Sexual division of labour (SDL) is the

delegation Delegation is the process of distributing and entrusting work to another person.Schermerhorn, J., Davidson, P., Poole, D., Woods, P., Simon, A., & McBarron, E. (2017). ''Management'' (6th ed., pp. 282–286). Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons Australia. ...

of different tasks between the

male Male (Planet symbols, symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or Egg cell, ovum, in the process of fertilisation. A male organism cannot sexual repro ...

and

female An organism's sex is female ( symbol: ♀) if it produces the ovum (egg cell), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete (sperm cell) during sexual reproduction. A female has larger gametes than a male. Females and ...

members of a species. Among

human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are Hominidae, great apes characterized by their Prehistory of nakedness and clothing ...

hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...

societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as

evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

ary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour. Many studies on the sexual division of labour have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of

Tanzania Tanzania, officially the United Republic of Tanzania, is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It is bordered by Uganda to the northwest; Kenya to the northeast; the Indian Ocean to the east; Mozambique and Malawi to t ...

. In modern day society, sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.

Behavioral ecological perspective

Both men and women have the option of investing resources either to provision children or to have additional offspring. According to

life history theory Life history theory (LHT) is an analytical frameworkVitzthum, V. (2008). Evolutionary models of women's reproductive functioning. ''Annual Review of Anthropology'', ''37'', 53-73 designed to study the diversity of life history strategies used by d ...

, males and females monitor costs and benefits of each alternative to maximize reproductive fitness;Bird, R. "Cooperation and conflict: the behavioral ecology of the sexual division of labor." Evolutionary Anthropology. 8.2 (1999): 65-75. however, trade-off differences do exist between sexes. Females are likely to benefit most from

parental care Parental care is a behavioural and evolutionary strategy adopted by some animals, involving a parental investment being made to the evolutionary fitness of offspring. Patterns of parental care are widespread and highly diverse across the animal k ...

effort because they are certain which offspring are theirs and have relatively few reproductive opportunities, each of which is relatively costly and risky. In contrast, males are less certain of paternity, but may have many more mating opportunities bearing relatively low costs and risks.

Hunting vs gathering

From the 1970s onward, the dominant paleontological perspective of gendered roles in hunter-gatherer societies was of a model termed " Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer"; coined by

anthropologists An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

Richard Borshay Lee Richard Borshay Lee (born 1937) is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus o ...

and Irven DeVore in 1968, it argued, based on evidence now thought to be incomplete, that contemporary foragers displayed a clear division of labour between women and men.Sarah Lacy & Cara Ocobock.
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
, ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'', 1 November 2023. However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies". The sexual division of labour may have arisen to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently. More recent evidence compiled by researchers such as Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock has found a lack of conclusive preferences for their role among both modern hunter gatherers, where "79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters," and among prehistoric societies such as those in

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

.Livia Gershon
This Prehistoric Peruvian Woman Was a Big-Game Hunter
''

Smithsonian Magazine ''Smithsonian'' is a magazine covering science, history, art, popular culture and innovation. The first issue was published in 1970. History The history of ''Smithsonian'' began when Edward K. Thompson, the retired editor of ''Life'' magazine ...

'', 5 November 2020. Archaeological research done in 2006 by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

suggests that the sexual division of labour did not exist prior to the

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories ...

and developed relatively recently in human history. Notable hunter-gatherer groups in the recent or contemporary eras known to lack a distinct sexual division of labour include the Ainu,

Agta Aeta (Ayta ), Agta and Dumagat, are collective terms for several indigenous peoples who live in various parts of Luzon islands in the Philippines. They are included in the wider Negrito grouping of the Philippines and the rest of Southeast A ...

, and Ju'/hoansi. Anthropologist Rebecca Bird argued that

natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the Heredity, heritable traits characteristic of a population over generation ...

is more likely to favor male reproductive strategies that stress mating effort and female strategies that emphasize

parental investment Parental investment, in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, is any parental expenditure (e.g. time, energy, resources) that benefits offspring.Clutton-Brock, T.H. 1991. ''The Evolution of Parental Care''. Princeton, NJ: Princeton ...

. As a result, women do the low-risk task of gathering

vegetation Vegetation is an assemblage of plants and the ground cover they provide. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular Taxon, taxa, life forms, structure, Spatial ecology, spatial extent, or any other specific Botany, botanic ...

and underground storage organs that are rich in energy to provide for themselves and offspring. In the book '' Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human'' British primatologist

Richard Wrangham Richard Walter Wrangham (born 1948) is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking. ...

suggests that the origin of the division of labour between males and females may have originated with the invention of cooking, which is estimated to have happened simultaneously with humans gaining control of fire. A similar idea was proposed far earlier by

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.unfinished essay from 1876.

