“Who’s going to do the dishes?” Lessons from hunter-gatherers
– by Angarika Deb & Christophe Heintz (photo credit: ChatGPT)
Just yesterday, my partner and I got into an argument regarding who has been vacuuming the last couple of times, around the house. And now that we expecting some guests, who should be the one to do it? Household arguments about undone tasks (or having done more than one’s fair share!) are a staple part of life. The actual arguments might look different from one couple to the next: some might vigorously argue aloud, providing continuous information to one another about how they are making up their minds and why; others might silently and implicitly negotiate, leaving some chores clearly unfinished to prod the other partner into picking up their slack. But underneath these, there’s a shared commonality: they’re all bargaining problems. eir slack. But underneath these, there’s a shared commonality: they’re all bargaining problems.
We can fit household bargaining onto a Nash bargaining model: imagine two partners dividing a shared pool of resources that is valuable to both, but limited in amount like leisure time. Partners can demand to split the total leisure time 50/50, or even ⅔ and ⅓ each. Both these splits seem compatible, and the house can still keep running. But if both ask for ⅔ of the total available leisure time, something in the house remains undone. The interesting question is, who gets to ask for a greater share? We suggested that each partner makes these decisions based on the fallback options they have in case the demands they make are incompatible with their partner’s, and risks ending the relationship.
This bargaining process with fallback options helps explain widespread and stable gender inequalities: women systematically have worse fallback options than their male counterparts. However, what constitutes these fallback options vary from one society to the next. Here, we studied households from two hunter-gatherer communities, the Mbendjele BaYaka based in Congo and the Agta from the Philippines, who have remarkable equality between men and women, socially, politically and domestically. We published our findings in Evolution and Human Behavior.
The lifestyles of these two groups – and other immediate-return hunter-gatherers like them – are quite distinct from our industrialised economies and settled way of life: they operate in environments with lower levels of food security; lead a nomadic existence; have very few material possessions or single-ownership of goods; and all individuals – including children – enjoy considerable autonomy over their movement and lives. Their fallback options are based mainly on their social capital—i.e., how many friends and helpers they have—since they own few material possessions. If their marriage were to dissolve or if they were to get into a serious fight with their spouse, they could then rely upon these friends. The bargaining model we outline above, predicted that, the better one’s fallback options the greater their bargaining power and share of leisure time, within the household. To find out if that was indeed the case in these hunter-gatherers, we calculated each person’s daily average leisure hours: we observed everyone from 6 AM to 6 PM, noting down what they were doing every hour, for weeks. We also observed them giving gifts to each other, and studying how they share food in their daily lives, to establish each person’s social capital.
Our results were surprising, and contrary to what we initially predicted: individuals with higher social capital did not enjoy a higher proportion of leisure time than their spouse. Why would this be? From our ethnographic knowledge, we speculated that this was likely due to the assertive egalitarianism present in these two hunter-gatherer groups: when groups have strong norms enforcing equality between individuals, these norms can end up shaping the fallback options available to individuals and thus, modulate any individual-level power dynamics that can arise. No single individual, socially wealthy as they may be, will have the opportunity to dominate their partner into doing more work in the house, and picking up their slack.
In line with this, we found that across households, despite differences in social capital, both partners had equal amounts of leisure time, both for the BaYaka and the Agta. This was remarkable, given what we know of industrialised societies, where women usually shoulder a higher burden of household tasks. Decades of studying households across most countries, has revealed that women are putting in a substantially higher amount of time in household chores, than the men – usually 70%, but sometimes as much as 90% – even when they are employed in full-time or part-time jobs.
If you are a feminist, like the authors of this blog, it is encouraging to find that there are human societies where, not only do men and women have equal political status, but also operate on egalitarian terms in the household. Our current work provides evidence that differences in one’s social capital need not convert into individual-level power differences; and suggests the potentially important role of social norms in shaping household behaviour. Our future work will test this more directly. The gender equality thus documented, is a promising note to suggest that we in our industrialised societies can have the same, if the right kind of group-level practices and norms – such as bilocal residence after marriage, equal political voice for men and women, involvement in subsistence activities, etc – are adopted.
Read the original article here: Deb, A., Saunders, D., Major-Smith, D., Dyble, M., Page, A.E., Salali, G.D., Migliano, A.B., Heintz, C., & Chaudhary, N. (2024). Bargaining between the sexes: outside options and leisure time in hunter-gatherer households. Evolution & Human Behavior, 45(4), 106589.
