What explains how we perceive gender across societies? Part of it has to do with age-old traditions of marriage and what roles society expected men and women to play. Joseph Henrich, a Harvard anthropologist, talks about how the Middle Ages rule of having only one wife in Europe may have constrained rulers with no similar canon in many Eastern or African societies. In Chapter 8 of his book, The WEIRDEST People in the World, Henrich outlines how the narrowing of the gender gap (a hotly debated topic in various spheres of life today) may have started with this rule instituted by the Church. In contrast, there was no similar overarching institution that shaped directives around marriage and kinship in Asian or African societies at the time.
This example underscores the large influence that religion had on life back when we lived in a fairly unequal society. The dominant view was that a woman’s place was at home, and a man was typically expected to earn income to manage the household. Thus, a large number of activities related to childcare, household work, and others were considered to be for women.
Much before Henrich, economist Ester Boserup suggested that agricultural practices had a lot to do with how societies developed their perception of gender roles. She argued that two broad methods of cultivation could have shaped gender norms around the world.
The first system, shifting cultivation, involved hand-held tools and plenty of hours spent preparing the soil for crops, and it was used by men and women alike. The second system, ploughing cultivation, involved dragging a plough through the field to prepare the soil. The plough, being a heavy tool, required significant upper-body strength and energy, and was mainly used by men.
Many societies in Central and West Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe did not have plough use. Boserup, and later on empirical work by Alberto Alesina and colleagues, found that societies that traditionally practised plough agriculture had more unequal gender roles in modern society. In a paper by Alesina and colleagues, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, they are also able to trace the choice of adopting the plough to the specific types of crops that were grown in those societies. In both Western as well as Eastern societies, these crops were grown extensively, meaning that adoption of the plough was just as likely in both cases.
Taken together, the way in which societies grappled with pre-modern challenges (nonmonogamous marriages, how to grow crops efficiently) may have had a lot to do with how we see men and women today. Gender roles that favour men in professional roles and women in caregiving roles are shaped not just by today’s society but also by where we came from. Societies are complex and dynamic, and gender norms today are no longer just about men and women but across a spectrum. It is likely that future discussions around such gender identities will be influenced by what we have inherited (from pre-modern societies) as well as what we as a society choose to accept today.
Anirudh Tagat
