Patriarchy Inc. E-Book

Cordelia Fine

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 432

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Excellent and incredibly timely' Caroline Criado-Perez, author of Invisible Women 'You should read this book' Philippa Gregory The most lucrative industries are male-dominated - yet half of men think they're the ones being discriminated against. Post #MeToo, we're all committed to stamping out sexual harassment - but not to changing the conditions that foster it. Women work more hours than men and accumulate less wealth - while many children want more time with their dad. Inequality in the workplace impacts all areas of our lives, from health and self-development to economic security and family life. But, despite the world's richest countries' long-avowed commitments to gender equality, there is still so much to fix - and so much we don't see. With perceptive and razor-sharp insight, award-winning author Cordelia Fine reveals how the status quo - Patriarchy Inc. - is harming us all, in our working lives and beyond. Drawing on social and cultural history, examples from hunter-forager societies to high finance and the latest thinking in evolutionary science, she dismantles the existing, inadequate visions for gender equality and charts an inspiring path towards a fairer and freer society.

Leseprobe

Praise for

PATRIARCHY INC.

‘If you are a woman and have ever been trapped in a monologue with a man telling you about your “female nature” – you should read this book. If you are that man – I dare you to read it. If you are neither, you will love this book which shows that we have all been defined against the core of our true natures and invites us to think again about what we might be and how we might live.’ Philippa Gregory, Sunday Times bestselling author of Normal Women

‘Combining feminist economics with a close analysis of scientific “justifications” for inequality, Fine offers fascinating, convincing answers to the question of why, if some women have so much choice and DEI initiatives are so widespread, men retain so much dominance in the workplace. As in Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex, complex ideas are delivered clearly and wittily, with the author once again unafraid to tackle research into sex differences that feminists are supposedly unable or unwilling to deal with. Both entertaining and enraging, this is a brilliant resource for any woman who has been told “it’s not really a gender pay gap” or been faced with inclusion policies which tell her she’s the one in need of fixing.’ Victoria Smith, author of Hags

‘Delusions of Gender skewered neurosexism. Testosterone Rex punctured inflated claims about the hormonal basis of gender. With Patriarchy Inc. Cordelia Fine now turns her fierce intelligence and wit to the world of work. The idea that men and women are different-but-equal is unmasked as naïve about the origins of sex differences and complacent about enduring inequities. The rival idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion are good for the bottom line is also pulled apart, shown to be driven by considerations of market value rather than human welfare or fairness. With her trademark command of theory, marshalling of social scientific evidence, and ear for le mot juste, Fine makes a powerful case for a new approach to gender in the workplace, one that would make work fairer, more secure, and more rewarding for all of us.’ Professor Nick Haslam, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne

‘Why do women still earn so much less than men? If you thought it was just the playing out of biological differences or the judgements of the market, Cordelia Fine’s excellent new book, erudite, witty and always a pleasure to read, will set you straight. She also explains clearly the complex cultural and social forces that actually maintain inequality and offers some radical and compelling suggestions on how we should move forward. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand gender in the twenty-first century.’ Professor John Dupre, Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, University of Exeter

‘Why is it that throughout the western world, most of the high-paid, high prestige posts are held by men? Not because this reflects innate differences in ability or personality. Not because it reflects average differences across the genders in human capital. Not because men and women have different conceptions of the good life, and make choices reflecting these. Not for any single, simple, reason. Patriarchy Inc. is informed, nuanced, penetrating, written with understated passion but wonderfully free of leaden moralising.’ Professor Kim Sterelny, School of Philosophy, Australian National University

‘In Patriarchy Inc., Cordelia Fine once again demonstrates her remarkable ability to provide a fresh and critical view, this time to tackle the persistent problem of gender inequality in the workplace. She skillfully dismantles both the ‘Different But Equal’ defense of workplace inequality and the corporate-friendly DEI approach, offering instead a compelling new framework for understanding how gender hierarchies persist in modern workplaces. Fine’s characteristic wit and incisive thinking make this essential reading for anyone interested in creating genuinely fair and productive workplaces.’ Professor Daphna Joel, School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University

‘Cordelia Fine has done it again! Somehow, she is able to take a serious topic, decant decades of research into informative and persuasive prose, all whilst bringing a wry smile to the reader’s lips. Fine illustrates how the pivot away from fairness arguments in the pursuit of gender equality to ‘the business case’ has failed to deliver. She punctuates the perpetual nature/nurture debate employing an interdisciplinary perspective to trace how and why contemporary gendered divisions of labour emerged and to resuscitate efforts to bring about a new vision of real equality for both women and men.’ Professor Rosie Campbell, King’s College London

‘Fine is a superb science writer. Every book she writes teaches me something new. Patriarchy Inc. is no different. If you have ever wondered why WWII code-breaker films are full of women typing away at proto-computers and nowadays programming is the domain of tech bros read this book. It is an engaging, humorous, and deftly argued account of why the modern workplace remains challenging if you don’t look, dress and act like “the man”.’ Michael Jennions, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology, The Australian National University

CORDELIA FINE is a professor in the History & Philosophy of Science programme in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her previous book, Testosterone Rex, won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. Cordelia was awarded the 2018 Edinburgh Medal for her work on gender, and was recently named as a living legend by The Australian newspaper.

