The Sexual Division of Labor
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The Sexual Division of Labor
REBECCA BLIEGE BIRD and BRIAN F. CODDING
Abstract
Many evolutionary arguments fossilize a human division of labor as one of man the
hunter, and woman the gatherer, with differences in labor arising out of the effectiveness of efficiency. We suggest here that arguments based solely on the efficiency
of labor specialization among heterosexual married pairs over-generalize divisions
of labor that are, in reality, much more diverse. Divisions of labor can be based on
age, as well as on gender, and are not limited solely to monogamous marital pairs.
Divisions of gender take the form more generally not of meat and vegetables, but
of the acquisition of high and low variance foods. Some differences in labor may be
the result of conflicting interests, others emerging from common goals, and still others from the power of patriarchy. Differences in labor patterns may not be designed
solely, or even primarily, to provision children, but may also be shaped by the social
goals of both sexes.
INTRODUCTION
While many other animals exhibit sex and age differences in behavior
and the use of natural resources, humans seem to be unique in the extent
to which such differences can be strategically utilized as a form of cooperative mutualism. The standard story suggests that human individuals
with particular advantages for certain tasks can team up with others who
specialize on alternatives and share the resulting products; the end result
can provide a more efficient outcome for all. When behavioral differences
involve cooperative specialization in economic production or reproduction,
we usually refer to the outcome as a division of labor. It is considered such
a pervasive, unvarying trait that the human lineage has become defined
by a singular division of labor that has evolved to take the form of men
hunting and women gathering—leading to the contemporary equivalents
of men bringing home the bacon and women specializing in housework
and childcare—a division that naturally is considered more efficient than
other options. This review moves beyond this stereotyped perspective to
argue that there is no “human sexual division of labor,” but rather, there are
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
“divisions of labor,” of which some may be based on gender. We suggest
that while divisions of labor based on gender are particularly visible in
most human communities, cooperation is possible between any two individuals. In recognizing the role of conflicting interest in family formation
and production, we suspect that not all differences in labor are patterned
by cooperative mutualism or based solely on considerations of economic
efficiency.
Cross-cultural surveys of gender difference in labor tend to find both a
common patterning and tremendous diversity. In nearly every (nonindustrialized) society in the Ethnographic Sample (Murdock & Provost, 1973),
hunting large animals, metalworking, and cutting trees are nearly always
predominantly male-dominated; surveys of labor occupations in industrialized countries show that not much has changed: according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov), loggers (8.5% female in the United States
in 2010), metalworkers (15.2% female), and fishers, hunters, and trappers
(12.5% female) are predominantly men. Domestic cooking, laundering,
and childcare in nonindustrialized societies are nearly always performed
predominantly by women, and most surveys in industrialized countries too
show that domestic labor is predominantly female: employed women do
about 70% of the household labor, and unemployed women more than 80%.
Yet some activities in Murdock’s sample are not predictably dominated by a
single sex: loom weaving, milking domesticated animals, and hunting small
animals swing from being predominantly male in some regions of the world
to predominantly female in others. Many other types of productive labor are
more evenly split, even within a single society: men and women often share
the labor of gardening, agriculture and animal husbandry.
The greatest focus of gender differences in labor is on subsistence work,
and although much has been written on gender differences in agricultural
production, this review is primarily interested in the factors that affect hunting and gathering decisions in small-scale societies. The broad patterning
of gender difference in hunter-gatherer foraging decisions is well-known:
men tend to spend much more time hunting for large prey, women in
gathering plant foods and caring for young children. But moving beyond
such stereotypes reveals a great deal of variation in the extent to which
women are involved in hunting activities, and men in gathering. Women
frequently hunt deer among the Agta (Goodman, Griffin, Estioko-Griffin, &
Grove, 1985) and Ainu (Watanabe, 1968) and caribou among the Chipewyan
(Jarvenpa & Brumbach, 2006). Central African women hunt for duikers and
forest pigs (Noss & Hewlett, 2001), while Australian Aboriginal women
provide meat from lizards and cats (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2008). Mixed gender
communal hunts for rabbits were common among Shoshone (Steward,
1938). In other societies, women do very little hunting themselves: Aché
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women work to support men’s hunting trips and occasionally cooperate
with spouses in acquiring armadillos (Hurtado, Hawkes, Hill, & Kaplan,
1985), Hadza women are prodigious producers of vegetable foods but do no
hunting at all (Hawkes, O’Connell, & Blurton Jones, 1997), and while !Kung
women may assist hunters in tracking game, they rarely get it themselves
(Biesele & Barclay, 2001). However, even where women are not active
hunters, their labor and skills are often crucial for preparing the hunt and
processing the catch into food, clothing, and other materials (Jarvenpa &
Brumbach, 2006). With respect to infant care, in some societies mothers
are the main caretakers (A. M. Hurtado, Hill, I. Hurtado, & Kaplan, 1992),
but in many, like the Efe (Ivey, 2000) and Martu (Scelza, 2009) caretaking is
accomplished by many others in addition to mother. Likewise, men do not
always fit easily into the stereotypical role of big game hunter: men in nearly
all hunter gatherer societies collect honey, !Kung men bring home gathered
foods when unsuccessful at hunting (Lee, 1979) and Aka men spend a great
deal of time caring for infants (Hewlett, 1987).
