The word “humane” conjures the best we can be: kind, empathetic, considerate. Yet as a species we are uniquely competitive and warlike. Is this who we really are, and the source of our success? Should we encourage competition in our culture? Or seek to eradicate it as the likely cause of our own demise?

Dr Finn Mackay specialises in feminist activism at the University of the West of England. In 2004 she founded the London Feminist Network, one of the largest grassroots feminist activist organisations in the country. 

Here she argues that gender difference is neither natural nor inevitable and that competition does not lead to excellence, as neoliberalism would have us believe.

You say that humans impose an artificial hierarchy onto all living things, yet there are hierarchies all across nature. Is it really so unnatural to be a hierarchical species?