Mars, Venus and gender disparity

Scratch a patriarchal male and he’ll come up with a hoary argument in favour of relegating a woman’s role to the kitchen. It’s always been that way, he’ll say. Back when we were primitive, men hunted and women gathered. Today’s notion of division of labour between genders, and the disparities that go with it, can be traced back to this clean binary: Men went into the wild, risked their lives, and brought home the meat while women stayed in the cave, gathered plantbased food and cooked.

For hundreds of years, we fell for it. It was and still is a convenient carpet to brush a lot of dirt under. But Grandpa might have to think again. Anthropologists have been challenging this mother of all stereotypes but came up against the weight of evidence-based inference that man was the hunter and woman the gatherer and ne’er the twain shall meet. But the 2020 find of a 9,000-year-old skeleton surrounded by hunting paraphernalia in the Peruvian Andes showed how even scientists could be susceptible to prefabricated tropes.

Initially, the explorers surmised the skeleton belonged to a male, as it was surrounded by hunting tools. However, subsequent lab tests of the bones and teeth showed that it was a female, and she was a hunter who used specialised hunting tools. Several other pre-historic burial sites discovered in the Americas indicated that a sizeable proportion of the skeletal remains found in hunting scenarios were female, all of them users of contemporary hunting tools. Intrigued by the Peruvian and subsequent findings, anthropologists asked whether they too, in their studies of forager ethnic groups, had missed or misinterpreted vital clues.

One group of scientists decided to review ethnographic studies of 391 foraging communities done over the past 100 years to see if they had any data on hunting practices, and if so, whether they mentioned women as intentional hunters. They found that 63 of these 391 societies had descriptions of hunting practices, and 50 of them had records documenting women hunting. In 87% of these latter societies, hunting by women was planned, with use of specialised tools, the sort used by hunter dudes. Women in these ethnic groups hunted game of all sizes, while carrying out gathering and child-rearing duties. So they were very much the multitaskers they are today.

This new finding, reported in the journal PLOS One last week, adds to a growing body of research evidence that blows up the water-tight hunter-gatherer paradigm. Gender-based division of labour was not a function of evolutionary development, but culture-based with enough flexibility for women to play multiple roles as needed. This leads to the inference that patriarchal allocation of gender duties is more likely based on dogma interpolated into faith texts rather than a sensible arrangement made within the context of each community. Women hunted small game in the vicinity of home when they had to, which allowed them to attend to child-rearing duties as well. These findings have implications for the way we address gender justice issues such as gender representation in the work sphere and equal pay for equal work. As hunters or gatherers, women traditionally worked as hard or harder than males but received less by way of reward or opportunity. And that is entirely because of patriarchy’s misinterpretation of convention and passing it off as a pre-ordained reco by a voice behind a bush.