Helen Fisher reveals in The First Sex how women's natural talents are changing the world, making women ideal leaders and successful shapers of business and society today and on into the twenty-first century.

Through deep evolutionary history, women and men developed different abilities and brain structures. In The First Sex, Fisher explores how women's innate superiorities are particularly well adapted to today's global society.

Fisher shows how the special structure of the female brain enables women to do "web thinking" or "synthesis thinking," as compared to men's more linear or "step" thinking, and she shows why this difference in female and male brain structure and thinking creates opportunities, and complications, for women in the business world.

The evolution of women's sexual, romantic, and family lives is also explored as Fisher traces the origins in prehistory of the differences between the ways men and women love and bond. She discusses new trends in families, maintaining that if there ever was a time when men and women had the opportunity to make fulfilling marriages, that time is now.