Also by Cordelia Fine

Testosterone Rex

Delusions of Gender

A Mind of Its Own

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Cordelia Fine, 2025

The moral right of Cordelia Fine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 334 8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 335 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 336 2

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For Carsten

CONTENTS

A Note About Language

Introduction

1 Divisions

2 Sex and Status

3 (Re)producing Fathers

4 Beyond Market-Thinking

5 Border Control

6 Differences

7 Girl, Uninterrupted?

8 From Equality to DEI

9 A New Vision

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

THIS BOOK DRAWS ON DECADES OF DATA AND centuries of discussion that use the terms ‘women’ and ‘men’ to refer to people based on their sex. I do the same here, but in acknowledgement that a person’s gender identification as a woman, man or non-binary can be distinct from their sex.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT’S YOUR VISION OF GENDER EQUALITY?

Whatever it is, it needs to take a stand on divisions of labour. Work – who does what tasks in society, and what they get in return – is at the heart of social justice. Among those concerned with social hierarchies, in which certain groups enjoy higher status and more power than others, there is a long and distinguished tradition of turning a beady eye on divisions of labour attached to the social identities people are born into. You be the serf, I’ll be the landowner, for example, does not offer fertile ground for egalitarian relations between those two social categories. Little wonder that in the general scheme of things, these are matters that can inspire philosophical treatises and political manifestos, strikes and protests, campaigns and cries of ‘Oil the guillotine, Pierre!’

When it comes to the gendered division of labour, just about everyone is familiar with the basic statistics. We know that along the ‘vertical’ dimension of prestige and pay, men remain firmly installed at the top. For example, in 2022 men still held more than 80 per cent of the top ‘C-suite’ roles in North American and European financial services firms.1 Among the world’s 40 largest banks, all but one had a man as chief executive officer at the beginning of 2024. Men also took up 78 per cent of roles as finance ministers and 87 per cent of those as the heads of central banks in OECD countries.2 (These are the countries, including the world’s richest, that are committed to market economies and democracy and are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.) But men are also overrepresented in jobs on the bottom two rungs of the occupational ladder, in roles like caretaker, garbage collector, and process, plant and machine operative.3

Clear ‘horizontal’ divisions of labour also remain. These divisions only partly line up with our stereotypes about differences between women and men in terms of traits, abilities, values and motivations.4 Females’ (modest) advantage in language abilities and supposed keen interest in people rather than things are sometimes used to explain their lower representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations.5 Yet turn to film screenwriting, a job seemingly custom-built for stereotypical feminine skills and interests, and you will find that 81 per cent of screenwriters are men – an even steeper gender imbalance than is seen among people with PhDs in computer and mathematical science.6 Less often commented on is that these horizontal divisions are linked to men’s much higher rates of fatal work-related injuries compared to women.7

Finally, we all know there are marked differences between women and men when it comes to the amount of time spent in paid work in the market versus unpaid work taking care of the home and its occupants.8 The average woman in the UK spends about 24 hours per week doing unpaid childcare, adult care and household chores, and 21 hours per week in paid work or education. For the average UK man, the priorities are reversed, with about 27 hours of paid work or study per week and 18 hours of unpaid work. He also enjoys 3 more hours of leisure every week than his female counterpart (which gives him plenty of spare time to read this book).9 Unpaid domestic labour takes gendered patterns too. Women are more likely to do the time-sensitive chores-without-end like cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry and routine childcare. In contrast, men are more likely to do more sporadic, time-flexible activities, like playing with the kids, and tasks like mowing the lawn or mending the gate that can be held off until a convenient moment, such as the weekend, the new year or the end of time.10

These divisions are both cause and consequence of the sex-based hierarchy of status and power over resources, aka patriarchy, that we see in the advanced economies of the Global North that are the focus of this book.11 But our progress in dismantling these arrangements has been stymied by two false visions that pervade mainstream debate and discussion.12

The first is what I call the Different But Equal perspective. This reframing of gender equality emerged in the 1990s, when the steady erosion of the gender traditionalism of the 1950s hit a wall.13 The ‘Equal’ part holds that women and men now rightly enjoy equal opportunities in education, work and family life. They are therefore both largely free to fully develop their skills, talents and other potential as they choose. This human capital can then be fairly exchanged in the labour market, in return for status, income and other rewards, via the gender-neutral market mechanisms of supply and demand.

The ‘Different’ element of this perspective assumes that women’s and men’s choices about how to realize their potential, such as whether to invest more in career or family, or what kinds of occupations to pursue, are strongly shaped by inherent sex differences in personality. Different But Equal-ers often draw on ideas from Evolutionary Psychology,14 which holds that biological effects of sex on the brain, honed over millennia by evolution, mean that males and females are born with programmes for the development of importantly different abilities, motivations and decision-making processes. These evolved because they gave ancestral males and females an advantage over others of the same sex in the struggle for survival and reproduction.

