Why Patriarchy? Foragers, Farmers, and the Origins of Gender Inequality

Why is patriarchy so pervasive? I search for answers with cognitive anthropologist Angarika Deb. You can either listen to our full conversation or just keep reading for the main highlights.

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. I hope you enjoy it!

You can listen to the episode On Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your shows. Alternatively, you can keep reading for highlights.

Listen (54min): Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Other players

Highlights

Angarika Deb argues that patriarchy is a relatively recent norm in the human story. She associates it with the spread of agriculture. Why? For many reasons.

1. First, most existing hunter-gatherers show high levels of gender equality. This is a robust pattern. For example, Deb’s research shows that couples' leisure time is shared equally in the groups we have data on, covering foragers in both Africa and Asia (BaYaka in the Republic of Congo; Agta in the Philippines).

2. Of course, hunter-gatherers are not living fossils. So is gender inequality something they developed recently when in touch with farmers? This is exceedingly unlikely. Quite the opposite, the more hunter-gatherers integrate with their neighbouring cultures, the more they tend to adopt patriarchal norms.

3. Furthermore, genetic evidence suggests that something big happened during the era of intensifying agriculture and pastoralism (around 5000 years ago). During the so-called “Y-chromosome bottleneck”, the genetic legacy of men and women started showing very different patterns, with fewer and fewer men monopolising mating. This shows a clear break from the past and might point out the beginning of the persistent patriarchy we are so familiar with.

So why is agriculture more likely to produce patriarchy?

1. Farmers often divide tasks between men and women. In many societies, men tend to do more farming and women do more household work. But this is not a good explanation in itself: Hunter-gatherers, too, divide work between the sexes. Yes, women can hunt. But men do much more of it. But women amongst hunter-gatherers have one big advantage: they bring in a lot of calories — often more so than men. This stands in contrast to farmers. There are many female farmers around the world. But in many cases, men bring in more calories.

2. So why don’t women farmers just keep, well, farming? One problem is that farmers tend to have more kids, which ties women into the domestic sphere. Also, farming requires upper-body strength, especially when using the plough, which gives men an advantage.

3. Also, farmers are tied to the land. This requires tough choices on who moves where during marriage. Men seem to have won the bargain: Most farmers are “patrilocal” and “patrilinear”. Wives move to their husbands’ homes and carry their husbands’ names. This is by no means a universal pattern. But patrilocality seems to be the statistical norm. This is catastrophic for women’s power, as marriage strips them away from their social support networks. This reduces the power of female alliances — one of the main ways in which hunter-gatherers prevent male domination. (Most hunter-gatherers are neither patrilocal nor matrilocal. The couples move where moving makes sense.)

4. Farming also produces tough questions on inheritance and the defence of property. This might have increased the stakes on who gets what. As the stakes got higher, men might have literally “forced” their way.

After discussing the big picture, we turned to some caveats. What about matriarchal farmers, like the “Garo” and “Khasi” in Northeastern India? What about pastoralists, like the Mongols, who don’t farm but aren’t exactly beacons of feminist emancipation? And what about arctic hunter-gatherers who have a strong preference for boys over girls? We also discuss work on the psychology of fairness from around the world, and how it ties into questions of equality.

I highly recommend listening if you are interested in these kinds of questions. Again, here are links to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other players.

For references, scroll all the way down.

Bonus

I’ve been working hard on a new podcast series called “The Origins of Humankind”. Expect some spectacular guests, taking you on a journey from the origins of life to the spread of Homo sapiens. It’s produced together with the CARTA, a research unit at the University of California, San Diego.

Subscribe to stay tuned!

References

Relevant articles by Angarika Debb

• Leisure time amongst hunter-gatherers (Deb et al. 2024)

• “Gender Egalitarianism in Hunter-Gatherers” in the Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior (Deb 2023 — behind a paywall)

• Relational concerns in fairness judgments (Deb et al. 2024)

Other papers mentioned in the conversation

• Settling down associated with increased gender inequality amongst the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari (Draper 1975)

• The Y-chromosome bottleneck and possible links to patrilineality (wives moving to husbands’ families) (Guyon et a. 2023).

• Khoisan hunter-gatherers have maintained the highest genetic diversity of any group in the world (Kim et al. 2014). Similarly, Amazonian hunter-gatherers live in genetically more diverse groups than their neighbours (Walker 2014)

• Origins of patriarchy, with a note on female coalitions and homosexuality (Smuts 1995 — behind paywall)

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