Sexual division of labour
Sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between the male and female members of a species. Among human hunter-gatherer societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit.[1] In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined.[2] The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour. Many studies on the sexual division of labour have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania.[3] In modern day society, sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.[4]
Behavioral ecological perspective
Both men and women have the option of investing resources either to provision children or to have additional offspring. According to life history theory, males and females monitor costs and benefits of each alternative to maximize reproductive fitness;[5] however, trade-off differences do exist between sexes. Females are likely to benefit most from parental care effort because they are certain which offspring are theirs and have relatively few reproductive opportunities, each of which is relatively costly and risky. In contrast, males are less certain of paternity, but may have many more mating opportunities bearing relatively low costs and risks.
Hunting vs gathering
From the 1970s onward, the dominant paleontological perspective of gendered roles in
Notable hunter-gatherer groups in the recent or contemporary eras known to lack a distinct sexual division of labour include the
Anthropologist Rebecca Bird argued that natural selection is more likely to favor male reproductive strategies that stress mating effort and female strategies that emphasize parental investment.[5] As a result, women do the low-risk task of gathering vegetation and underground storage organs that are rich in energy to provide for themselves and offspring.[5] In the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human[12] British primatologist Richard Wrangham suggests that the origin of the division of labour between males and females may have originated with the invention of cooking,[13][14] which is estimated to have happened simultaneously with humans gaining control of fire.[15] A similar idea was proposed far earlier by Friedrich Engels in an unfinished essay from 1876.[citation needed]
In modern human society
Sexual division of labour is observed globally, and across most cultures.
Hypotheses for evolutionary origins
Provisioning household
The traditional explanation of the sexual division of labour finds that males and females cooperate within pair bonds by targeting different foods so that everyone in the household benefits.[21] Females may target foods that do not conflict with reproduction and child care, while males will target foods that females do not gather, which increases variance in daily consumption and provides a broader diet for the family.[21] Foraging specialization in particular food groups should increase skill level and thus foraging success rates for targeted foods.
Show-Off/Signaling hypothesis
The signaling hypothesis proposes that men hunt to gain social attention and mating benefits by widely sharing game. This model proposes that hunting functions mainly to provide an honest signal of the underlying genetic quality of hunters, which later yields a mating advantage or social deference.[22] Women tend to target the foods that are most reliable, while men tend to target difficult-to-acquire foods to "signal" their abilities and genetic quality. Hunting is thus viewed as a form of mating or male-male status competition, not familial provisioning.[23] Recent studies on the Hadza have revealed that men hunt mainly to distribute food to their own families rather than sharing it with other members of the community.[24] This conclusion suggests evidence against hunting for signaling purposes.
The Victorian Period
The Victorian era has been closely examined by Sally Shuttleworth. Women played dual roles and were expected to deliver with conviction in the aspects in which they were required to perform duties in and outside of the household. Shuttleworth states, "two traditional tropes are here combined: Victorian medical textbooks demonstrated not only woman's biological fitness and adaptation to the sacred role of homemaker, but also her terrifying subjection to the forces of the body. At once angel and demon, woman came to represent both the civilizing power that would cleanse the male from contamination in the brutal world of the economic market and also the rampant, uncontrolled excesses of the material economy."[25]
SDL and optimal foraging theory
Optimal foraging theory (OFT) states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time.[26] In other words, animals behave in such a way as to find, capture, and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The sexual division of labour provides an appropriate explanation as to why males forgo the opportunity to gather any items with caloric value- a strategy that would seem suboptimal from an energetic standpoint. The OFT suggests that the sexual division of labour is an adaptation that benefits the household; thus, foraging behavior of males will appear optimal at the level of the family.[27] If a hunter-gatherer man does not rely on resources from others and passes up a food item with caloric value, it can be assumed that he is foraging at an optimal level. But, if he passes up the opportunity because it is a food that women routinely gather, then as long as men and women share their spoils, it will be optimal for men to forgo the collection and continue searching for different resources to complement the resources gathered by women.[28]
Cooking and the sexual division of labour
The emergence of cooking in early Homo may have created problems of food theft from women while food was being cooked.[29] As a result, females would recruit male partners to protect them and their resources from others. This concept, known as the theft hypothesis, accommodates an explanation as to why the labour of cooking is strongly associated with the status of women.[29] Women are forced to gather and cook foods because they will not acquire food otherwise and access to resources is critical for their reproductive success.[29] On the contrary, men do not gather because their physical dominance allows them to scrounge cooked foods from women. Thus, women's foraging and food preparation efforts allow men to participate in the high-risk, high-reward activities of hunting. Females, in turn, become increasingly sexually attractive as a means to exploit male interest in investing in her protection.[29]
Evolution of sex differences
Many studies investigating the spatial abilities of men and women have found no significant differences,
Sexual division of labour continues to be a debated topic within anthropology. Gerda Lerner quotes the philosopher Socrates to argue that the idea of defined gender roles is patriarchal. It also identifies how men and women are capable of performing the same job descriptions with the exception of when it calls for anatomical differences, such as giving birth.
"In Book V of the Republic, Plato—in the voice of Socrates—sets down the conditions for the training of the guardians, his elite leadership group. Socrates proposes that women should have the same opportunity as men to be trained as guardians. In support of this he offers a strong statement against making sex differences the basis for discrimination: if the difference [between men and women] consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to proof that a woman differs from a man in respect to the sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits."[42]
He continues to add that with the same set of established resources such as education, training and teaching, it creates an atmosphere of equity which helps to further the cause of gender equality.