Adequate understanding of the division of labor requires explanations that
incorporate these departures from the norm, difficult when most contemporary models assume a normative perspective on the division of labor. Explanations for gender differences in labor fall under three main categories, what
we will call here the “power of patriarchy,” the “effectiveness of efficiency”
and “actions of agency.”
Power of patriarchy arguments take as given that any departure from
equity in work performance or decisions about types of labor to pursue is
evidence of power differentials between the sexes caused by institutionalized
sexism. Common in gender studies, sociological and feminist approaches
to the division of labor, this perspective suggests that contemporary work
differentials between men and women result from historic inequities that
set persistent constraints for women’s decision-making (Leacock, 1981).
The power of patriarchy creates assumptions about household hierarchies
that presume males dominate decision-making, forces stereotypes about
women’s work and motherhood, and shoehorns women into low-status,
low-reward forms of productive labor that exclude them from access to
power and prestige. Under patriarchy, the benefits of a division of labor go
mainly to men, and in the absence of patriarchy, the default labor pattern
would presumably be one of little difference between the sexes.
Effectiveness of efficiency arguments do not ignore the power of patriarchy,
but assume that differences in male and female labor are adaptive at the
household or societal level not just for men, but for women as well: that is,
they are the result of cooperative specialization (Burton, Brudner, & White,
1977; Kaplan, Hill, Lancaster, & Hurtado, 2000). These explanations rely
heavily on formal economic models of labor specialization (Becker, 1985).
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
These models propose that women have an intrinsic comparative advantage
over men in the production and care of children, which sets an initial
condition that leads to differentiation in the economic and household tasks
that men and women pursue. Over time, these build into cooperative
specializations that lead men and women to develop human capital in
different arenas, which only continues to reinforce this trajectory.
Actions of agency models depart from the normative perspective and
focus not on “divisions” but on “differences,” presuming that individuals
are free to make choices about their time investment in different forms of
productive labor. These choices are conditioned by differences in individual
constraints, trade-offs, and opportunities, as well as by the decisions of
others around them (Elston & Zeanah, 2002; Zeanah, 2004), and thus are
well-suited to explain the vast array of diversity in gendered labor decisions.
While choice models figure into force of efficiency arguments as well, the
main difference here is the level at which benefits are realized: in actions of
agency models, individuals do better by choosing different labor strategies,
while in effectiveness of efficiency models, it’s the household (or larger
cooperative group, such as the firm or society) that benefits. Agency models
are agnostic about cooperative mutualism.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Evolutionary scenarios of the origins of the human division of labor stem
from three influential treatments: Washburn and Lancaster’s Hunting
Hypothesis (Washburn & Lancaster, 1968), Alexander and Noonan’s model
of the evolution of concealed ovulation (Alexander & Noonan, 1979) and
Owen Lovejoy’s Provisioning Hypothesis (Lovejoy, 1981). In the “Man the
Hunter” volume, Washburn and Lancaster argued that the human family
arose from the habitual sharing between male hunters and female gatherers,
and that cooperative hunting by males defined the traits that make one
human. Alexander and Noonan proposed that concealed ovulation evolved
in females to secure parental investment from males for increasingly dependent offspring. In Lovejoy’s model, which does not necessarily involve
hunting as a male prerogative, early hominids became human through the
adoption of monogamy and male provisioning. Walking upright allowed
males to carry food back to their pair-bonded females, who could reduce
their foraging effort and concentrate on looking after children. In response,
critics pointed out the importance of female gathering (Dahlberg, 1983), the
possibility that concealed ovulation evolved instead to confuse paternity
and reduce infanticide risk, rather than secure investment (Hrdy, 1999), the
unpredictability of hunting as a means to provide for daily consumption
(Hawkes, 1990), the limitations of the nuclear family concept (Hawkes,
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O’connell, Jones, Oftedal, & Blumenschine, 1991), and the importance of
intergenerational cooperation in feeding offspring (Hawkes et al., 1997).
