Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Do Men Rule the World? with Dr. Alice Evans

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Around the world and for most of history, human societies have been dominated by men. Why? Professor and author of the forthcoming “The Great Gender Divergence”, Dr. Alice Evans, joins Adam to explain how male governance springs from systems of inheritance, why matrilineal systems tend to convert to patrilineal ones, and why we’re seeing progress on gender equality around the world. You can follow Alice's work on Twitter at @_alice_evans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible things they know that I don't know that you might not know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. We're going to have a great time together. I want to thank once again everyone who supports this show on Patreon. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to get bonus podcast episodes. See stand up for me that you can't see anywhere

else, and to join our live over the internet book club where we read a recent work of nonfiction and discuss it often with the author. And our first installment of that, by the way, is coming up this Sunday. We're going to be discussing Annalie Newitz's Four Lost Cities with Annalie themselves. It's going to be a blast. Join us at patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you're interested. This week on the show, let's talk about men. Specifically, men that rule. Not like men rule. I mean like that rule over other people.

Throughout most of human history, men have literally ruled the earth. Men have controlled the vast majority of governments, militaries, economies, religious institutions, institutions of learning, and of course, households for as long as basically anyone can remember. And notable exceptions like Queen Elizabeth of England or the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, apologies to Hatshepsut if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, or the Byzantine Empress Irene, who you should check out on Wikipedia. Her story is wild. These examples basically just prove the rule because they are so rare. The reign of men has been so universal and long lasting that in many ways, human history appears to be nothing more than a giant dong slapping the earth forever. Humanity, by and large,

lives under a literal patriarchy. Now, that word is often thrown around glibly on Twitter, but it is also the technical term for the system that we live under. And that system has real world impacts. Globally, again, talking about the entire world, women have less rights than men on average. One study from the World Bank found that women have only three quarters the workplace rights that men have. And it gets much worse than that. Women make up two thirds the world's illiterate and 60 percent of it's chronically hungry. Women are also much more likely to face domestic and sexual violence. In America, women account for 90 percent of adult

rape victims. And you don't need me to tell you the shocking degree to which our legal system does not do justice to the rights of women who have been harassed, abused or sexually assaulted. Now, there has obviously been major progress for women in the last few centuries. There's the vote here in the United States, property rights, no fault divorce, motherfucking birth control. But despite all of that, we are nonetheless living in a world that is very far from gender equality and that is still quite literally a patriarchy. But, you know, here's a question that we almost never ask and that I am desperately curious about the answer to. Why?

Why do we live under a patriarchy? Why is dude's rule the rule? It's a harder question to answer than you might think. You know, the sort of basic first thought idea might be like, well, okay, men are physically stronger than women on average, so they weren't able to seize control. But first of all, there's great variation in physical strength between people. There are many women who are much, much stronger than men. Just look at Liz Cambage of the WNBA Sparks, if you want an example. She could absolutely dominate me in any field of human

athletic competition. And if I was the ruler of a village, would probably have no trouble conducting a coup. But also, our system of government is not, in fact, run by the strongest people. You know, in 2020, America elected Joe Biden, not known for feats of strength. They didn't elect the third time world's strongest man winner, Hathor Julius Bjornsson. Again, apologies to Hathor if I didn't pronounce your name correctly. So what is the answer? Why do we see this pattern around the world of men ruling over and dominating women? Well, I don't know, but today on the show, we have someone who does, and she has an incredibly comprehensive theory on the origins of patriarchy and how to loosen its grip and why we are seeing progress for women around the world.

She has a commanding understanding of so many different fields that she synthesizes into an incredible vision of how we got to where we are today. And she is such a character and a delight to talk to. She's a lecturer at King's College London and the author of the forthcoming book, The Great Gender Divergence, which is a global history of gender. I love this conversation and I think you are going to love it as well. Please welcome Dr. Alice Evans. Alice, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm excited too. This is going to be fun. the show. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm excited too. This is going to be fun.

It almost sounded ominous. It almost sounded like you were a character in Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. This is going to be fun. Well, maybe I am. Well, so look, let me give you a little bit of background on why I'm so excited to talk to you. I read a couple of years ago, and I've talked about this on the show before, that book by Yuval Harari called Sapiens that was like a big bestseller, big, you know, a couple hundred page long history of humanity, very much an overview. And, you know, as the years go on, I learn more and more things that are probably not correct in that book. But it's one of those books, there's like two interesting ideas on every single page, right? And there's one point in this book where he says, patriarchy is, you know, universal

or almost universal across the world. And nobody knows why, uh, you know, there are theories, but none of them really hold up and, and no one really knows why this is, uh, let's move on. And I was like, that's weird. Like, first of all, is it true that, that it's universal across the world? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure I believe him, but also the assertion that nobody knows why. Hey, good point. What is the, you know, we have lots of history, you know, theoretical histories of other reasons why the world is the way it is today. But

I can't think of ever hearing a sort of universal explanation for why patriarchy is dominant. He goes through a couple and says, I don't think this one's true. I don't think this one's true. And then he moves on. So that always stuck with me as like a question that I wanted an answer to. And then I came across an amazing post that you did that just went through, okay, here are all the various theories that we have. And now I understand that you're working on a book about this topic. Is that correct? Exactly. Yes. Okay. So I'm so excited to talk to you. I hope that's a pretty good place to start. And you're hugging a dachshund on your lap right now, which is a little unprofessional of me to bring up, but is really cute. Okay.