Different But Equal-ers don’t subscribe to rigid biological determinism. They readily acknowledge that non-biological factors shape development and behaviour. They are typically careful to draw attention to the fact that average sex differences still allow for plenty of overlap in personality (a term I am using here in the broad sense of traits, abilities, motives and values). But they think that in countries that boast wealth and gender egalitarian norms, the gendered division of labour is approaching a just and natural state in which women and men are able to freely and fully develop and express their potential, preferences and choices. Then, as adults, they neatly slot themselves into forms of work that best match their evolved personalities.

The Different But Equal perspective is not a niche view. According to a national survey of Australians in 2018, about a third of respondents were quite comfortable with traditional gender roles, and half agreed that the sexes have different skills and talents. About a fifth of respondents thought that men make better leaders and are more ambitious. Almost a third thought that women don’t aspire to leadership positions because of their family responsibilities, and a substantial minority approved of women prioritizing home over career.15 Even though, at the time of the survey, more than three quarters of Australia’s most senior justices and judges, private-sector CEOs and federal government ministers were men, only six out of ten respondents agreed that Australia should have more women in the top echelons. Nor, it’s important to say, were these kinds of views exclusively clustered among the older generations, and therefore destined to die out.

Half a decade later, another survey of Australians found that 58 per cent agreed that men are naturally suited for some jobs, women for others, with another 29 per cent unsure either way. Only 22 per cent of respondents firmly disagreed that some areas of study are naturally suited to boys and others to girls. A quarter thought that traditional families and children function best when fathers do the breadwinning and mothers do the caring, and a further 38 per cent were on the fence.16

It’s not difficult to see why the Different But Equal viewpoint is an obstacle to tackling inequalities relating to the gendered division of labour. According to this vision of gender equality, there is no real problem to solve.

The second major obstacle to dismantling patriarchy is the vision offered by the business-case Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) approach. I’ll be using the acronym DEI when referring to this package, and the terms ‘diversity’, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’ when referring to the concepts themselves. (Sometimes, particularly in the US, the ‘E’ is for Equity.) Corporate communications teams tend to write about their companies’ DEI values and commitments as if they were being paid by the platitude. However, they boil right down to a handful of points. Most obviously, the DEI approach values diversity. It affirms a positive orientation towards a workforce with many dimensions – gender, ethnicity, viewpoint and experience are often offered as examples. The main reason to value diversity, according to the contemporary DEI approach, is because it can create more competitive, profitable, high-performing, innovative businesses. Therefore, in order to foster these business benefits, we need to treat everyone fairly (the ‘equality’ or ‘equity’ part), and cultivate environments that ensure all employees feel welcome and able to make their business-enhancing contributions (the ‘inclusion’ part).

The DEI approach has taken the business world by storm. In Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business, published by the prestigious Harvard Business Review Press, a leading gender consultant designates the end goal of mere equality as an outdated, twentieth-century framework. In this century, the ‘end goal is competitive advantage’.17 Along similar lines, the recent book All the Brains in the Business: The Engendered Brain in the 21st Century Organisation seeks to replace ‘the argument for equality’ with one for ‘organizational advantage’. The co-authors, a business academic and a consultant, recommend leaders reap this gain from a fuller appreciation of ‘feminine energy’ within organizations, which they refer to as the ‘emergent quality of women’. They even coin the term ‘e-quality’ to refer to this promisingly under-leveraged female human capital, as if to emphasize the end of demand for the unamended version of the word.18 The message is getting through. A recent analysis of the organizational diversity cases of the Fortune 500 (the 500 US companies with the largest annual revenue) found that these business-case arguments were first and foremost in 81 per cent of the diversity cases offered by these companies on their websites. Only 1 per cent argued for diversity in terms of fairness.19

The problem with the DEI approach is that it pivots away from what most of us believe is the most important reason for caring about the equality and inclusion of marginalized groups – that we want to create a fairer society. The DEI approach may well be successful at making a profit out of women’s labour. It has failed to create workplaces that offer genuine gender equality for women (or men), because that was never the goal.

The DEI approach has not won everyone’s hearts and minds. This is perhaps not surprising, given the apparent popularity of the Different But Equal perspective. The 2019 Ipsos global survey, in conjunction with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, found that 40 to 44 per cent of respondents in Great Britain, the United States, France and the Netherlands disagreed that ‘employers doing more to promote women to senior leadership positions’ would have a positive impact.20 Their 2024 survey found that among those same countries, approximately one in two men agreed that ‘We have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men’ (ranging from 46 per cent of men in France to 59 per cent in Great Britain). Nor can we simply chalk up these attitudes to male-privilege-induced blindness, given that about a third of women from these countries reported feeling the same way.21

These dissatisfactions can also be found in the higher ranks of management and white-collar work. In 2021, an Australian survey of professional men, conducted by a DEI consultancy company, found that one in four agreed that ‘men and women aren’t supposed to be equal’ and that ‘gender initiatives actually do more harm than good’. Forty-four per cent thought that women and men were already treated equally and they didn’t know what the problem was. Forty-five per cent agreed with the statement that men are not to blame for women lagging behind in society or the workplace, since ‘sometimes women are less driven or motivated’. Just over half thought that men ‘are now suffering from reverse-discrimination, to the point where they are missing out on opportunities’. Almost one in two men were also fed up with the issue – ‘I’m tired of hearing about it’.22

I am tired too. We have had more than enough of this unproductive clash between one vision of gender equality that obscures the problem, and another that doesn’t really care about it. It is time for a new vision, grounded in a deeper understanding of the social processes that give rise to the gendered division of labour, and the inefficiencies, harms and injustices that this division creates.