Yet few have questioned why there might be differences in labor between
males and females in the first place. The long-standing assumption has
been that divisions of labor stem from women’s childcare constraints. In the
1970s Judith Brown, George Murdock, Douglas White, and others, argued
that women were unlikely to engage in activities that offered profound
incompatibilities with simultaneous childcare, that were dangerous, or took
women too far from home (Brown, 1970; Murdock & Provost, 1973). Hunting
was associated with all of these things.
Hurtado et al. (1992) later refined this hypothesis to propose that a combination of constraints and tradeoffs between caring for, and provisioning
offspring were primarily responsible for how much time women spent in
particular subsistence activities. Their work focused on studies of South
American foragers, the Aché and Hiwi, noting that among both, women
spent little time foraging compared to men, but produced much more when
older women could dig roots, and when younger women with infants could
pick fruit. Yet questions remained: if women foraged differently than men
because they were more often looking after infants, why then did women
without young children, and postmenopausal women, not forage more like
men? Why did postmenopausal women, in particular, shift to roots when seasonally productive rather than hunt as men did? Hurtado and Hill proposed
a few alternative “effectiveness of efficiency” explanations. One suggests
that differing tasks by gender provides nutrient complementarity between
men and women, with men bringing in more protein and women more carbohydrates (Hill, 1988). Another follows Becker’s model in suggesting that
because of women’s childcare constraints, long-term investments in men’s
capital resulted in higher hunting gains for men, assuming hunting requires
more skill and provides higher returns than gathering (Gurven & Hill, 2009).
While these hypotheses have proven fruitful in stimulating discussion, they
may account for divisions of labor in some places, but not others. Women do
hunt, men and women are equally productive in many societies, and there
is no evidence that hunting large game requires more skill than the types of
foraging women typically do. Likewise, there are many cases where nutrient complementarity does not appear to characterize the suite of men’s and
women’s resources, especially where women hunt or procure high protein,
high fat nuts and seeds. For Kristen Hawkes and colleagues (Hawkes, 1991;
Hawkes, O’Connell, & Blurton Jones, 2001), the answer to why men and
women make different subsistence choices lay in the fact that some forms of
hunting may not be as productive or as predictable as previously thought:
acquisition failure is often quite high for large game and the products of
hunting are often widely shared beyond the family. Their work with Hadza
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
hunter-gatherers in Tanzania brought these paradoxical trends to light: why
would men continue to hunt large game if their acquisition was unlikely
and even when a hunt was successful, most of the meat would go to others beyond the family? Hawkes and colleagues suggested that this pattern
may be explained as show-off behavior, indicating that men and women
were operating with different currencies in mind. While women may have
been maximizing energetic efficiency with the acquisition of plants (especially tubers), men were focused on maximizing preferential social attention.
This model was later formalized with the incorporation of costly signaling
theory to explain why Meriam men preferred to spear fish rather than collect
shellfish and hunt sea turtles for public feasts even when they could be collected at lower cost from nesting beaches (Bliege Bird, Smith, & Bird, 2001;
Bliege Bird, Bird, Smith, & Kushnick, 2002; Bliege Bird & Smith, 2005; Bliege
Bird, 2007). As a seasonal resource, the costs and benefits of sea turtle hunting
vary intra-annually. During the nesting season when turtles come onto shore,
they are easily acquired by men, women and children, with the meat and
eggs going mostly to the acquirer’s households and neighbors. During the
mating season when turtles remain at sea, they are pursued only by men who
take on excessive risk and have limited success; when successful, meat is distributed at public feasts, with the hunter taking nothing for himself. Hunters
gained political and marital benefits lacking among men who only collected
turtle from nesting beaches. Much of the difference between Meriam men
and women in choices about which prey to pursue seemed linked to the variance in acquisition, both in the risks of failure and in the high potential for a
bonanza harvest, with women spending more time on low-variance and men
on high-variance fishing (Bliege Bird, 2007). The variance ensures the honesty
of signals sent through hunting and widespread sharing, generating social
capital among those who can afford to sustain high-cost, low consumption
return subsistence activities. Consistent with the “actions of agency” perspective, the division of labor is here modeled as the result of conflicts of interest
in the pursuit of social capital between men and women.
