The animal behavior of a chick is one who likes to peck. It’s been called a “cycle of violence” because when the chick grows up, it continues to do this but with more force. Doctors do not use “chicks” to describe women. This is more slang than anything else and has nothing to do with animal behavior. Doctors do use this “cycle of violence” to explain how an abused child eventually turns into the abuser.
In a study conducted on Espanola Island which is Galapagos, researchers followed the Nazca birds in the hope of finding a correlation between human behavior and animal behavior. The Nazca Boobies birds are the whitest of all sea birds. They have this peculiar behavior called sibling murder or siblicide. It happens when there is more than one egg that hatches and competes for food. By killing the sibling, one chick gets all the food instead of just 50%. Interesting but scientists have connected this somehow to human behavior in explaining how instinctively a chick has in survival and adapting.
David Anderson who is an ecologist with the Wake Forest University specializing in evolution says that, “You don’t expect to see animals wasting time, bothering with a neighbor’s chick, when it could be doing something that benefits its fitness, like finding a mate.” And yet, this is exactly what the Boobies do. Dr. Anderson took his graduate students to study the animals in their natural habitat for 3 straight breeding seasons. Their findings include that the female Boobies normally lay just 2 eggs but care for only one. They call it abusive behavior because the parent Boobie chooses one egg over the other. Then, if both eggs hatch, the parent allows the chicks to fight each other for survival.
So how does this have anything to do with women being called chicks? When women are threatened, they will turn aggressive and can even fight close relatives if the need arises. However, they almost never take it to the extreme by killing a person. The chick label is therefore more because of the connotation on pecking which researchers refer to nagging in human behavior. This is one way of looking at why men call women “chicks.” Also, for some reason, they think that it’s a trendy way of calling women that makes appear young and hip.