Culture is taught and learned; society is a convention. Civilization centers on the physical realities of humans living together in community, as scholar David Murrow writes:
Men have always done the dangerous jobs, and they still do them. Today 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men. Men also do most of the dying for their country. If any civilization is to survive and prosper, it needs men who will act like men when the need arises. If men are cowardly, craven, or criminal, chaos reigns.
To be sure, there are notable and worthy women who excelled in traditionally male roles: Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko, for example, or the women soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces. But the statistics and the reality are incontrovertible - men constitute the overwhelming majority, to the point of near exclusivity.
This seems simply to happen: there is no deliberate action or plan which leads to this arrangement. It simply presents itself.
Every society needs people to do the dangerous jobs. Throughout human history, someone has had to fight wars, travel long distances without the comforts of home, and hunt down dangerous animals. Today we need people to work in mines, rush into burning buildings, and catch bad guys.
These gender roles hold across a host of other variables: time, place, religion, language, income level, etc. With no significant exceptions, these arrangements are found in every human society.
This ubiquitous statistical pattern is not an argument for some notion of male superiority, because it has a dark side: 95% of violent crime, and 95% of those found guilty for it, are men. This is also reflected in the populations of prisons and penitentiaries.
Civilization is made possible by gender roles. These roles are distinct, but do not place a relative valuation on the two genders. On the contrary, the conclusion suggested is that both genders are absolutely indispensable.