The extent to which gender differences in foraging are a result of gender
differences in the pursuit of social capital is, however, a matter of debate,
especially since many types of hunting activities pursued by men do appear
to provide high caloric returns, even after accounting for sharing (but see
Hawkes et al., 2001; Bliege Bird et al., 2002). In addition, men do appear to
be sensitive to the benefits of provisioning: Hadza men provide more food
to wives when they are nursing or pregnant (Marlowe, 1999, 2003), and men
with dependent offspring are more likely to choose to live with good foragers than an audience for show-off behavior (Wood, 2006). Men seemed
to be sensitive to the costs and benefits of provisioning low risk resources
versus pursuing the social benefits of high risk resources: the foods Hadza
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men were providing were mainly vegetal (honey) or smaller game, which
has a lower daily risk of failure. Likewise, depending on the context, sea turtle can serve as a reliable provisioning resource targeted by married men with
dependent offspring and shared in ways that preserve consumption benefits
for households; or as a costly item pursued more often by unmarried men and
shared widely and without regard for reciprocation (Bird, 1997). As Hawkes,
O’Connell, and Coxworth (2010) point out, men’s hunting can be an important source of food, but this does not mean that all of men’s subsistence time
allocation decisions are designed to optimize family provisioning.
To date, positive evidence for costly signaling, show-off behavior and
prestige hunting has proved difficult to produce, and the extent to which
subsistence risk is ameliorated through reciprocal sharing seems to vary.
However, while the nuances are surely complex, the main points raised
by Hawkes and others remains: risk in acquisition and how food is shared
complicates both traditional notions of efficiency and the idea of a dyadic
partnership between spouses that serves to provision families. These issues
are still central to cutting edge research into the division of labor. Specifically,
there are three areas of growing interest that focus on (i) resource acquisition
risk or variance, (ii) the role of cooperative breeding and a more critical
approach to the universality of the “nuclear family” and (iii) the application
of microeconomic bargaining models which pay greater attention to issues
of power and patriarchy.
CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH
In targeting large mobile resources, men do seem to take on consistently
higher levels of risk than do women (Bliege Bird, 2007; Bliege Bird & Bird,
2008). In a recent paper, Codding, Bliege Bird, and Bird (2011) examine
how acquisition risk and energy varies across sets of resources acquired by
Western Desert Martu, Torres Strait Meriam, and the Neotropical hunters of
Paraguay (Aché), and how this in turn affects the relative production of men
and women and the extent to which gender differences in labor are convergent (overlapping) or divergent (non-overlapping). Their results suggest
that men tend to target high energy resources regardless of the risk of failure,
while women tend to target low risk resources, accepting lower energetic
returns for lower risk of acquisition. The general division of labor then
emerges as a function of the suite of available resources: when high-energy
resources are only acquired with a high risk of failure, men’s and women’s
subsistence decisions diverge, producing a more divergent division of labor.
In this scenario, women tend to bring in the majority of calories (as with
Martu or Hadza). When high-energy resources are acquired with low risk,
men’s and women’s foraging choices converge, with women either directly
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
involved in acquisition (as with Agta or Ainu), or in a supporting role that
includes residential mobility designed to facilitate men’s hunting (as with
Aché) or post-acquisition processing (as with Inuit). In these latter scenarios,
researchers have tended to credit men’s labor as more important in production; though when support and processing are considered, the real division
of labor may be more equitable. Whether women are actively involved in
pursuit of high return, low risk resources or more involved in supporting
men’s acquisition likely depends on the extent to which childcare is socially
organized or provided mainly by mother. In this model, parental investment
strategies determine the extent to which differences in labor choices are
leveraged into a form of cooperative mutualism: benefits for cooperative
breeding, for example, may create age-related labor specialization among
women, while the lack of opportunities for extra-maternal care may create a
diverse set of gender-related labor specializations.