In modern human society

Sexual division of labour is observed globally, and across most cultures. In many societies the breadwinner–

homemaker Homemaking is mainly an American English, American and Canadian English, Canadian term for the management of a home, otherwise known as housework, housekeeping, housewifery or household management. It is the act of overseeing the organizational ...

model has been a stable characteristic. The division is more pronounced in some fields of work than in others, generally, work outside, dangerous work and work in highly technical disciplines (typically

STEM Stem or STEM most commonly refers to: * Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant * Stem group * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Stem or STEM can also refer to: Language and writing * Word stem, part of a word respon ...

jobs with the exception of those related to

health care Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...

) is more likely to be done by men, while work related to care and interpersonal relations is generally more likely to be done by women. The borders of the division are not generally stable, with some fields showing a reversal of the proportions, such as doctors. Some fields see an increasing segregation, positively correlated with the levels of

egalitarian Egalitarianism (; also equalitarianism) is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all h ...

policies of the countries, known as the gender-equality paradox.

Hypotheses for evolutionary origins

Provisioning household

The traditional explanation of the sexual division of labour finds that males and females cooperate within

pair bond In biology, a pair bond is the strong affinity that develops in some species between a mating pair, often leading to the production and rearing of young and potentially a lifelong bond. Pair-bonding is a term coined in the 1940s that is frequently ...

s by targeting different foods so that everyone in the household benefits.Lee and I. Devore, "What hunters do for a living, or How to make out on scare resources," in Man the Hunter. pp. 30-48. Chicago:Aldine Females may target foods that do not conflict with reproduction and child care, while males will target foods that females do not gather, which increases variance in daily consumption and provides a broader diet for the family.

Foraging Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavi ...

specialization in particular food groups should increase skill level and thus foraging success rates for targeted foods.

Show-Off/Signaling hypothesis

The signaling hypothesis proposes that men hunt to gain social attention and mating benefits by widely sharing game. This model proposes that

hunting Hunting is the Human activity, human practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, and killing wildlife or feral animals. The most common reasons for humans to hunt are to obtain the animal's body for meat and useful animal products (fur/hide (sk ...

functions mainly to provide an honest signal of the underlying genetic quality of hunters, which later yields a mating advantage or social deference. Women tend to target the foods that are most reliable, while men tend to target difficult-to-acquire foods to "signal" their abilities and genetic quality. Hunting is thus viewed as a form of mating or male-male status competition, not familial

provisioning Provisioning may refer to: * Provisioning (technology), the equipping of a telecommunications network or IT resources * Provisioning (cruise ship), supplying a vessel for an extended voyage ** Provisioning of USS ''Constitution'' * Provisionin ...

. Recent studies on the Hadza have revealed that men hunt mainly to distribute food to their own families rather than sharing it with other members of the community. This conclusion suggests evidence against hunting for signaling purposes.

The Victorian Period

The

Victorian era In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed the ...

has been closely examined by Sally Shuttleworth. Women played dual roles and were expected to deliver with conviction in the aspects in which they were required to perform duties in and outside of the household. Shuttleworth states, "two traditional tropes are here combined: Victorian medical textbooks demonstrated not only woman's biological fitness and adaptation to the sacred role of homemaker, but also her terrifying subjection to the forces of the body. At once angel and demon, woman came to represent both the civilizing power that would cleanse the male from contamination in the brutal world of the economic market and also the rampant, uncontrolled excesses of the material economy."

SDL and optimal foraging theory

Optimal foraging theory states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time. In other words, animals behave in such a way as to find, capture, and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The sexual division of labour provides an appropriate explanation as to why males forgo the opportunity to gather any items with caloric value- a strategy that would seem suboptimal from an energetic standpoint. The optimal foraging theory suggests that the sexual division of labour is an

adaptation In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the p ...

that benefits the household; thus, foraging behavior of males will appear optimal at the level of the family. If a hunter-gatherer man does not rely on resources from others and passes up a food item with caloric value, it can be assumed that he is foraging at an optimal level. But, if he passes up the opportunity because it is a food that women routinely gather, then as long as men and women share their spoils, it will be optimal for men to forgo the collection and continue searching for different resources to complement the resources gathered by women.

