It's questionable how these strategies help the race as a whole

Wellll, I view them as competitive pressures within the species, which contribute to the welfare of the species overall by improving its male half (there are other types of sexual selection acting on females).

Sexual selection gets less attention than species selection, but it may be a profound evolutionary force, especially for humans. Many biologists believe that it was female hominids selecting males for ability to provide food that gave us our big brains, and quite a few credit language and the arts to females selecting for males able to bring them gifts and provide entertainment. Makes sense, because ability to hunt is a broad filter, and one that can be a weak differentiator when game is plentiful. If all the males can bring home plenty of food, selection will move on to more abstract criteria like devotion (capacity for monogamy, as evidenced by gifts and persistence) and social skills as evidenced by language that predict how high a mate will rise in the primate hierarchy.

It's sometimes overlooked, but this process wasn't just selecting males, it selected both males and females. The females were competing among themselves to develop more sophisticated selection criteria and ability to distinguish suitable mates, as well as in the separate arena of learning to raise young who were better competitors in the next generation.

I realize how that might sounds like I'm advancing a biological justification for traditional sexual roles or even male chauvinism. But I distinguish between "natural" and "historical"--in the history of hominid evolution we got a lot of mileage out of elaborating on basic primate sexual role differences and social structures, but that doesn't mean we're locked into them now by our "nature". We've discovered over the last century how we can get even more mileage out of letting the roles be fluid and thereby doubling our species potential, now that our circumstances aren't forcing us to thread the narrow needle of Darwinian selection in the old natural world.

Isn't science wonderful? You betcha!