Our understanding of the diversity in the sorts of individuals that cooperate in a division of labor has been stymied by the preoccupation with
monogamous heterosexual couples and the normative template of the
nuclear family, which evades issues raised by polygyny and polyandry, and
excludes investigation into the other divisions by age and sex that structure
society and the allocation of labor. That we recognize divisions of labor
beyond the male–female marital pair at all is, at least in part, a product
of research into the “grandmother hypothesis.” Hadza grandmothers
contribute tremendous amounts to raising grand-offspring, particularly in
provisioning foods that children cannot acquire (Hawkes et al., 1997) and
such benefits for post-menopausal investment may be the adaptive function
of our long, post-reproductive lifespan (Kim, Coxworth, & Hawkes, 2012).
However, the scope of kin support in child rearing goes well beyond grandmother: recent reviews suggest that across populations, many different
individuals assist in paying the costs of raising offspring (Mace & Sear, 2005;
Sear & Mace, 2008). Mothers, perhaps not surprisingly, have a strong effect
on child survival across societies; fathers, maternal and paternal grandmothers and siblings have an effect on childhood survival in some cases, but not
others. Fathers have been shown to have a positive effect on successfully
initiating boys into adulthood and on the timing of reproduction among
Martu (Scelza, 2010), though seem to have no significant effect on the success of Tsimane children (Winking, Gurven, & Kaplan, 2011). Among Aché,
unmarried men play a crucial role in provisioning kin and non-kin (Hill &
Hurtado, 2009). Siblings of all ages, perhaps the most understudied kin
relation, also play a large role in some societies in caring for and provisioning
each other (Kramer, 2011). Within this web of alloparental relations, a more
complex picture of the sexual division of labor emerges. Men and women of
differing kin and social relations may alter their labor depending on the need
The Sexual Division of Labor
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to care for others. This presents a more complicated picture of how men and
women choose to allocate their time in many societies. However, there are
still some societies that may fit the general stereotype of the nuclear family.
In social and ecological contexts where dyadic mother-father or expanded
three-generational groupings are the central unit in economic decisions,
differences in labor are more likely to be structured around husband-wife
cooperative specialization. This is likely to be the case where high-energy
resources can be acquired at low risk, where interdependencies between
families in labor and the products of labor (sharing, cooperative breeding)
are low, and there are strong comparative advantages for specializing,
rather than sharing the work equally. Under these circumstances, understanding how men and women decide who will do what can be a central
question of interest. Recent research by Gurven and Hill (2009) address
this issue through the use of bargaining models. This approach treats men
and women as a joint economic unit and views children as public goods
with shared costs and benefits for both partners. How much effort each
individual will put towards each task required to raise offspring emerges
out of negotiations between partners. Lack of effort by one side or the other
could result in termination of the partnership. In preliminary tests with
Tsimane, Gurven and Hill (2009) find that spousal tasks are complementary
and that harder working individuals pair within one another to produce
more overall resources that provide for more offspring than less productive
couples. However, they find mixed results that individuals with greater
bargaining power (as a function of overall individual value) perform less
work within the household, suggesting that negotiations of effort may be
worked out prior to the formation of spousal pairs. While this will vary
greatly across societies, they predict that the specific amount an individual
husband or wife should contribute to the household depends on their
relative bargaining power, which should determine power dynamics and
work effort between individuals. This microeconomic approach serves to
formalize analyses of within-household effort. When such partnerships are
common, this framework may have some promise in explaining variability
in work effort between cooperating individuals.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Providing a complete explanation for variability in the sexual division of
labor will require broad approaches that link current cutting edge theories
and models with expansive datasets that incorporate fine-grained data on
multiple populations in varying environments. While this task is a massive
undertaking, there are some more basic questions that can help guide immediate progress.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
ARE GENDER DIFFERENCES THE RESULT OF RISK SENSITIVITY, AND IF SO, WHY A GENDER
DIFFERENCE?
Recent research has provided more evidence on how men’s and women’s
resource choice varies, but we are still at a loss to understand how men and
women evaluate the costs of risk differently. Why might men be more willing
than women to take on greater levels of acquisition risk? To better understand
this, researchers should begin by testing alternative hypotheses that evaluate
predictions from standard diet breadth models, nutrient complementarity
models, models of acquisition risk and models of prestige. Understanding
how men and women differentially evaluate costs and benefits within the
same currencies will allows us to better understand when women take on
greater acquisition risk, or when men might spend greater effort to provision offspring. The answer may also depend on how individuals benefit from
sharing food widely.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF SHARING FOOD WIDELY?