So first up, is patriarchy universal throughout time and across the world? No. There's actual tremendous variation. And a thousand years ago in the Philippines, women traveled freely. They led worship. They were priestesses., women traveled freely. They led worship. They were priestesses. They were goddesses. They owned land.

In sub-Saharan Africa, we had female merchants who are incredibly prosperous and wealthy. There were queen mothers who are important in Latin America, the Inca civilization. Women inherited land. They led rituals. So there's a tremendous variation in gender relations across the world. So patriarchy isn't inevitable. Patriarchy, now, so there are many theories, absolutely. In studying the evidence as best I can, I would say that, well, I would say that, well, I think the Neolithic revolution was pretty important. So before, I think there has never been a feminist utopia.

Women have always been vulnerable to men's sexual violence, even in hunter-gatherer days. Even though those societies were relatively egalitarian, a woman was still vulnerable to rape. societies were relatively egalitarian, a woman was still vulnerable to rape. But male governance, I think, became more common, especially in Eurasia, so Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, after technological innovations like the plow, cereal cultivation, draft animals, cereal cultivation, draft animals, and when societies became more stratified by wealth. So when societies domesticated animals, then we had livestock herds. Then there was draft animals. Once the land could be plowed and irrigated, it gained value. So then some people owned the land and others worked on it. So wealth and class, that social stratification, turned inheritance into a really important part of how we organize society. So wealthy landowners and pastoralists who are concerned about passing on their fixed assets down the generations, what concerned them, Adam, was paternal certainty. what concerned them, Adam, was paternal certainty.

And how do you make sure that it's your son that gets your assets? Controlling women, controlling your women's sexuality, stopping them moving about, so you can be absolutely certain that it's your heir getting your land. And then cereals and draft animals like cows also enabled a sort of taxable, storable agricultural surplus. So now armies could be fed, states could expand, seizing slaves, and that all exacerbated class inequalities, more and more stratification. So in order to preserve those inherited class privileges and lineage purity, people made sure that women, their female kin only reproduced with

group members. So the stronger the reliance on kinship cooperation, lineage purity, as well as the greater concern for purity, which was shaped by religions and culture, then the stricter the surveillance. So that's partly why we see this heterogeneity, because it was in Eurasia where we had the plow, where we had cereal cultivation. So those places would have been ripe for the patriarchy. Whereas in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, I don't believe there was such strict social stratification and women would have moved more freely. Now, so that's your baseline. And then I can talk about changes over time across regions. I have a lot of questions about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can start with that.

Okay, let's start there. So one thing you said was women have been always subject to male sexual violence and like physical domination. And I think we can say that's simply like biological in terms, you just take human animals and you put them together and you're going to have those sorts of issues. But when we talk about patriarchy, you said we're talking about governance specifically, like of some kind of like mode of government, like social control, social infrastructure that causes women to have what, less decision-making power versus men in the community? Is that fair as a working definition for our purposes? Right. So I think we can talk about patriarchy on several levels. One is men's control of women in their own house. So, for example, in Egypt and India today, there are very low rates of female employment.

Women would typically be home-based laborers. So they're working, but it's under the control of male kin. They might be working in a carpet atelier or something. So that's sort of men controlling women, stopping them from going out wandering at night restricting how many friends they can have for example there's research in uttar pradesh in india showing that only about 30 percent of women have a friend they can trust they can go to they can visit wow yeah so there's this enormous heterogeneity in gender relations some women are so cloistered so secluded that they just don't have those friendships. And so that makes it very difficult for women to amass knowledge of the wider world.

In India, it's men who go out into the world, men who run businesses, men who amass political networks. So all that freedom in the public sphere enables men to seize economic opportunities, to migrate to states to get work. And so, of course, they end up governing. states to get work. And so, of course, they end up governing. So, yeah, absolutely. As you say, there's the governance stuff we can talk about who's leading the polity, but also leadership in the homes. Got it. So, all right. So it's a system of control that is not just like social on that big governmental scale, but like in the household as well. But so my first question, when you said that, OK, it had to do with changing agriculture, with draft animals, with plowing, that changed the nature of land ownership, also probably the nature of labor, right, in terms of who's producing calories and how and all those sorts of things, and just read David Graeber and David Wengro's book and interviewing David Wengro on this show and, you know, their whole thesis is, hey, this was not there was no one agricultural revolution. Right. There was no single story for humanity.

