Gamma Bias is an excellent construct for explaining the gender bias we see today. A fatal flaw attached to the theory, however, is the claim that it is an evolved, hardwired species trait (as proposed in The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health).
Seager and Barry put the evolutionary claim this way:
It makes sense that women are more valuable than men, because of their importance in reproduction. A very basic way of understanding this is to think about the question of which hypothetical village would have the better chance of survival: the one with 100 women and one man or the village with 100 men and one woman? The answer to the question demonstrates the unquestionable value of women to human survival.
Why We Disfavour Men
On an evolutionary level, males can be seen as the providers of protection, not the recipients of protection (Seager et al. 2016). It makes sense that someone should have the role of protecting offspring, and also protect those who give birth to and nurture the offspring. Thus social attitudes would have been calibrated accordingly over many thousands of years to associate femininity with nurturing and vulnerability and masculinity with protection and strength. Because of this, it would be more difficult—both unconsciously and consciously—to feel the same level of emotional sympathy for a male than a female. For the man, it might also therefore be difficult to deviate from the script of the protector and seek help. By the same token, it might also be difficult for society to see men as victims rather than protectors.
[pp. 96-97 in The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health]
Evolutionary psychology “Just So stories” assume Victorian nuclear-family roles—man as sole protector/provider, woman as sole childminder/homemaker—that do not match most of human history. Humans lived and worked as cooperative teams (“all for one, and one for all”). Child survival depended on alloparental care and paternal investment; protection and provisioning came from every group member, not only men. When men were sick, injured, or dependent, the extended family filled the gap rather than discarding them according to any supposed hardwired gamma bias. Without that direct male investment in childcare and survival infrastructure, the offspring of many women paired with a single male, or even limited males, would almost certainly fail to survive.
The evolutionary-psychology component can therefore be discarded. Occam’s razor favors memetic drivers (Dawkins) over genetic ones; these are better grounded in the historical record, and it’s good to see an attempt to elaborate some of those memetic drivers in the same Palgrave handbook. Treating gamma bias as adaptive hardwiring simply perpetuates the maladaptive force it describes. Said differently, the appeal to genetics is part of the memetics of gamma bias.
Seager & Barry’s evolutionary account of the empathy gap and gamma-bias patterns treats the selective magnification and minimization as adaptive calibrations in the following way:
CELEBRATION (doing good):
-Female magnification (genetic/adaptive — higher reproductive value)
-Male minimization (genetic/adaptive)
PERPETRATION (doing harm):
-Male magnification (genetic/adaptive — disposable protector role)
-Female minimization (genetic/adaptive)
The selective pattern of magnifying female value while minimizing male vulnerability is the same pattern the theory itself applies when explaining the bias. The evolutionary gloss therefore accounts for gamma bias by invoking gamma bias itself. It treats the selective magnification of female value and minimization of male vulnerability as an already-established adaptive fact, then uses that pattern to explain why the bias exists. That is the circularity.