#weirdiness

Here’s the premise:

For many species, male reproductive things and female reproductive things have different bioloads, and this plus other things, like the environment, has an effect on culture. 

In Hunter/Gatherer cultures, this bioload doesn't seem to be a divisive factor. In one valley, the hunter/gatherer culture is maternal, in the next valley, the culture is paternal even though they're both the same species.

In most Agricultural cultures, the bioload causes problems. The worse the bioload, the more the male reproductives "get ahead" becasue the female reproductives have to take enormous chunks of their lives out of commission.

Factory-Industry, the technology levels this out a bit. By the time you hit Service Industry or Replicator Culture, the bioload is capable of being cancelled out, and cultures -can- level out if they choose to (Denmark! sort of) or not level out at all (Saudi Arabia!)

As an aside:

Vulcan biology =/= Vulcan culture like, AT ALL. Leave 100 Vulcans on a desert island with their minds wiped of Vulcan culture and you Do Not Get anything remotely "Vulcan" 1000 years later. You get something completely different.

Romulans are related, but seem to be a bit more bio-normal. Leave 100 Romulans on a desert island with their minds wiped of Romulan culture and you get things that are believably Romulan.

It's the gap between "if you wipe 100 human brains, 1000 years later, you do not get "Japan" even if those 100 brains were Japanese people to begin with, but you do get a functionally believable human culture of some kind.

And I used "male reproducing" or "female reproducing". If you're a Ferengi woman who identifies as male, your nasty reproducive organs don't care one iota about you. So you’re “female reproducing”.  --

OKEY! On to the HeadCanons!

HUMANS

Human female reproducers have a bioload of, we'll call it "9" for "9 months pregnant" because we need a number to compare to. This "9 bioload" also includes the menstrual cycle and all the problems that go along with it. Endometriosis, anemia, everything.

What this means is that in a world with zero technology, a male reproducer has nine less biological things to worry about every day, and can spend that time doing other things.

Why this becomes such a huge advantage in an agricultural society when it's not a huge deal in a hunter/gatherer, I dunno, but in non-Trek human history, it seems to be a major factor.

CARDASSIANS

There's some darling headcanons of Cardassians laying eggs. We'll give Cardassian female reproducers a bioload of "3". It's still A Bioload, but it's not nearly as big as humans.

What this means is that in a world with zero technology, a male reproducer has three less biological things to worry about. In an agricultural culture, they have some advantage, but not nearly as much as a human male. The culture never gets quite as gender biased as humans even without technology.

Why the military split?

1. Because it's not as big a gap as say, humans, they may not have ever had enormous gender gaps to begin with, just little ones. Enough to give you the military split they have now. 

2. They have a recent, top-down government that can do pretty much whatever it wants to do. Even with a bioload of 3, it's still easier to send only male reproducers off as soldiers.

3. Because the bioload is present-but-low, -everybody's- on Condoms Only. The techonolgical jumps that are "hey humans, beholden The Pill. Wow, didja know women can CEO??!" never came up because women were already CEO-ing. So it's still cheaper to just send men because nobody's bothered to invent the tech to lower it from a 3 to a zero.

4. It might not be as split as it looks, because American human writers default to male.

There is Gul Ocett in TNG. We have Makbar the Chief Archon. By Cardassian culture, Crell Moset makes MORE sense as a woman, but American viewers would freak out. (guy kills millions, meh, it happens. girl kills millions, that's something to call Paramount about.)

And Moset was a stand-in for Dr Mengele, so eh, metaphors. 

KLINGONS

The bioload seems to balance out to either "zero" or something really really low. Your human woman has a 1 week period/month and 9 months pregnant. Your Klingon woman takes 1 day out of the year to pop out a baby and it's painful and miserable and Klingon -culture- likes pain anyway, and then she gets on with her life with the economic load of a child, but not the bioload.  On a desert island with 100 Klingons, they're ALL equally Klingony dangerous to each other. The 50 women bioload isn't even a issue.

VULCANS

TOS... human writers have gender dichotomies. Ditto pieces of ENT. TNG/DS9/VOY: Male reproducing Vulcans have a bioload. Pon Farr can get you killed.

The question is "what is the female Vulcan bioload?" If they both have a bioload of, say, "2" relative to humans without Pon Farr, they're equal to each other. I dunno, there’s not enough Vulcans in DS9. 

ROMULANS

In DS9 seem 100% gender neutral. The question is "is this biological or technological"?

If you have a desert island of 100 Romulans, do the female reproducers even HAVE a bioload working against them? Klingon women don't.

Or is this an issue of "our government figured out if you hand 50 of these people a pill, you get 100 people capable of devoting 365 days of the year to the Romulan Empire, instead of 50 of those people being occupied by their reproductive parts for multiple months out of the year?

Now onto FERENGI!!!

Headcanon is that they have a higher natural bioload than humans. If Human bioload is 9, Ferengi female reproducer bioload is at like, 17.

Even with technology, the bioload is big enough that you have to either be extremely smart to manually innovate your way around it personally, like Pel, or post-menopausal, like Ishka.

Ferengi women aren't spending 1 week out of the month on their period, they're spending 3. They're not spending 9 months pregnant with a couple months recovery, they're stuck with it for like, 14 months. The non-infectious-disease-affected pregnancy mortality's not 600/year like the USA 2014, it's more like 1500/375,000 people. (couldn’t find good US stats for this, srry) 

This isn't "deaths by cholera", this isn't "deaths by crappy care". This is just "you got pregnant, something went wrong with your physical body itself, now you're dead" at twice the rate of the human bioload.

The bioload gets in the way of education.

In nonTrek Sub Saharan Africa where girls without menstrual products miss 1 week of school a month because of their periods, Ferengi women don't even have time to start going to begin with.  

Pel figured out how to "pass" as male, she probably figured out what tech to use to squelch that. Or got a (reversible?) hysterectomy illegally off planet at some point. Or something. 

The bioload has major cumulative culture problems. It's big enough and tech-evasive enough that their culture with all its profit-wanting has figured it's more profitable to just leave it alone.

It might even have something to do with the "no clothes" policy.

Their planet rains like -crazy-.

I don't wanna know what their period looks like, but "don't bleed on the expensive fabric, here, go stand outside, there, you're clean now" is not all that far-fetched for a pre-tech culture, and that could have just stuck around as a gender bias.

Like in nonTrek Middle East. Without technology, there's a man with a beard and a full-length robe for sunscreen, and a woman with a face veil and a full-length robe for sunscreen. Without his beard and robe, he burns. Without her veil and robe, she burns. Now that we have airplanes and sunscreen and AC, it's a gender war.

As for ear size specifically, they do seem to grow into them. They just have mega-ginormous --heads--, so Bioload problems!