Despite the carnival atmosphere, this is no game. The stakes are high. As the
frustrated bull rounds the corner of a narrow street, one participant misjudges
both his and the bull’s capabilities and is gored. The nearby ambulance men leap
into action, but it is a long way down the hairpin bends to the hospital.

To the locals, the bull run is an important tradition and an opportunity for
the young men to let off steam. But its true function is not immediately
apparent, even to those who are actively involved. Running with the bull,
remaining close but unscathed, is about male status—and all the rewards
that status confers.

On the other side of Europe, a similar ritual is played out in a small town
in Austria, but here the rewards are more explicit. On May Day, a 20-metre larch
tree is stripped of its bark, and erected in the centre of the village. Any man
that is able to climb the sap-drenched pole and grasp the garland of flowers at
its tip can present it as a proposal offering to the girl of his choice.

In Darwinian terms, success in climbing trees or avoiding a bull’s horns can
be viewed as sexually selected traits that give the victors a head start in the
mate acquisition process. They work because success is potentially costly and
cannot be faked. Sexual selection operates on differential reproductive success
and anything that gives a male an advantage in the mate acquisition stakes will
be favoured. Bull running and tree climbing are for human males the cultural
equivalents of a peacock’s tail.

In every sphere of society, men have created situations in which they can
demonstrate their prowess. And just about every activity which generates
“status”, from bungee jumping, through bird watching and cultivating bonsai,
have one thing in common—they are all done (or taken to extremes)
predominantly by men.

In early human societies, hunting skill was probably the most important
characteristic determining male success in finding a mate, but not because
hunting made man a provider and thus a good parent. Anthropologists now realise
that among our ancestors, the male province of hunting was not the vital
activity we once imagined. In terms of calories, women actually collected more
food. Rather, hunting was (and still is) a status acquisition strategy. For
Western society, the absence of such hunting has caused males to use other
opportunities, wherever they can be found, to participate in a competition with
other males.

In order to impress females, men apparently believe that they need to be at
the top of some hierarchy or other, whether the activity is joy-riding,
collecting stamps or breeding exhibition poultry. The type of competition
depends on the circumstances: if you happen to be athletic and live in
Andalusia, bull running will do, but if you’re a balding British academic,
perhaps publishing scientific papers will have to do. Publishing papers is
almost certainly not as effective as bull running, because the costs are so much
less—but it is probably better than nothing. Anyway, the best strategy
probably depends on the kind of mate that you are after. What else would
motivate some individuals to write and publish twenty or more research papers a
year? And just what else can a discerning

female do but gasp with admiration when presented with an impressively
weighty packet of reprints?

What all this boils down to is that in every walk of life sexual selection in
males has favoured motivation to compete. Without the motivation to acquire
status in one sphere or another, men cannot hope to be chosen by the fittest
females and generate offspring.

Many of us have been concerned in recent years with rectifying the poor
representation of women in science, especially in established posts. We wonder
whether the imbalance between the number of men and women in science, as well as
some other careers, may be a consequence of the fact that men are essentially
show-offs. Women and men compete directly for the same posts, but there is
likely to be a fundamental difference in their motivation and desire to display
their quality. This needs to be taken into account.

The blatantly self-publicising male, out there in the arena waving his CV,
desperate to show how much better he is than everyone else, has the advantage of
a long evolutionary process that has prepared him for his contest. The sooner we
accept that such biological differences may contribute to the inequalities in
opportunity between the sexes, the sooner we can start to do something sensible
about it.