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Alt theory for persistence & universality of gender inequality over millennia

#1
C C Offline
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/pla...-of-years/

EXCERPTS: . . . All societies have categories of people who are treated poorly, but these groupings vary widely from one place and time to another. Religion, race, social class, caste, language, ethnicity, and other classifications have been used to justify the unequal treatment of identifiable groups of people. And yet only gender serves as the basis for unequal treatment in all societies in all places and at all times. Why is that? And where does the universality of women’s lesser power and status fit into the overall picture of inequality among humans?

In considering these questions, we have attempted to restrain ourselves from censuring even extreme forms of inequality, choosing instead to describe reality as it exists and has evolved over time. The following brief discussions of gender inequality and social evolution summarize consensus understandings among anthropologists and other social scientists (we are, respectively, an anthropologist and a psychologist).

To begin with, we can dismiss myths about women’s domination of some societies in faraway places and/or in the distant past. While women may have been respected elders and sources of wisdom about a society’s rules, there is no documentation of a society where women called the shots. This is a fact that has repeatedly required explanation, even for the peoples themselves — taking the form of myths about the way women once ran things, but messed up badly, so men took over and set matters straight.

The first and most obvious biological (as opposed to social) explanation is that men run things because on average they are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than women. [...] However, this ancient assumption has been examined and shown to be false. As we look at societies around the world, it is evident that the people at the tops of the hierarchies of power and privilege — while overwhelmingly male — are rarely the strongest men ... Furthermore, their social skills — at which women are thought to outdo men — were key in getting them to the top. An appeal to humans’ past as hunter-gatherers provides little support for the physical strength hypothesis...

[...] A second biological explanation for male dominance is that, until recently when people began to live longer and could use methods of birth control, women’s lives were taken up by pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care, in addition to their other responsibilities, leaving little time or energy for dominating the affairs of the group... The problem with using women’s reproductive and infant care responsibilities to explain the subsequent perpetuation of gender inequality can be seen by looking at our two nearest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos...

[...] What then can we say about the apparent universality of male dominance? Since human biology is a constant [...] it is possible that biological differences between the sexes (such as men’s strength and women’s pregnancy and infant-care) may in the distant past have contributed to an initial difference in power. This initial difference would have had the kind of advantage that any prior custom has, but it would not be adequate to explain its ongoing existence and even amplification in today’s complex societies, millennia later. On the other hand, neither has anyone come up with a plausible sociocultural explanation for the persistence and universality of gender inequality over thousands of years.

We would like to propose one.

[...] This is a key point about inequality. The exploitation of a category of people, a characteristic of hierarchy, can produce a benefit and even a survival advantage for a given society in competition with others — leading to a selection over time of societies with comparable practices.

[...] Industrial societies used the developments in science to harness the powers of nature ... As a byproduct of industrialization and urbanization, slavery became largely obsolete ... Still, it took a protracted struggle to overcome this superannuated institution, illustrating once again that entrenched cultural practices do not disappear of their own accord. This is because, despite their counterproductive effects for the society as a whole, many powerful people and groups still benefit from the practices, and change in itself is viewed negatively by many others.

We can see the historically and geographically accidental and pragmatic ways that categories of exploited people have been created. [...] There was nothing inherently inferior about the oppressed categories of humanity. Ideological justifications for the legitimacy of their exploitation were provided after the fact to sustain and perpetuate the newly imposed forms of inequality. In other words, people weren’t exploited because they were believed to be inferior; their presumed inferiority was constructed after the fact to justify their exploitation.

As societies became ever larger and more complex, they benefitted from the social evolutionary advantage of hierarchy, and they contained ever more hierarchies with ever more layers. And, as we have seen, hierarchy means that some category of people has to be at the bottom. To use a popular computer metaphor, inequality is a feature of human societies, not a bug.

[...] So, we return to our original question — why women and why in all societies?

In order to subordinate a category of people they need to be identifiable, so easily recognizable sensory information is of key importance. Since vision dominates the other senses in human perception, obvious visual cues are the most commonly used tool for classifying people into categories. The clearest current example is that of race.

[...] unlike skin color, which can vary greatly across generations through mating, biological sex remains for nearly everyone divided into two separate categories. All societies can count on producing an ample supply of women, roughly equal to the number of men, in every generation; and all societies have had some pre-existing forms of inequality — including gender inequality — to build upon. Rather than asking what it is about women (or blacks or any other group) that justified putting them in an inferior position, we should examine the ways in which the groups already in power saw an advantage in doing so...

[...] This explanation — of women as a numerous and visually identifiable category of people to exploit — seems so obvious to us that we wonder why we haven’t come across it before. We think that the answer lies in the difference between an insight in the social sciences and an insight in the other sciences... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
So they dismiss all the obvious reasons only to posit some presentism, social science, agenda-driven, critical theory nonsense.
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