at men (as we tend to do when it comes to economics, business and money) it’s easy to draw conclusions about that it’s “competition”, “hustle”, “aggression” - and a drive to “crush it”, “own it” and “dominate” that creates economic value.
That is the conventional story.
It is also WRONG most of the time.
It’s based on conclusions drawn without taking women into account (or aspects of men that we consider “feminine” and therefore ignore). Hey, so much of the work women do isn’t even counted as part of GDP!
That’s why the little question “what about women?” is so revolutionary. It’s a doorway to a better understanding of who we are: men, women, songbirds, peacocks and everything in between. Happy Thursday!
Katrine
PS. I am talking to author Koa Beck on her new book WHITE FEMINISM: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind. The event is free and you can sign up here. Koa is brilliant.
NOTES:
An informative video about peacock sex
Recent study showing how female scientists disrupted the field of bird song
Scientists need your help documenting female bird song