Cooking and the sexual division of labour

The emergence of

cooking Cooking, also known as cookery or professionally as the culinary arts, is the art, science and craft of using heat to make food more palatable, digestible, nutritious, or Food safety, safe. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely, from ...

in early

Homo ''Homo'' () is a genus of great ape (family Hominidae) that emerged from the genus ''Australopithecus'' and encompasses only a single extant species, ''Homo sapiens'' (modern humans), along with a number of extinct species (collectively called ...

may have created problems of food theft from women while food was being cooked.Wrangham, R, J.D. Jones, G Laden, and D Pilbeam. "The Raw and the Stolen." Current Anthropology 40.5 (1999): 567-94. As a result, females would recruit male partners to protect them and their resources from others. This concept, known as the theft hypothesis, accommodates an explanation as to why the labour of cooking is strongly associated with the status of women. Women are forced to gather and cook foods because they will not acquire food otherwise and access to resources is critical for their

reproductive success Reproductive success is an individual's production of offspring per breeding event or lifetime. This is not limited by the number of offspring produced by one individual, but also the reproductive success of these offspring themselves. Reproduct ...

. On the contrary, men do not gather because their physical dominance allows them to scrounge cooked foods from women. Thus, women's foraging and food preparation efforts allow men to participate in the high-risk, high-reward activities of hunting. Females, in turn, become increasingly sexually attractive as a means to exploit male interest in investing in her protection.

Evolution of sex differences

Many studies investigating the spatial abilities of men and women have found no significant differences, though meta studies show a male advantage in

mental rotation Mental rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects as it is related to the visual representation of such rotation within the human mind. There is a relationship between areas of the b ...

and assessing horizontality and verticality, Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns and a female advantage in

spatial memory In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event. Sp ...

.Ellis, Lee, Sex differences: summarizing more than a century of scientific research, CRC Press, 2008, , Halpern, Diane F., Sex differences in cognitive abilities, Psychology Press, 2000, , The sexual division of labour has been proposed as an explanation for these

cognitive Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

differences. Those differences disappear with a short training or when given a favorable image of woman ability. Furthermore, differences between individuals are greater than average differences, therefore such differences are not a valid prediction of male or female cognitive ability. This hypothesis argues that males needed the ability to follow prey over long distances and to accurately target their game with projectile technology, and, as a result, male specialization in hunting prowess would have spurred the selection for increased spatial and navigational ability. Similarly, the ability to remember the locations of underground storage organs and other vegetation would have led to an increase in overall efficiency and decrease in total energy expenditure since the time spent searching for food would decrease. Natural selection based on behaviors that increase hunting success and energetic efficiency would bear a positive influence on

. However, recent research suggests that the sexual division of labour developed relatively recently and that gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, contradicting the theory that each sex is naturally predisposed to different types of work. Sexual division of labour continues to be a debated topic within anthropology. Gerda Lerner quotes the philosopher

Socrates Socrates (; ; – 399 BC) was a Ancient Greek philosophy, Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and as among the first moral philosophers of the Ethics, ethical tradition ...

to argue that the idea of defined gender roles is

patriarchal Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of authority are primarily held by men. The term ''patriarchy'' is used both in anthropology to describe a family or clan controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males, and in fem ...

. It also identifies how men and women are capable of performing the same job descriptions with the exception of when it calls for anatomical differences, such as giving birth.

"In Book V of the Republic,
Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
—in the voice of Socrates—sets down the conditions for the training of the guardians, his elite leadership group. Socrates proposes that women should have the same opportunity as men to be trained as guardians. In support of this he offers a strong statement against making sex differences the basis for discrimination: if the difference etween men and womenconsists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to proof that a woman differs from a man in respect to the sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits."

He continues to add that with the same set of established resources such as education, training and teaching, it creates an atmosphere of equity which helps to further the cause of gender equality.

"Socrates proposes the same education for boys and girls, freeing guardian women from housework and child-care. But this female equality of opportunity will serve a larger purpose: the destruction of the family. Plato's aim is to abolish private property, the private family, and with it self-interest in his leadership group, for he sees clearly that private property engenders class antagonism and disharmony. Therefore men and women are to have a common way of life. . . —common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common."

Some researchers, such as Cordelia Fine, argue that available evidence does not support a biological basis for gender roles.

Evolutionary perspective

Based on the contemporary theories and research on the sexual division of labour, four critical aspects of hunter‐gatherer socioecology led to the evolutionary origin of the SDL in humans: (1) long‐term dependency on high‐cost offspring, (2) optimal dietary mix of mutually exclusive foods, (3) efficient foraging based on specialized skill, and (4) sex‐differentiated comparative advantage in tasks. These combined conditions are rare in nonhuman vertebrates but common to currently-existing populations of human foragers, which, thus, gives rise to a potential factor for the evolutionary divergence of social behaviors in ''Homo''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sexual Division Of Labour Labor history Sociobiology Anthropology Labour economics Industrial history Manufacturing Production economics Gender roles