The starting point of the Patriarchy Inc. account is that humans have been using sex to divide labour for at least tens of thousands of years, and perhaps much longer. Whether the contribution to keeping society functioning is hunting big game, boatbuilding, caring for toddlers, writing computer code, sewing clothes, assisting with childbirth, building houses, or selling complex financial products that will bring the global financial system to its knees, even children soon understand whether it is typically women’s work or men’s work.

Key to understanding why these divisions are so persistent is the special importance for our species of cooperation, social learning and culture for meeting the challenges of survival and reproduction. Whether the setting is a hunter-gatherer community, a household or a global investment bank, reaping the benefits of complex forms of cooperation, like divisions of labour, involves working out who will do which tasks, and what they will get in return. (You dig up the tubers, I’ll hunt the elk, and we’ll share the spoils equally. You work in the home, I’ll work in the market, and I’ll take the greater share of status, control over family income and leisure time. You work on the reception desk, I’ll do the merging and acquiring, and I’ll work double the hours but take home ten times the pay.)

How did we create and work out these complex arrangements? Cultural evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour and social life offer an alternative to Evolutionary Psychology, and a quite different answer to that question: with distinctively human capacities for acquiring, curating and passing on culture. We have evolved both minds and culturally constructed niches that shape us into social roles. We are sensitive to norms, imitate some but not others, and are adept learners and teachers, alert to the matter of what it means to be someone like me. We create social categories and load them with cultural baggage concerning the skills and knowledge these kinds of people should have, how they should behave, their status, and their rights and responsibilities.

These same processes, acting on and through individuals, interactions and institutions, also explain the gendered division of labour.23 My analysis centres on sex: a fundamental biological category, and human societies’ most ubiquitous way of dividing both people and labour. But as we’ll see throughout, gender intersects with the other major social hierarchies around which societies often organize labour, most commonly race and class, deepening disadvantages. Crosscutting with race and class, these processes shape women and men into different gender roles (who does what) and maintain the gender hierarchy of men’s greater status and power over resources (who gets what). In its post-industrial form – the focus of this book – this gender system is what I name Patriarchy Inc.

The idea that the gendered division of labour is at the heart of a patriarchal gender system is hardly novel. But the Patriarchy Inc. account does offer something new for everyone, from the gender-fatigued sceptic to the weary foot soldier of social justice. First, it sets out an argument that the gendered division of labour is both a product of evolution and socially created. These two positions are normally pitted against each other, and accusations that social explanations of gender inequality are ‘blank slate-ist’, eager to deny sex, biology and evolution for political reasons, are always at fever pitch. Clearly, it would be false advertising to claim that this book will bring together supporters of warring scientific worldviews to find consensus, peace and harmony. Still, I hope there will be a constructive element to seeing how well the two perspectives fit together.

This book also makes a very abstract concept – the gender system – more concrete. It’s easy to throw out accusations that ‘patriarchy’ is to blame for this, that and the other. It is much harder to get a handle on exactly how, when and where it operates – particularly since one important aspect of the system is the ideologies (sets of values and assumptions that we are sometimes barely conscious of) that we and others use to justify and rationalize our social arrangements. I hope this book will help you to really see the problem, and recognize Patriarchy Inc.’s handiwork in workplaces, households and government, and even within your own mind.

Finally, this book serves as an intervention to prevent the important concept of gender equality from becoming what the nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill called ‘dead dogma’. By this, he meant a doctrine for which, ‘Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.’24

I wrote this book because Patriarchy Inc. continues to perpetuate real harm and injustice for both sexes. It limits what we can do and who we can be, and its fat thumb unfairly tips the scales when it comes to what we get in return. It creates gendered distortions of competence and productivity, and irrational resistance to reforms that would make our workplaces not only more productive but also fairer. In workplaces where it is given the loosest rein, Patriarchy Inc. destroys organizational cultures, by corrupting those at the top of the ladder and creating upside-down value systems that ‘pass off vices as virtues and condemn virtues as if they were vices’, as one philosopher puts it.25 But Patriarchy Inc.’s effects seep well beyond workplaces, contributing to economic insecurity, undermining health, putting pressure on family life and preserving females’ second-class status. My hope is that a deeper understanding of how Patriarchy Inc. really operates will make gender equality once again a ‘vivid conception and a living belief’; dispel the false visions that distract us; and inspire effective, common-sense reforms that will make workplaces and society fairer and freer for everyone.

