In the language spoken by the matrilineal Khasi culture of northeastern India, useful objects are given a feminine noun while things unformed and crude are masculine.

Other parts of the Khasi way are also sure to be alien to those used to the primacy of man.

After marriage, it's the husband that has to move in with his wife, not the other way around. In fact, the Khasi wife owns all children and property and can end a marriage whenever she wants. After a mother dies, the youngest daughter inherits the property and eventually becomes the head of the household.

The most important economic aspect of the Khasi culture is that since daughters stay close to the family throughout their lives, families can raise the daughters they want, not the daughters that will fetch the best price on the marriage market.

(Female power doesn't necessarily extend beyond the home, however, as Khasi women don't participate in politics or law and priesthood is an all-male profession. Women may even be punished for publicly voicing their opinions on these matters.)

Here in the United States, while women have made great strides in bringing their earnings closer to that of men, a gap still exists. The presence of women in the upper echelons of business, science, and government is also lacking. Meanwhile, social scientists and biologists have tried to explain the disparity, and some recent research points to a link between gender and competitive drive.

In other words, it's possible that some of the gender differences we're seeing in pay and achievement could be related to different inborn desires among men and women to compete.

To get a better idea of whether this is the case, Uri Gneezy and John A. List of the University of Chicago and Kenneth Leonard of Columbia University traveled to the Khasi region of India as well as the Maasai region of Tanzania -- home to one of the most male-dominated societies on the planet -- to set up a very simple, yet revealing, experiment.

Maasai men typically have many -- much younger -- wives, who along with their children, are referred to as "property." Daughters aren't counted in response to the question "how many children do you have?" and, most starkly, women are considered to be worth less than cattle.

For the experiment, residents were directed to a central site, usually a schoolhouse, where the researchers split them into two groups. Each resident who chose to partake in the study was given 10 chances to toss a tennis ball into a bucket placed about 10 feet away. The participants were told that they were matched against a competitor in the other group (who they did not see through the duration of the experiment).

Residents could decide whether they wanted to be paid a set amount for each shot that they got in (the amount was equal to one day's wage), or they could choose to go against their unseen competitor, and if they won, earn three times the set amount for each ball they got in.

This particular game was chosen by the experimenters because it was a task largely alien to both cultures (the Khasi are archers while the Maasai are lancers) and since the rules stipulated that the ball be thrown under-handed, different innate abilities between men and women weren't expected.

Here is how it turned out:

The graph above shows the proportion of each group that chose to compete. The Khasi woman were just as competitive as the Maasai men, even a little more so. Within the Khasi population, women were 15 percent more likely than men to compete while among the Maasai men were about 30 percent more likely.

In another experiment along the same lines, Gneezy, List and two other researchers decided to see if there were any gender differences in levels of selfishness.

This time they gave Khasi residents 60 rupees (roughly one day's wage) and asked them to decide how to allocate money given these two options:

1) Every rupee invested into an "Individual Exchange" would give the investor one rupee back.
2) Every rupee invested into the "Group Exchange" would give everyone else who was also taking the experiment a return of one-half of one rupee.

So, if you decided to keep everything for yourself (i.e. invest in the "Individual Exchange") you'd walk away with 60 rupees. But if there were 10 other people taking the experiment at the same time and everyone decided to put all of their money into the "Group Exchange," each person would walk away with 300 rupees. The experiment was run such that the payoff from the Group Exchange if everyone took part was always bigger than 60 rupees. In other words, being selfish meant a worse outcome for everyone involved.

The experiment was then repeated into two nearby patriarchal villages. Gneezy and List found that the Khasi were more likely to invest in the "Group Exchange" and less likely to keep the money for themselves than the other two villages. Surprisingly, the difference in giving was largely due to the Khasi men, who gave more than their genetic counterparts in the two other villages.

Next on the agenda for the researchers is to see if there are any biological reasons for their findings. They'll be using saliva to check for different hormonal levels among the Khasi.

The results of both experiments are preliminary and need to be verified in other matrilineal cultures, but could eventually have very wide policy implications. For example, living in a capitalist society means there is a reward tied to being competitive. But if women are conditioned from birth not to be as competitive as men -- as the first experiment suggests -- how would we want to change society to promote more female competition.

And in the case of selfishness experiment, could it be the case that resource allocation decisions made by women lead to more equitable societies -- and less wasteful use of resources?

For those itching for an immediate implication, perhaps it's time for this.