"Socrates proposes the same education for boys and girls, freeing guardian women from housework and child-care. But this female equality of opportunity will serve a larger purpose: the destruction of the family. Plato's aim is to abolish private property, the private family, and with it self-interest in his leadership group, for he sees clearly that private property engenders class antagonism and disharmony. Therefore men and women are to have a common way of life. . . —common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common."[42]
Some researchers, such as Cordelia Fine, argue that available evidence does not support a biological basis for gender roles.[43]
Evolutionary perspective
Based on the contemporary theories and research on the sexual division of labour, four critical aspects of hunter‐gatherer socioecology led to the evolutionary origin of the SDL in humans: long‐term dependency on high‐cost offspring,[44] optimal dietary mix of mutually exclusive foods,[45] (3) efficient foraging based on specialized skill, and (4) sex‐differentiated comparative advantage in tasks.[46] These combined conditions are rare in nonhuman vertebrates but common to currently-existing populations of human foragers, which, thus, gives rise to a potential factor for the evolutionary divergence of social behaviors in Homo.
See also
- Division of labour
- Hunter-gatherer
- Evolution
- Compatibility with childcare
- Economy-of-effort theory
- Strength theory
- Adaptation
- Male expendability
- Natural selection
- Gender roles
References
- ^ Marlowe, Frank. "Hunting and Gathering: The Human Sexual Division of Foraging Labor." Cross-Cultural Research. 41.2 (2007): 170-95. Web.
- ^ Zihlman, A., and NM Tanner. "Gathering and the hominid adaptation." Anthropology Origins. 10.99 (2001): 163-194. Web.
- ^ Marlowe, Frank. (2010). The Hadza: the Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press.
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- ^ a b c Bird, R. "Cooperation and conflict: the behavioral ecology of the sexual division of labor." Evolutionary Anthropology. 8.2 (1999): 65-75.
- ^ a b c Sarah Lacy & Cara Ocobock. "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong", Scientific American, 1 November 2023.
- ^ Stefan Lovgren. "Sex-Based Roles Gave Modern Humans an Edge, Study Says". National Geographic News. Retrieved 2008-02-03. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html Archived 2011-06-04 at the Wayback Machine
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- ^ Biesele, Megan; Barclay, Steve (March 2001). "Ju/'Hoan Women's Tracking Knowledge And Its Contribution To Their Husbands' Hunting Success". African Study Monographs Suppl.26: 67–84
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- ^ Bradt, Steve; Sciences (2009-06-01). "Invention of cooking drove evolution of the human species, new book argues".
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- ^ Fry, Richard; Kennedy, Brian; Funk, Cary (April 2021). "STEM Jobs See Uneven Progress in Increasing Gender, Racial and Ethnic Diversity". pewresearch.org. pew research. Retrieved 13 September 2023.
- ^ "Women are well-represented in health and long-term care professions, but often in jobs with poor working conditions". OECD. March 2019. Retrieved 13 September 2023.
- ^ "The proportion of female doctors has increased in all OECD countries over the past two decades Data - OECD". www.oecd.org. OECD.
- ^ a b Lee and I. Devore, "What hunters do for a living, or How to make out on scare resources," in Man the Hunter. pp. 30-48. Chicago:Aldine
- ^ Hawkes, K, and Bird Bliege. "Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work." Evolutionary Anthropology. 11. (2002): 58-67. Web.
- ^ Hawkes, K. "Why do men hunt? Some benefits for risky strategies.." E. Cashdan. (1990): 145-166. Web.
- ^ Wood, B., and K Hill. "A Test of the "Showing-Off" Hypothesis with Ache Hunters." Current Anthropology. 10.99 (2000): 124-25. Web.
- ^ Shuttleworth, Sally (1990). Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era." *Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 47–70.
- ^ Marlowe, F. "Hunting and Gathering: The Human Sexual Division of Foraging Labor." Cross-Cultural Research. 41.2 (2007): 170-95. Web.
- ^ Marlowe, F. "A critical period for provisioning by Hadza men: Implications for pair bonding." Evolution and Human Behavior. 24. (2003): 217-29. Web.
- ^ Porter, C. (2007). "How Marginal are forager habitats?." Journal of Archeological. 34. (2007): 59-68. Web.
- ^ a b c d Wrangham, R, J.D. Jones, G Laden, and D Pilbeam. "The Raw and the Stolen." Current Anthropology 40.5 (1999): 567-94.
- ^ Corley, DeFries, Kuse, Vandenberg. 1980. Familial Resemblance for the Identical Blocks Test of Spatial Ability: No Evidence of X Linkage. Behavior Genetics.
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- ^ Stefan Lovgren. "Sex-Based Roles Gave Modern Humans an Edge, Study Says". National Geographic News. Archived from the original on December 10, 2006. Retrieved 2008-02-03.
- ^ a b Lerner, Gerda (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. Chapter 10.
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- ^ Halperin, R. "Ecology and Mode of Production: Seasonal Variation and the Division of Labor by Sex Among Hunter-Gatherers." Journal of Anthropological Research. 36 (1980): 379-399. Web.
- ^ Wrangham, R, J.D. Jones, G Laden, and D Pilbeam. "The Raw and the Stolen." Current Anthropology 40.5 (1999): 567-94. Web.
- ^ Hurtado, A. M., Hill, K., Kaplan, H., & Hurtado, I. (1992). Trade-offs between female food acquisition and child care among Hiwi and Ache foragers. Human Nature. 3.3. (1992): 185 – 216.