I have to disagree here. A matrilineal society, as I stated in my previous comment, does in fact often give women more access to familial resources, as these are often given to women to be managed or inherited from women, by women.
Hence often piously called matriarchal, as in "The Afro American family tends to be matriarchal"
In practice, "matrilineal" societies are often societies where no one knows, or much cares, who the father is. As our society becomes increasingly like this, the proposition that women benefit from this arrangement starts to smell funny. Men in a matrilineal society contribute substantially less to the support of women and children, and often the relationship is that between a pimp and his bitches: the women (plural) support the man (singular). The male contribution is frequently large and negative.
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.