Have you ever worked in an office before? Because believe you me, most people who have understand that the person who is your boss generally is not there because they are so much more skilled than you are. Many companies have upper management filled with dolts who were "kicked upstairs." Statistically, CEOs have a much higher level of sociopathic traits than average - because in a dominance hierarchy, that reads as leadership.
Do you understand the difference between power over and power to or power with? Here's a real-world example.
I used to work for a non-profit organization that was specifically created to be a partnership-oriented work place. I was part of the leadership team, but what that really meant is that I was the point-person amongst the people in my department, not only acting as liaison to the other team leaders, but making sure that my people had what they needed to do their job effectively. If you come from an engineering background, that may sound like places that you've worked before, but it's not the way the rest of corporate America runs by and large.
My organization solved problems by relying on our trust and affection for each other not by jousting for place in some sort of pecking order, or blaming someone who couldn't fight back. The people closest to the work usually got to make most of the decisions about how that was done. It's the difference between paternalism (I'm the daddy boss and I know best, so do what I say or else...) and actual working groups where workers are not just cogs in the wheel but actually valuable members of a team which work together toward the established goals of the organization.
I worked there very happily for 13 years, and then some corporate types got on to the board and decided to "fix" things, which destroyed all the things that made the partnership model work so well. I left soon after.
The central aspect of a dominance hierarchy is maintaining traditional power by fear, coercion, and sometimes violence. Enacting laws that keep certain people in second class status, unable to actually compete as full members of the society is often a part of this as well. But even after these laws are repealed, thousands of thousands of years of these kinds of hierarchies are baked into our social system - although more often in the collective unconscious.
Still today, people with “non-white sounding” or obviously female names get called for interviews significantly less than those named David Smith. This is so widely known and well established that some companies have started doing blind hiring where any personally identifying information is removed from a resume so that it can be evaluated without any unconscious bias and instead, strictly on its actual strengths.
Black women die due to childbirth three times as often as white women in the US. "Closing the gap involves addressing structural racism—that is, those aspects of social, political, economic, and health care systems that reinforce inequity, researchers say."
We talk about merit and a belief in equality in this country, but the nation was established to be the direct opposite of that. This dovetails nicely with the particularly brutal brand of capitalism that we practice in the US, so other Western democracies tend to be slightly better on at least some fronts. Countries like Denmark actually teach empathy in schools and encourage students to compete against themselves rather than each other. This is seen as a key element of being a successful business person and manager of other people.
It has been noted by many, many sociologists who study masculinity in America, that this is something that men must prove everyday. Women just are, but men have to constantly prove that they are men, particularly in relationship to the other men around them. There are rather narrow rules for what is considered acceptable for being "a real man." This is a part of the dominance hierarchy as well.
