“Of Evolution, Culture, and the Obstetrical Dilemma”
“The assumption that “women are compromised bipedally in order to give birth,” is widely accepted says anthropologist Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island. But Dunsworth sees flaws in this premise. Women already have a range of dimensions in their birth canal, she thought, and they are all walking just fine. Indeed, research on human skeletons by anthropologist Helen Kurki of the University of Victoria in Canada has shown that the size and shape of the human birth canal varies very widely, even more so than the size and shape of their arms…
“The obstetric dilemma, in its definition, has housed this idea that women aren’t as good as men in some things because they have to give birth,” adds Cara Wall-Scheffler, an evolutionary anthropologist who studies human locomotion at Seattle Pacific University. “I have a number of papers that show that women are great walkers, and in some particular tasks women are better — they don’t use as much energy, they don’t build as much heat, they can carry heavier loads with less of an energetic burden.”…
In another study of 96 countries, Wells and his colleagues found “strong associations” between societal gender inequality and the prevalence of low birth weight, stunting, wasting, and child mortality. “On this basis,” he says, “societies with high levels of gender inequality are more likely to produce adult women of smaller body size,” which will impact the dimensions of the pelvis.”
This Wells guy seems awful. He’s being a weird mansplainer.
(Now that I’ve said this, I’m going to meet him somehow and he’ll be fine, it will turn out he was misquoted)
