Busting gender role myths

In preparation for a workshop for International Women’s Day - IWD2023 on unconscious bias related to gender, I’m analyzing different myths regarding gender roles.

Myths that have been so influential that they became our stock stories and have impacted bias in science.

 In the spirit of the upcoming IWD2023 let’s bust one of them: 

Females were gatherers and males were hunters.

That assumption derived, among others, from the observation of recent hunter-gatherer societies where hunting is an overwhelmingly male-biased behavior. Such observations would seem to suggest that this gendered behavioral pattern is an ancestral one.

But it’s actually not true.

Findings published in Science Advances show the nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.

• One archeological discovery of hunting toolkit at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa and meta-analysis challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis and the gender division of labour.

• The other analysis of burial practices throughout the Americas at the earliest and most secure hunter burial site includes 10 females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials.

And there is actually a sub-myth to it:

The labour division based on gender existed because of the pregnancy and child care.

But that one is also not true.

- Human species practiced alloparenting – care provided by individuals over young that are not its own direct offspring, which would have freed women of child care demands, allowing them to hunt.

- Our ancestors practiced communal hunting, which would have encouraged contributions from females, males, and children whether in driving or dispatching large animals.

Source: Science Advances “Female hunters of the early Americas”, Nov 2020