When the Women Did the Hunting

Tradition has told us that men earn the income and women care for the home.

Tradition might be wrong.

Gender Roles

Sometimes, “Who you are shapes the questions you ask.” Citing a male-centric narrative. female scientists are digging deeper into archaeological evidence.

As a result, they’ve concluded that some hunter-gatherer societies had a gender neutral division of labor. In archaeological sites, even when women were unearthed with tools, scientists assumed they were not for hunting. Now though, reconsidering the evidence, led by female anthropologists, new research indicates that when hunting was an important source of food, the women also “brought home the bacon.”  Indeed, 8,000-14,000 years ago, the women and the men did big game hunting.

Our Bottom Line: Division of Labor

In his Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith focused on one pin factory to show how a division of labor saved time, elevated production, and diminished each item’s cost. Smith told us that one worker, alone, might not even produce a single pin in a day. But when 10 workers divide 18 different tasks and each one specializes, output soars to a whopping 48,000 pins a day.

Then, taking somewhat of a leap, Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker moved the division of labor into the home. Comparing the household to a little factory, he said the husband and wife had separate responsibilities. One made the bacon and the other brought it home. Their output–the kids–was the result.

Since Becker’s 1960s paper on at-home division of labor, the development of the “pill” let women decide when to have children, how long to attend school, and what career to pursue.  It changed gender roles:

As a result, in the home, Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson tell us that couples became companions.

Maybe the same was true for hunter gatherers?

My sources and more: Always handy for a relevant survey Pew is a good place to explore gender roles. Then, taking the next step, this NY Times article questioned the traditional division of household labor.

Please note that most of today’s “Bottom Line” was in a past econlife post.