"Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilized, educated nation." — Napoleon Bonaparte

In chess, the queen is the most powerful piece. Yet for much of the game’s history, she was among the weakest. In the past there was a piece called the vizier (advisor to the king) which was very weak and could only move one square diagonally. Around the 15th century, the vizier was transformed to the queen we know today, but only when the queen’s full range of movement was recognized did chess transform into the dynamic game we know today. Civilizations repeat a similar mistake with women: systematically underestimating their structural role in shaping the future of society.

The Leverage of Early Childhood

A robust finding in developmental psychology is that the first five years of life strongly shape cognitive, emotional, and social trajectories. Neural plasticity is at its peak, foundational habits of trust, imagination, and learning are established, and adverse experiences can have lifelong consequences. Globally, mothers remain the primary caregivers during this window. Estimates suggest that over 80% of children are primarily raised by mothers in their earliest years. 

This implies that maternal care is one of the most influential leverage points in human development. Improving maternal health, education, and agency directly translates into higher-functioning individuals and, by extension, more resilient societies.

Neglected High-Impact Interventions

Despite this leverage, societies consistently underinvest in women and mothers. Consider resource allocation: vast budgets are directed to military defense, technology, or short-term economic growth, while maternal support and early childhood development receive a fraction of attention and funding. This is a textbook case of misallocated optimization effort. If the goal is long-term stability, prosperity, and innovation, then neglecting the most foundational input, early caregiving, is irrational.

Structure Shapes Systems 

From a systems perspective, women are high-centrality nodes in the network of social capital. Small changes in their well-being propagate across generations: maternal education predicts child literacy, maternal health predicts child survival, and maternal emotional stability predicts resilience in offspring. The multiplier effects are large, yet invisible when viewed only through short-term metrics like GDP.

Yet, Why do societies continue to underestimate women despite the evidence? Several factors contribute:

Cultural bias: male-dominated institutions historically undervalued domestic and caregiving labor.

Incentive structures: political and economic systems prioritize immediate returns, not generational outcomes.

Visibility problem: caregiving work is unpaid, diffuse, and difficult to quantify, leading to its neglect in formal accounting systems.

The result is a persistent blind spot: we optimize around the visible pieces on the board while ignoring the most powerful mover.

Conclusion: Rational Resource Allocation

If civilization is a game we want to win, then undervaluing women is a strategic error. Like the queen in chess, their true power is structural and expansive, shaping the capacities of every other piece in the system. Rationally, this means rethinking resource allocation: investing in maternal health, education, and empowerment is among the highest-leverage moves a society can make.

Civilization advances not by ignoring its queens, but by recognizing their centrality.