Fact Check: Would a ‘matriarchy’ mean fewer wars?

Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey, Jr Friday called for a planetary “matriarchy,” propagating the claim that men start more wars.

“Men start wars and the entire planet should be a matriarchy,” the Iron Man star said in an interview with the Associated Press to discuss his upcoming film Oppenheimer. “But I’ve never changed position on that.”

The claim was also made by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg last year and many other feminist operatives.

However, evidence shows that women are at least 27% more likely than men to wage armed conflicts.

In a 2017 study, researchers from Chicago University and College of William & Mary in Virginia analyzed wars between 1480 and 1913, mainly in Europe. They found that countries ruled by queens were 27% more likely to enter into armed conflict than countries ruled by kings.

“We find that queenly reigns engaged more in inter-state wars relative to kingly reigns. Queens were also more likely to gain territory over the course of their reigns,” concluded the researchers. They acknowledged that the finding contradicted “a common perspective that women are less violent than men, and that states led by women will be more peaceful than states led by men.”

The study’s authors also dispel the idea that female warmongering is born of a need to overcome stereotypes that women are weaker. They found that queens were more likely to wage war throughout their reigns, not only to signal strength in the beginning.

In the book Why Leaders Fight, the authors studied all wars from 1875 to 2004 and found that 36% of female leaders started at least one military conflict, compared to just 30% of male leaders.

In a 2011 study from Texas A&M University, researchers examined gender differences in military aggression — measured by defense spending — across 22 “established democracies” between 1970 and 2000. They concluded that female heads of state are more hawkish than their male counterparts when it comes to armed conflicts, spending on average 3% more on defense than men in the same positions.

“[W]omen in the executive branch, as either the chief executive or related ministers, oversee greater defense spending and increases in conflict behavior than when men hold the same positions,” wrote the researchers.

As the first study’s authors point out, these findings appear to dispute a common perception that men are more prone to violence than women.

However, evidence suggests that this claim, too, requires further scrutiny.

As of 2014, there were 270 empirical studies and 73 reviews that found women are at least as physically aggressive as men in relationships. In teenage intimate relationships, girls have been found to be nearly twice as physically violent toward boys than vice-versa. 

Women do, however, sustain more physical injuries resulting from spousal violence than men.

University of Haifa Prof. Zeev Weinstock, considered one of the world’s foremost experts on violence between men and women, reported these controversial findings before the Israel Knesset in 2017:

For almost 50 years we have known that men's violence towards women takes place in similar proportions to the violence that women use against men in intimate relationships, in almost every culture and society that we know from traditional societies to liberal Western societies.

In addition, we know that in the motivations for violence, there is no difference between men and women. For the same reasons that men beat women, women beat men. The results are different, because of the differences between men and women, and men's physical endurance - they are injured less and therefore arrive less to the emergency rooms. So the visibility of the problem is very high in the case of women, but the motivations and the violent behavior are not a peculiarity of either particular gender.

Weinstock added that the same is true even in Arab societies, despite popular perception, but that "[t]he system today is structured to deal with the violence of men against women, and it does not intervene in cases where women are violent towards men.”

“Even in cases where women are violent toward men, the women are always treated as if they are the victim, and the victim is treated as if he were the aggressor,” he stated.

Indeed, social experiments conducted have found that bystanders who witness a man being physically violent against a woman are more likely to intervene but will stand back and even express amusement if the roles are reversed.

But publishing such findings has become taboo. In 1980, when evidence of equality in intimate violence began to surface and threatened the feminist narrative of an “oppressive patriarchy,” the researchers “faced not only criticism but also a barrage of abuse, falsehoods and threats from women's advocates that is now well documented.”

Researcher Kate Fillion wrote in her 1997 book Lip Service: The Myth of Female Virtue in Love, Sex, and Friendship of a COVID-era suppression of scientific evidence:

Currently, findings on all types of female physical and sexual aggression are being suppressed; academics who do publish their research are subjected to bitter attacks and outright vilification from some colleagues and activists, and others note the hostile climate and carefully omit all data on female perpetrators from their published reports.