History suggests lefties have finally gained the upper hand

Ten per cent of the population are left-handed, but why is this – and how far back does left-handedness go? Sean Smith reports

Left-handed children will do well in adversarial sports such as tennis, cricket, boxing or baseball (Getty/iStock)

If you’re one of the 700 million left-handed people, who gamely struggle with scissors, tin openers, corkscrews and Qwerty keyboards, you’ll have realised that the world is designed by and for right-handers. But take heart from the fact that there’s never been a better time to be a lefty, and it’s not just because banks are finally phasing out cheque books.

Although southpaws make up just 10 per cent of the population, five of the last eight American presidents signed their executive orders with their left hand. Leaning left is clearly no longer a barrier to professional advancement or social acceptance, but it hasn’t always been that way.

Lefties are a people without a backstory, because history has been written by a dominant right hand that hasn’t particularly cared for what its left has been doing. Surviving linguistic biases hint at the extent to which left-handed people have been marginalised. For example, the Latin word “sinister” merely meant “of the left side”, but over time left-handers were viewed with such suspicion that it gradually became synonymous with evil.