Human groups across cultures and times have divided labor by gender. What explains this fact, along with related inequities in the division of resources? It may be tempting to assume that such divisions are to be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology—evolved differences in suitability or preferences for various tasks, innate sexist biases, and so on. But substantial cross-cultural diversity in the details of labor divisions points to a more complex and nuanced picture: a story of cultural evolution involving the emergence and use of social categories to solve recurring coordination problems.
Cailin O’Connor illuminates this more complicated story using evolutionary game-theoretic modeling. This framework, she argues, shows how type-conditioning of behavior using categories such as gender can emerge spontaneously in response to certain coordination problems, even where those categories are inherently irrelevant to the behaviors in question; and it also shows that inequities will tend to emerge even in...