1

DIVISIONS

IN 1976, AN AUSTRALIAN WOMAN CALLED DEBORAH Lawrie applied to become a trainee pilot with what was then a major Australian airline, Ansett Airways.1 Despite her irreproachable qualifications, her application was rejected. As the general manager of Ansett helpfully explained, ‘We have a good record of employing females in a wide range of positions within our organization but have adopted a policy of only employing men as pilots.’2

Lawrie (who soon thereafter married and changed her surname to Wardley) promptly took up a discrimination claim against the company – a bold move that was possible thanks to freshly minted equal opportunity legislation that made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex.3 In its legal defence against Wardley’s claim, the company didn’t make any attempt to deny her competence. A letter to the secretary of the Women’s Electoral Lobby from the general manager of Ansett even described her as ‘a very nice person, highly intelligent and undoubtedly a good pilot’.4 Instead, Ansett drew on an argument that twenty-first-century organizations now routinely use as a rationale in favour of hiring women – the business case. The company argued that it simply was not economically efficient to hire Wardley given that she was likely to get pregnant and have to take extended leave. This, they argued, wasn’t sex discrimination.5 They had nothing against women per se. They’d make the same decision about any male candidate who was likely to be off the job for a lengthy stretch.

There’s a certain logic to it. If you are piloting Ansett-ANA Flight 325 from Sydney to Canberra, you will not be available at home to mash bananas and feed them to a baby. Conversely, if you are wiping mashed banana off hands, face, highchair, floor, your clothes and, perplexingly, the kettle on the other side of the room, it is not possible for you also to be located 40,000 feet in the air, calmly warning passengers of upcoming turbulence.

Divisions of labour yield efficiency boons.6 As Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith famously observed in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, where one man could perhaps not even make a single pin in a day, ten men working on distinct parts of the process could make more than 48,000.7 There can be gains if one group of people learns to exploit one resource while another group learns to make use of another. You do the hunting and I do the gathering; you make the pots and I’ll carve the weapons; you cook and I clean. In contrast, if we both clean, we will be hungry. If we both cook, we will live in squalor. True, everyone could try to do a bit of everything. But that strategy may lead to us eating burnt food out of greasy pots. Dividing labour in an organized way becomes particularly beneficial when it comes to work that takes some skill and practice to do well, that has to be done in particular locations, and there are more and more kinds of work to do as households and societies become more complicated, and work becomes more specialized.

So, dividing labour in an organized way is likely to leave everyone better off, even if some people end up getting less desirable jobs than others. But how do we decide who does what? And why, across all human societies (from hunter-foragers to our own post-industrial economies), is this division of labour so often organized by sex?

Two standard answers to this question have locked horns for decades. The first explanation comes from Evolutionary Psychology. According to these accounts, at least some aspects of gendered divisions of labour are best understood as a downstream effect of genetically evolved sex differences in personality that promoted reproductive success in our ancestral past.8 Evolutionary Psychologists acknowledge the existence of gender roles – culturally shared beliefs about what women and men are (and should be) like. But they think that the important core of these gender roles largely tracks and tweaks evolved sex differences in personality, rather than insidiously creating them. As two Evolutionary Psychologists have put it: ‘culture-level gender roles may serve to amplify or attenuate fundamental sex differences in evolved biology’.9

The second explanation, from what is known as Social Role Theory, reverses the chain of command.10 Psychologists Alice Eagly and Wendy Wood propose that sex differences in personality are mostly a downstream effect of gendered divisions of labour. According to them, these divisions are shaped by social, economic and ecological factors, in combination with enduring physical differences between the sexes – most importantly, that men are typically stronger and faster, while only women get pregnant and breastfeed. Gender roles track what work men and women do. If women do the childcare, we assume they are caring. If men do the leading, we assume they are authoritative and decisive. These cultural expectations then help create their own reality. Behaviour that fits the gender role is rewarded, while nonconformity is punished. We internalize at least some of the cultural expectations attached to our own gender identity. And our biology offers a helping hand too, such as when testosterone rises or falls depending on whether the circumstances call for competition or nurturance.11

Evolutionary Psychologists regard Social Role Theory as an implausible ‘blank slate approach’ to understanding sex differences in personality.12 But as we’re about to see, the theory fits rather nicely with alternative evolutionary accounts of what’s on that slate. This chapter suggests that socially created gender roles evolved not just because physical differences between the sexes mean that some tasks are easier for one sex than the other, but also because gendered divisions of labour help solve the problem of coordinating who does what.13

I realize that to some, the idea that we evolved cultural gender roles, rather than sex-differentiated personalities, might seem fantastical. Even as I write, I imagine my sternest critics from Evolutionary Psychology shaking with mirth as they gleefully announce to each other that Cordelia has really surpassed herself this time. The Evolutionary Psychologist David Schmitt recently argued that ‘It would defy everything known about evolution by sexual selection to maintain that selective forces have continuously and completely “wiped the gender slate clean” of psychological sex differences during the long path of human evolution.’14 Two important questions are packed into this short quote. One has to do with our evolutionary history – ‘the long path of human evolution’. What were the selective pressures that, by weeding out less successful individuals, brought about the evolution of the human mind (including sex differences)? That is, what were the challenges our ancestors faced? The second matter is what kind of creatures we have become – what minds have we evolved? – as a result.

