That is why women work more than men

For thousands of years, humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. The division of labor was largely this way, at least in the communities that survive today, in which men were hunters and women were gatherers. As a result, the men often walked further than the women. In rural communities, however, the situation is different, as a new study published in the journal Current Biology shows: women take more steps there.

A team of anthropologists led by Yuan Chen and Ruth Mace of University College London traveled to the border region between Tibet and China, where the researchers studied groups of farmers and herders. They were concerned with the question of which factors determine who works the hardest in a household and why.

The vast majority of adults worldwide are married, the study authors found in an article on the online knowledge portal realclearscience.com. Since marriage is a contract, one could actually assume that the costs and benefits are roughly equal for both parties. However, the bargaining position in a household is not always equal for both parties, which means that one may contribute more than the other.

One form of inequality is when one of the two partners in a marriage has to leave the family. The researchers assumed that those who leave their family and possibly also their native village to live with their partner and their family will have to work more. These people, who have to leave their ancestral environment, do not have the same genes or history as the host family – so they can expect less help. The researchers discovered that if you don’t have blood relatives nearby, you have less bargaining power.

Worldwide, it is still women who leave their families to live with their husbands and their families (patrilocal variant). In the meantime, it is also increasingly common for both partners to leave home and live together in a new place (neolocal variant). On the other hand, it is much rarer for the man to move in with his wife’s family (uxorilocal variant). And even rarer is the model where both partners stay with their families and live separately (duo-local variant). All four variants occur in the Tibetan border region – one of the reasons why it is an interesting area of ​​study for anthropologists.

With the help of Chinese researchers, the scientists interviewed about 500 people in villages of six different ethnic groups and cultures, where they lived after marriage. In addition, they asked these people to wear an activity meter in order to draw conclusions about their workload. The result of the evaluation was clear: women consistently worked harder than men and contributed more to their families. This was done on the basis of both the women’s own reports and the data from their activity monitors.

It showed that women take an average of just over 12,000 steps per day, while men take an average of only 9,000 steps. Since these are communities in a deep farming society, where everyone is a herder or farmer, the number of steps may well serve as an indicator of the work done. Not only did men take about a quarter fewer steps than women, they also had more time for social activities or to rest.

The anthropologists attribute the large difference in work output to the fact that women are on average physically weaker than men and therefore have a poorer bargaining position. But it also showed that the people – women and men alike – who left their own families and moved in with their partners had to work harder than those who could stay close to them.

So women who move to join their husbands’ families for marriage, which remains by far the most common variant worldwide, have to work harder. If both partners leave their families, they both have to work harder because they don’t get help from their families. In these cases too, women work harder than men. Only when the man moves in with the woman’s family do both partners work equally hard.

For the anthropologists, these results explain why the patrilocal variant, in which the woman moves to the man’s family, is by far the most common. When men leave their families, they need to increase their step count by about 2,000 a day, compared to just 1,000 for women.

However, this pattern is slowly starting to move. As women live further and further away from their partner’s family and their own family, their bargaining power increases. All the more so because they have more and more education and autonomy, as well as self-generated wealth. In many urban, industrial and post-industrial societies, men are beginning to take on more demanding tasks – although, for example, in the affluent West, where sedentary work is rife, women still do most of the housework. (i.e)