Why are history books so full of men? Why have so many societies treated women as property?

In short, why is patriarchy so pervasive?

A casual thinker might find an easy answer from biology. Men tend to be bigger and stronger. Hence, they get to run the show. “Just look at chimpanzees!”

But this explanation has obvious problems. Indeed, female chimpanzees don’t have much power in their groups. But female bonobos do. And looking at humans, not all human societies are patriarchal — not nearly to the same extent.

We don’t need to look at modern Scandinavia to get inspiration for women’s empowerment. Quite the contrary, equality between the sexes might have been the norm throughout most of the human story. This might sound surprising given the rates of patriarchy across time and space. However, it is supported by a simple finding: gender equality is relatively common in existing hunter-gatherers. This stands in stark contrast to their agricultural neighbours.

This old finding became part of the scholarly conversation again in late 2024 when a new paper reported high levels of equality between husbands and wives amongst married hunter-gatherers. The levels of equality surprised the scholars themselves. But all this raises an interesting question: why is this? Why would hunting and gathering incline societies towards equality? Or vice versa, why would agriculture nudge societies towards male power? And what should we make of the many outliers from this pattern, like the matriarchal farmers of northeastern India?

To discuss these topics, I invited the lead author of the recent paper to the show.

Angarika Deb is a cognitive anthropologist, soon to earn her PhD from the Central European University. Despite her young career, she has produced tons of interesting articles on gender inequality around the world. A wide-ranging conversation was guaranteed.

LINKS

For links to academic articles and a summary of the conversation, head here (uploaded with a short delay after the episode).

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MENTIONS

Technical terms

Patrilocality | Matrilocality | Virilocatily | Y-chromosome bottleneck

Ethnic groups

Agta | BaYaka | !Kung | Mongols | Garo and Khasi | Inuit

Keywords

Patriarchy | Agriculture | Neolithic | Social evolution | Social complexity | Hunter-gatherers | Sexual division of labor | Human evolution | Anthropology | Archaeology | Evolutionary psychology | Sociology | Social science | Human science