Researchers interested in human evolution have offered many different answers to both questions. Evolutionary Psychologists have long favoured the view that over the course of the Pleistocene, a relatively stable period between 2.5 million and 11,700 years ago, we fixed on adaptations to help solve many challenging day-to-day problems: evade predators, find mates, raise children, maintain a good reputation, detect social norms, cooperate with others without getting swindled, and so on.15 Evolutionary Psychologists do recognize the importance of learning. But, they say, our minds are not blank slates. By this they mean a mind that comes without any inbuilt information to assist with navigating the complexities of survival and reproduction, beyond a domain-general capacity to learn associations provided by the environment. Instead, they argue that learning is channelled and shaped by pre-existing content. This content is packaged in hundreds, if not thousands, of genetically bestowed adaptations – mechanisms that furnish abilities, motives and processes for making decisions.16 Each mechanism is highly specialized – it evolved to solve a specific problem. And because some of the challenges facing our ancestors differed depending on their sex, for these problems sex-specific adaptations evolved, prefigured to generate somewhat different abilities, motives and decision rules. These can operate in ways that are sensitive to context, but it is a prefigured range of plasticity, limited to what was adaptive for Pleistocene environments rather than novel ones.

Hopefully it is clear from this brief sketch that Evolutionary Psychologists aren’t just committed to the uncontroversial idea that human minds have evolved. They are committed to a particular story about how our minds evolved, and what our minds are like. We’ll come back to their ideas in chapters 6 and 7. But at this point, allow me to condense the lengthy and sometimes testy exchanges that have taken place over decades down to a brief sentence of understatement. Not everyone agrees with Evolutionary Psychologists on these matters – including those who instead back one of a suite of cultural evolutionary perspectives that, as the term suggests, put much greater emphasis on the role of cultural processes.

For example, everyone agrees that our minds are not entirely blank slates, ineffectually trying to pick up patterns like a useless aristocrat who has learned little more than that when he rings the bell, someone brings a cocktail. But other evolutionary scientists have quite different views on the initial starting state of the slate. A view termed ‘cultural evolutionary psychology’ proposes that our ‘starter kit’ is little more elaborate than genetically inherited warm feelings and tolerance towards our fellow humans, a bias to attend to other people (especially faces and voices), and extra-powerful general-purpose mechanisms for learning and processing information.17 Other cultural evolutionary perspectives on offer think instead that our slates come with prefigured biases about what, when and from whom to hoover up information.18

Some advocates of cultural evolutionary approaches also think that selective pressures acting on us during the Pleistocene were too irregular – too rapidly changing – for highly specific inbuilt psychological adaptations to be useful.19 One reason for this is just how fast we evolved, as philosopher Kim Sterelny has persuasively argued.20 As evolutionary scientists like to point out with justified awe, our hominid precursors split off from the chimpanzees just six to seven million years ago. About three million years later, we started undergoing what from an evolutionary perspective can only be described as a whirlwind transformation. We started walking on two legs. We developed technology and cooperation and became dependent on both. We adapted to climatic variation, spread geographically and worked out new ways of feeding ourselves.

We also revamped our social organization. Fathers cast aside the neglectful ways of their chimpanzee forebears and started investing in their children. We evolved cooperative breeding: a flexible arrangement of ‘mothers and others’, as evolutionary scientist Sarah Hrdy put it.21 The extra childcare help provided by this more communal approach was accompanied by the evolution of bigger, smarter brains that develop over the course of an extended childhood.22 Whether cooperative breeding evolved before, simultaneously or subsequently to becoming a highly cooperative species in other domains remains a matter of debate.23 But here we are now. We have language, adolescence and postmenopausal grandmothers graciously helping out with the kids. Our social and sexual lives have continuously adapted to shifts in family organization, social hierarchies and divisions of labour. As we raced our way to becoming the literally singing and dancing modern human – music and rituals being yet another addition to our repertoire – we charted an entirely unique path.

And as our ancestors changed, so the ecological, economic, social and psychological environments – and selective pressures – also altered. The pace and novelty have implications for the kind of minds we could have evolved, says Sterelny: ‘As humans have lived in such variable environments, many . . . [informationally demanding] problems cannot be solved by prewiring information into human heads. Our genes cannot predict the kind of world in which we will live. That has been true for at least 200,000 years, probably longer.’24 One adaptation that was called for, he argues, is a profound capacity for developmental plasticity.25 Like many others, Sterelny contends that the reason humans have been able to rapidly and successfully adapt to such a diverse range of environments, including by changing those environments, is that we increasingly relied on, and enhanced, three processes that have precursors in other animals: cooperation, social learning and cumulative culture. Cooperation refers to groups of individuals working together for mutual benefit. Social learning refers to when we learn from other people, rather than through our own individual efforts. Cumulative culture refers to ‘culturally constructed niches filled with artifacts, skills, beliefs, and practices that have been inherited, accumulated, and modified over generations.’26

To help you get the feel for the concept of the ‘culturally constructed niche’, let me offer an incomplete survey of my own. My artifacts include, in no particular order of importance, a house, a cup of coffee, a laptop (running off electricity), a diary, books, flip-flops, a table and chair, and a fan (the kind that creates a pleasant current of air on a hot day, rather than the kind that tells you how much they love your books). My skills include reading, writing and typing. Less tangible, but no less powerful, are the beliefs and practices shaping my behaviour: such as the education I received, conventions about clothing, the ideas I have encountered, and my daily routine as a professor at a university.

