Why men rule?

Always. :)

No. Not if she made more money. I am the most competitive guy around on that score. A type A, always have to be the firstest, bestets, mostest.

I think there's another possible explanation here (as with all these sorts of explanations, probably only a partial one):

I remember reading (in one of Jared Diamond's books, if I remember correctly) that in traditional hunter-gatherer societies studied by the author it is in fact the women who gather the vast majority of the tribe's caloric intake - with the men often providing only for their own needs. In our own society, women still tend to spend more hours working (particularly around the house) than men do. Is it not possible that men have quite simply tended to have more time to pursue non-subsistence-related activities than women?

This of course ties in with the physical difference between men and women. Since women have a much more limited potential to produce offspring, they have historically had to err on the side of stability (which would often mean knuckling under rather than chancing confrontation) to give each of their offspring the best chance of survival. Men, on the other hand, have a much better chance of being able to replace their offspring later on if they lose them - so they've historically been more willing to take greater risks with what they had in pursuit of what they wanted.

If Jared Diamond has a secret feminist agenda, I'm not aware of it. It's also not as if this is something he pulled out of his posterior one day - he researched the issue, and this was his conclusion. The book was called "The third chimpanzee: the evolution and future of the human animal", by the way.

A significant part of the book actually focuses on game theory in an effort to explain the different behaviours of males and females. Men traditionally had less of an investment in social stability than women (To a certain extent that's still the case, although in at least some countries technology and social norms mitigate the difference(. As a result, men have traditionally been more inclined to take risks. In the most basic evolutionary terms, if a man impregnates a woman but then decides that their relationship/this child isn't quite what he wants it to be, he can decide leave to pursue better options, or just to cut his losses, at the cost of the 10 or 20 minutes of work he put into the conception. The woman, on the other hand, would be losing nine months of her life if she walked away in the same situation. Even if the child - or its father - is sub-optimal, her calculation of whether it would be best to walk away has to take into account the higher cost (nine months and a baby representing a significant percentage of her reproductive potential) of doing so. So she's less likely to think the risk is worth it. Because she's in a different bargaining position, her options are constrained.

Again, as societies have developed male/female interaction has become more complicated and in some times and places men and women have had more similar options. But these instincts still influence our behaviours and condition our likely responses to different scenarios.

Here in Canada, at least, surveys consistently show that women tend to perform a disproportionate share of housework. This is not a daytime TV stereotype. There certainly are households where men do most of the work, but then there are also deer that only have one horn.