Purportedly matriarchal societies resemble underclass society. ... It is the society depicted in rap songs.
This sounds good as rhetoric. And it's not rhetoric to which I am entirely unsympathetic. But its relevance to the current discussion doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Of the society in the OP, it is alleged that "money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister". That is not true of the society that rap songs depict.
Of the society in the OP, it is alleged that "money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister". That is not true of the society that rap songs depict. That is not true of the society that rap songs depict.
Very true, the society of the OP appears to be different. The society of the underclass is a society where men use money to buy status symbols that help them build coalitions among men and gain success among women. Their women often give them gifts of great value or support them.
But it is in a sense very similar to the...
"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.