Despite many years of research, there is still little understanding of how
exactly individuals might benefit from sharing food, particularly whether
sharing is structured by the need to pool risk to provision self and offspring,
or whether it’s more about creating social relationships and gaining social
prestige. Evidence of two-way flows is not enough to determine whether
or not giving is contingent upon receiving (a requirement of risk pooling)
and there has been no quantitative data collected on actual consumption
that measures, from the perspective of the consumer, whether a reliance
on receiving portions of others’ high variance foods produces the same
consumption patterns as acquiring a lower-return, but low variance resource
for one’s self. Answering this question requires long-term ethnographic
information that links quantitative data on resource acquisition and hunting
success to complete food sharing networks, perceived measures of status
and prestige and proxy measures of somatic and reproductive success.
As daunting as this task may be, it is necessary if we are to answer this
question.
WHO CARES FOR KIDS WHERE AND WHEN?
To understand patterns in the sexual division of labor will require understanding how broader social and ecological variability predicts variability in
the networks of alloparental support across and within populations. Answering this question will provide a more refined picture of the sexual division
of labor that avoids assuming dyadic partnerships as an unquestioned initial
condition.
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HOW DOES ACQUISITION VARIANCE AFFECT OFFSPRING HEALTH AND SURVIVORSHIP?
While men do seem to take on greater levels of acquisition risk in many
societies, we do not know what effects this may have on child health and survivorship. Riskier acquisition portfolios may result in malnutrition, reductions in offspring growth or increases in disease susceptibility; but to date,
we know very little about this topic. Addressing these problems will provide a better understanding of how risk and variance in resource acquisition
may cost parents by reducing offspring quality and survivorship.
HOW DOES VARIABILITY IN THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR AFFECT BROADER SOCIETAL
PATTERNS?
The effects of the division of labor may reach well beyond variability in task
differentiation. For example, the relative contribution women make to subsistence seems to predict matrilocal residence patterns (once controlling for nonsororal polygyny, Korotayev, 2001). Similarly, greater production by women
may lead to differences in men’s and women’s status differentials, systems
of land tenure and patterns in wealth inheritance. Variability in the division of labor may lead to shifts in fertility and survivorship which aggregate into broader demographic outcomes, all of which likely feeds back to
affect the labor decisions that women and men make. Answering these questions in ways that adequately determine causality is near impossible, but
any steps taken in this direction will serve to broaden our understanding
of the sexual division of labor and its interactive effect on broader societal
patterns.
Research undertaken in last quarter of the twentieth century truly broadened our understanding of the division of labor. Given the successful strides
made in the first decade of the twenty-first, we should be optimistic about
the future. Future models of the sex and gender division of labor will need
to draw together factors that affect men’s and women’s foraging decisions
across different explanatory traditions: sometimes cooperative economies of
scale may emerge in particular contexts, other times conflicts between individual decisions will result in divergent divisions of labor and larger networks of alloparental support in childcare. Power and patriarchy may play
an important role in structuring gendered labor where women do not have
access to strong social networks of kin and nonkin, and rely almost exclusively on male production. Rather than fossilizing a static view of the division
of labor, evolutionary anthropology will have to work towards explaining
the variability observed among ethnographic groups. Doing so will provide
a more realistic framework to explore spatial and temporal variability in the
division of labor.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Douglas W. Bird and Kristen Hawkes for sharing their thoughts
and insights on these topics.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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REBECCA BLIEGE BIRD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Rebecca Bliege Bird is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford
University. Her work focuses on the socioecology of hunting and gathering
economies in Oceania and North America. Recent work examines the gender
division of labor, cooperative hunting, costly signaling, indigenous conservation and fire ecology. She has extensive ethnographic experience working
with Meriam in the Torres Straight Islands and Martu in the Western Desert
of Australia.
BRIAN F. CODDING SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Brian F. Codding is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Utah. His research focuses on understanding the dynamic interactions
between humans and their environments in archaeological and ethnographic contexts. Current projects are focused on understanding resource
exploitation, the division of foraging labor and the use of anthropogenic
fire among past and present hunter-gatherer populations in Australia and
Western North America.
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