What If All Men Disappeared?

How would the world change if, all of a sudden, every biological man disappeared? Would the world become more peaceful? Why would you have to ration food? And why wouldn’t the loss of all the men on the planet keep women from reproducing?

I’d like to think that a world without men would be the end of the human race. Sadly, we’re not as important as we sometimes think we are. And women might not even need us for reproduction.

Some female animals can give birth by themselves. It’s called parthenogenesis, and it’s common in sharks and lizards. These virgin births only happen when there are no males in the females’ vicinity. So how soon could human females develop parthenogenesis?

Let me get back to human reproduction without men in a moment. Because before women could try to reproduce without men, they’d have to work hard to avoid the total collapse of society.

Without men, the world would lose about half its population and workforce. It would be up to the women to fill traditionally male jobs. Could they? Now, I believe 100% in a woman’s ability to do any job that a man can do.

But women are still underrepresented in some crucial jobs. That means they wouldn’t have the training to take over some male-dominated positions right away. Only 3.5% of firefighters are women. Fire season would get pretty bad.

And of all the aircraft pilots and flight engineers in the world, only 5.2% are women. So plane travel would become rare and expensive. And since only about 37% of physicians and surgeons are women, there’d be long wait times for surgeries. Luckily, there would still be plenty of nurses.

But the biggest hurdle the all-female world would have to overcome is that they’d only have 25% of our farmers left. Food would become more expensive and harder to find. Rationing would be necessary for the first couple of years.

Eventually, after years of training, changing jobs, and restructuring the world, women would get a handle on things. And a new era of world peace would begin. Or would it?

Would no men mean no violence? According to some scientists, men are more aggressive than women because of their DNA. If this is true, then our hypothetical world with only females world would be more peaceful.

But others argue that men are more violent because of culture, societal roles and gender inequality. If this is the case, women would have just as much potential for violence as men do.

Maybe we could look at Bonobo apes to answer this question. These apes share almost 99% of their DNA with us. Females are the leaders in bonobo groups. And it turns out that they are a much more peaceful lot than chimpanzee groups led by males.

But if two different groups of bonobos meet, they fight viciously. So maybe the world wouldn’t be all peace and love with only a female population.

At least militaries around the world would be a lot smaller. The U.S. would have just 14.4% of its military left. North Korea, on the other hand, would dominate. About 40% of its military is female.

It seems that women could do alright without men. But what about reproduction? They couldn’t do that by themselves, could they?

Well, it wouldn’t happen right away. First, women would get pregnant by using whatever is left in sperm banks. That would give them time to develop ways to reproduce without men.

In Japan, scientists successfully converted the stem cells from a female mouse into sperm cells. Those sperm cells then impregnated another female mouse. Humans are much more complex than mice. So it would take a lot more experimentation to perfect this technology for human use.

But if the women of the world perfected this technology, babies could be born from two females. And because women would be partnering up to produce offspring, you could see a return to a “traditional family structure. Now it would be a different story if all men, except for one, disappeared. If you were the only man left in this Amazonian world, what would happen to you?