Cumulative culture is important because it ‘is a system that fairly quickly evolves novel solutions to novel problems. In this respect, Cultural Evolution is like a faster version of genetic evolution, and, like genetic evolution, generates design and functionality in traits.’27 But also, by changing the environment, we potentially alter what it takes to successfully survive and reproduce. These cultural innovations can therefore also create their own selective pressures, including on our genes over a long enough timescale. (When this happens, it is called gene–culture coevolution.)28

Herein lies the trifecta of our success, with the total being bigger than the sum of its parts. Cooperation helps us with social learning and accumulating cultural capital; culturally constructed niches help us to socially learn and cooperate; social learning helps us cooperate and construct our cultural niche.

These three interlocking processes provide the social structure within which gender roles, including the gendered division of labour, occur.

Certainly, in line with Social Role Theory, ethnographic surveys of non-industrialized societies find that work that requires strength (particularly upper body strength), travelling far from home, or that would be especially dangerous for people who are smaller, weaker or pregnant – tree cutting, smelting of ores, metalworking and big game hunting – is done exclusively or predominantly by men.29 Collecting wild honey, another male-typical activity, is also physically demanding – not because the jars are hard to open, but because reaching the source involves cutting steps into trees with an axe and climbing them.30 Meanwhile, cooking, laundering and dairy production – activities that are safe, close to home, don’t require intense concentration, and can be interrupted by a nursing infant and then resumed – are mostly performed by women.31 Similarly, in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, there is a ‘broad patterning’ whereby ‘men tend to spend much more time hunting for large prey, women in gathering plant foods and caring for young children’.32

But what neither Social Role Theory nor Evolutionary Psychology can explain is why there are also many examples of sex being used in diverse and arbitrary ways to divide labour.33 Some activities, like building houses, hunting small animals, crop planting and harvesting, are done mostly by women in some societies, and mostly by men in others. And even when it comes to activities that are usually strongly sex-patterned, there are sometimes exceptions to the rule, such as societies in which men are the launderers or the gatherers, or in which women are the land clearers or the wild honey collectors.34 In some communities, women are also regular hunters of middling-sized animals such as deer, antelope, reindeer or forest pigs.35

To set ourselves a reverse-engineering exercise, why would human societies universally create gendered divisions of labour, including designating jobs as for women or for men in arbitrary ways? And how do these cross-culturally diverse arrangements, including occasionally counterintuitive ones, come about?

Philosopher of science Cailin O’Connor argues that we should expect gendered divisions of labour to emerge in any human society, even when neither sex has a physical or psychological advantage for performing the work. This is because divisions of labour offer a solution to a problem – who does what – posed by forms of cooperation in which people have to coordinate their behaviour by taking complementary roles.36 Dancing the tango offers a nice example: things run more smoothly and efficiently if everyone knows that these people lead and those people follow. If there were some ubiquitous and obvious method for creating these social categories, we might well expect the benefits for everyone to mean that the practice spreads through a population. And of course, there is.

Sex categories offer a universal and easy basis for creating social categories that can be used to organize labour (or tango dancing). Every society has both sexes, usually in roughly equal numbers. The sexes are readily distinguishable, and certain vital tasks are already done by women (childbearing and breastfeeding) due to different reproductive roles. Using mathematical models, O’Connor shows that groups that use sex to coordinate divisions of labour will often be more successful than those that ignore it, leaving everyone better off. The sheer efficiency of using sex to assign roles means that we can expect groups ‘via social learning or cultural evolution to . . . take advantage of existing biological sex differences to create . . . gender roles and conventions’.37 In other words, the gendered division of labour evolved as a cultural adaptation – a culturally inherited practice that increased survival and flourishing. To keep it going, we needed people to categorize themselves and others as men or women (and boys or girls) based on their sex, ideally emphasizing the distinction through artifacts such as clothing and other adornment. We needed culturally shared norms about which sex should do what and how they should behave, and we needed members of the society to notice, conform to and enforce those norms. In short, we needed gender roles that gradually emerged and were passed on and modified via cultural evolution.

The gendered division of labour might well have been adaptive overall in populations in which fertility is high, in economies in which many forms of labour require considerable physical strength, and in cultures in which tradition trumps autonomy and self-expression comes rather low on the list of cultural values.38 But none of these features apply to post-industrial economies, rendering the drifting-on of the gendered division of labour a problem rather than a solution.

