What does hobnobbing amidst the high-end opulence of Deauville on the Normandy coast have in common with the grim logic of natural selection in prehistoric Africa? Quite a bit, according to Helen Fisher, a physical anthropologist at Rutgers University. She was speaking to hundreds of women executives, activists and scholars who gathered last week to discuss how to better put their strengths to work in a world dominated by men.

Though women still face formidable barriers to entry to the corridors of power, Fisher told them that evolution has bequeathed to them natural advantages particularly pertinent to today's

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) world. "For millions of years, women had to do many things at the same time," she said. "Men had to do one thing: hit the buffalo on the head with a rock."

That might have been a bit of hyperbole, but I didn't protest; I was in the (otherwise enviable) position of being vastly outnumbered by women over three days at the second annual Women's Forum for the Economy and Society. And Fisher has a good argument. Her broader point, laid out in a discussion of "the future of gender," is that modern humankind's inexorable movement away from farming has caused a slow sea change in women's role, pushing them out into the labor market almost everywhere.

Now that brawn and the ability to plough a straight furrow matter less than subtlety and networking, she says, "the job market is moving in a direction that needs the female mind." She cited evidence that the physical structure of the female brain enables greater tolerance of ambiguity, better social and language skills, and more mental flexibility — all key talents for mastering an increasingly cacophonous and interconnected world.

So has woman's time finally come? In France's febrile pre-election period, that question is usually tied to the fortunes of probable Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. She was supposed to address the Forum along with her likely rival, conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. Both of them bailed out at the last minute, with Royal saying she'd prefer not to address "the happy few in a rich town." Forum founder and president Aude Zieseniss de Thuin scolded the candidates for their "unacceptable comportment."

But other politicians had their own tales to tell. U.S. Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes, who claimed that women are graced with "natural empathy," pointed out that eight of President George W. Bush's 18 senior staff members are women. On a panel shared with French Minister of Defense Michèle Alliot-Marie and Burundi's Minister of External Relations and Cooperation Antoinette Batumubwira, Kuwaiti Communications Minister Maasouma Al Moubarak captivated a crowd by recounting her 32-year battle to secure the vote for Kuwaiti women. "They insulted us that we weren't good Muslims," she said, "but we studied the Koran and saw that all their bluffing was lies." The Kuwaiti parliament finally gave women voting rights in May 2005, and the following month Al Moubarak was appointed minister. "Believe me," she said, "it's nice to be the first."

Her account was a reminder of how primordial women's struggles are in much of the world. But the main focus of the Women's Forum was how to secure more top business posts for women. Its central argument is that female social skills of the sort Fisher highlighted are something corporations spurn at their own peril. Eleanor Tabi Haller-Jorden, general manager of Catalyst Europe AG, a research organization that promotes women at work, cites a Catalyst study showing that Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women on their boards earned 35% better return on equity than companies with the most masculine boards. Yet she describes progress on getting women into corporate officer positions as "glacial." Among Fortune 500 companies, it ticked up from 15.7% to 16.4% between 2002 and 2005. "At that rate, it'll take us 40 years to reach parity," she says.

The problem, she and others say, is less one of rank misogyny than of unconscious biases. Yves-Louis Darricarrère, an executive vice president of Total, has looked at how those biases work as he tries to promote a more diverse corporate culture at France's largest petroleum company. Annual job evaluations there include the key question of whether an employee is mobile; when a male employee says he is, the box gets checked and promotion chances multiply. When a female employee checks the same box, Darricarrère says, "the evaluator sometimes asks her if she's married, whether she has a family — and she might end up being convinced [by the exchange] she's not so mobile after all" — and that the company thinks so too. Promoting women has become one of the benchmarks for assessing managers at Total: the share of women among the 350 top directors of the company has increased from 4% to 7% in two years, and should be 12% by 2010.

Others seek faster progress. Since the beginning of this year, any new privately-owned, publicly-listed company in Norway must have at least 40% women on its board; existing companies have until the end of next year to comply. Quotas like that remain anathema to much of the business world, of course: Anne Lauvergeon, for instance, executive chairman of French nuclear powerhouse Areva, who ranks near the top of almost every list of Europe's most powerful women, told the forum she was totally against them. She figures the Fisher thesis will win in the end: that women will rise because they are congenitally advantaged, from being barraged throughout their lives with a need to balance conflicting demands.

"In my view, we women are very well trained to make decisions," she says. Gaining admission to the places where important ones are made, though, still takes overcoming the deep-set, residual biases of us lonely hunters, still looking to throw that rock and bring home the buffalo bacon.

• Why changes in the workplace may give females an evolutionary advantage