>>13628538As the brain size of our ancestors increased this created a bottleneck in female fertility - this bottleneck being that women become incredibly vulnerable during pregnancy, during childbirth and even a great deal of time after childbirth.
Our female ancestors started selecting men who would invest in them to keep them safe during this period of vulnerability. This in turn created an evolutionary feedback loop where women continued to place a lot of reliance on men for their survival and the survival of their offspring. Women were increasingly selected for neoteny, while men were for neoteny AND their ability to secure and protect women.
This obviously created a power imbalance between the sexes that is rooted in our biology. Culturally women do things to get the upper hand on men in some cases but for the most of human history in the majority of places men lorded over women because women needed to be protected in order to maximize our breeding efficiency.