We are not the only species to have evolved divisions of labour. Social insects, such as ants, bees and termites, organize their communities around this principle. A termite is not simply a termite, but a reproducer (makes the baby termites), a soldier (defends against ants and other intruders), or a worker (in charge of food, grooming and tunnel building).39 But compared with other specializing species, the scale and novelty of our cooperative activities, and the demographic complexity of who we cooperate with, is beyond compare.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies human workers into no fewer than 867 different occupations, including banquet cooks, egg graders, log ropers, radio time buyers, aircraft instrument mechanics, flower arrangers, morgue attendants and, thank goodness, career counsellors.40 How do we achieve these specialities? Obviously, the environment doesn’t activate one of 867 prefigured psychological mechanisms. One is not born, but rather becomes, an egg grader.41

A concept called ‘mindshaping’ is helpful for understanding this process of becoming. Developed by the philosopher Tadeusz Zawidzki, mindshaping refers to processes such as imitation, education and norm enforcement, which shape our minds and behaviour to become more like those around us.42 Mindshaping is a crucial evolutionary lynchpin of human cooperation, because we can only effectively cooperate when we behave in ways that are similar, predictable and acceptable to the people we interact with. We have therefore evolved to become fervent imitators, teachers and learners, exquisitely sensitive to norms, and to create and curate cultural niches that provide extensive and forceful information about what shape our minds should be taking, and thus how we should behave.

For example, like chimpanzees, we imitate. Both chimps and human children will copy the actions an adult takes to get into a box in order to retrieve a reward. But if the chimp can work out a more efficient way than the one modelled by the adult, she will use it. All she cares about is getting into the box and grasping the treat inside it. Children, in contrast, carry on breaking into the box in just the same way the adult did it – including gratuitous and silly rituals.43 The standard explanation of this human penchant for over-imitation is that for us, instrumental goals aside, there is also something intrinsically rewarding about matching the behaviour of a model. As one academic observed: ‘All my children, from the time they could wriggle, would pull books out of the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase and then flip through the pages intently, pausing only to giggle to themselves every once in a while. As they were the offspring of academics, their behavior was transparent. They were doing, to the best of their ability, what their parents did.’44 This proclivity for faithful imitation is an important channel for cultural inheritance – a non-genetic route for passing on useful knowledge and skills, including about how to behave, to the next generation.45

Cultural learning is also actively propagated through what Sterelny calls ‘master–apprentice’ relationships.46 Those in the ‘master’ role are predisposed to offer guidance, while ‘apprentices’ are receptive from an early age to what others might teach them. For example, evolution has surely genetically gifted us with parental motivations to care for our infants. But we also have the ability to learn the culturally tuned specifics of how to tend to babies’ cognitive, emotional, social and bodily needs (alongside plenty of tearful individual trial-and-error learning).47

Parents then pivot from being learners to teachers. Emotions, for instance, are arguably mindshaped from birth, helping to curate development and expression in culturally approved ways. Caregivers mirror certain patterns of babies’ facial expressions in an exaggerated way, while ignoring others. They help infants to regulate their emotions. They positively reinforce culturally valued emotional expressions, while responding negatively to, or ignoring, others. Caregivers also structure interactions in ways that draw attention to (or away from) certain emotionally charged features of an unfolding situation. As one emotion expert has put it: ‘Socialized norms and prescriptions about emotions affect caregiver responses to infants (including attentiveness, reward, and punishment), and shape the development of their emotions long before infants internalize these norms and prescriptions explicitly.’48

Indeed, as parenting guides like to ominously warn, we are often teaching our children even when we don’t realize it.49 Words of admiration at a valiant attempt to tidy up the toys is ‘teaching by evaluative feedback’. Helping a child sweep up leaves with a broom twice his size is ‘opportunity provisioning’. Drawing a child’s attention to the task at hand is ‘teaching by local and social enhancement’. Telling a child to say thank you when they receive a present, a meal or decades of selfless parental service is an example of ‘direct active teaching’. Performing traditions or rituals with your toddler nearby is yet another pedagogical style – ‘teaching by social tolerance’. Meanwhile, complex human societies set up ‘institutions of formal education and sanctioning to shape group members to play highly specific roles in very complex social structures’, as Zawidzki observes.50 These are all ways of helping children and young people pick up the know-how to be successful cooperators.

Knowledge of norms is a crucial part of this. ‘Almost everyone who has written on the evolution of norms and normative guidance’, says Sterelny, ‘has argued for a fundamental connection between human cooperation and norms.’51 Particularly once cooperation became more complex, and involved people we didn’t know and to whom we were unrelated, norms were essential to effectively police defectors and prevent lazier members of the group from free-riding on the hard work of others. Norms also reduce ambiguity as to what counts as free-riding – an uncertainty that would only otherwise intensify as the social world becomes more complex.52 The group can sanction the norm violators, and the would-be exploiter knows it. (Nonetheless, one interesting feature of norms, as Sterelny points out, is that many have no obvious and direct connection to cooperation, and even seem to undermine smooth relations.53 As Freud might have said, sometimes a norm is just a norm.)

Then, in ‘larger and more complex environments’, Sterelny suggests, individuals ‘regulate their interactions and expectations of one another through recognition of social role and function, rather than through specific individual knowledge’.54