Humans slipped in and out of these patterns in, you know, unpredictable ways over times and ways that we're only beginning to understand. ways over times and ways that we're only beginning to understand. You know, a lot of times when we tell the story, we're just telling the story of here's what happened in Europe, as opposed to looking all across the world. So given that, given that amount of variability, why do you think that we have seen this pattern globally? And I know you're going to say, oh, there is great variation globally, but as you said, there also is no matriarchal utopia, right? And there are perhaps maybe a couple, if you're a patriarchist, a couple of patriarchal utopias, right? Where men are in total control of everything top to bottom. And we don't really see that the opposite, at least not around the world today. And there's a few historical examples. So why would that be? Why would it be such a general pattern we see around the world?

Why does wealth stratification beget Petroline the world worldwide? Because I think men, when they have assets, they tend to want to pass them down to their children. But that said, to want to pass them down to their children. But that said, absolutely you're right that it's not a materialist inevitability. And I think the best way of showing that is by looking at ancient Egypt. So in ancient Egypt, there were a couple of very prominent female rulers. Women were also leading cults to the goddesses of Isis and Hathor. Women walked freely in their communities. They had equal rights under law.

They worked in linens and cottons, etc. So women exercised freedom in ancient Egypt. But now today in Egypt, of course, women are veiled. Women are secluded. Women are under male guardianship, both in terms of their homes and in terms of the laws of the land and have very little representation. And that has persisted for centuries. And that was largely as a consequence of the Arab Islamic conquests in the 7th century. So in the 7th century, when there are Arab Islamic conquests, people could gain tax exemptions if they Arabized and converted to Islam, if they converted to Islam. And under Islam, there is patrilineal succession of children. So inheritance is down the male line,

and also men are recognized in inheritance. So male relatives could inherit the land, the assets of the family. So what that encouraged, what that system encouraged, was a degree of cloistering women. And Egypt, which was bilateral, which means descent is traced down both the male and the female line, increasingly over hundreds of years became patrilineal because of Islam. As people converted to Islam, they traced descent down the male line.

And so that increasingly encouraged a shift in the kinship systems. And there's this wonderful new book I'd recommend by Zahra Ayyubi. So even though the Quran, even though scripture has many elements of egalitarianism, many of these Persian theologians in the 11th century, 12th century, 13th century, they increasingly, they, and this was under when Iraq was the sort of seat of the sunni muslim empire these persian theologians said listen men are rightful patriarchs they alone are rational they alone are intellectually superior and they should seclude women because women would create

fitness or moral corruption and so women were increasingly banned from the mosques and women were increasingly cloistered in their own homes. So over hundreds of years, this idea that men achieve purity and men achieve piety by secluding their women. And so we saw, so even though in Egypt, women once moved freely, similarly in Syria, there was a Queen Zenobia who led 80,000 troops against the Roman armies. In Morocco and Tunisia, they had female leaders of the Berber and female goddesses. all those areas, as a result of cultural evolution, suddenly became much more patrilineal and much more patriarchal. Now, when societies were agricultural, when most people were living as peasants on their own farms, we wouldn't have seen that big of a difference between Europe,

the Middle East, and North Africa, because everyone was a peasant. There weren't many exit options. Men were ruling the land. You know, life was grim across Europe. Life was grim for women, right? In Europe, 200, 300 years ago, all the universities, all the religions, all the governments, everything was led by men. Massive sausage fest, right? led by men. Massive sausage fest, right? But, so I'm totally with you that the idea that you were saying before, that even if you have similar agricultural systems, even if everyone's got the plow, even if everyone's farming cereals, you can still have this tremendous variation over time. And I think that the Arab Islamic Congress are one example of that. Yeah. But so why, I guess, and I'm sorry to start with such a big specific question.

No, go for anything. Feel free, Adam. But if you're, thank you. I really appreciate that. Because I have a lot of questions about this topic. Just go for it. If you're saying that wealth stratification leads to male patrilineal, like, inheritance, right? And that would be a big, you know, reifier, solidifier of patriarchy. I get that, but why would it lead specifically to male patrilineal inheritance? Why wouldn't, you know, wealth stratification in, you know, one or two places lead to a, you know,

not just a temporary, but a long lasting matrilineal inheritance system? Okay. Okay. Great question. Okay. Now here's a universal truth. No matrilineal inheritance system. Okay, okay, great question. Okay, now here's a universal truth. No matrilineal society has ever got rich. That's what you're asking. Matrilineal societies become patrilineal. Yeah, why? Yeah, okay, right. I can do this.

I can do this. No problem, right. Okay, so listen. I'm so excited for this. So matrilineal is pretty rubbish. So Adam, for you as a man, if you... So I did my PhD in Zambia. I influenced in Bemba.

A Bemba man would have maybe 100 years ago, because it's matrilineal, when he married, you, Adam, would have to go and perform two years of bride service for your wife's parents you just have to work on their land you don't come with your own kin you don't come with your own assets your own land you're just a minion for them and you've got no authority now over time you can um amass you know authority, but you come with nothing and you're treated not great. I'll be brutal with you, Adam. But what happened in Zambia over the 1930s, when the mines opened in the copper belt in the 1930s, 1940s, men rushed to the mines.

They earned their own money. And then they started paying a bribe price. They set up their own nuclear homes. They set up their own money. And then they started paying a bribe price, they set up their own nuclear homes, they set up their own families, they didn't want to be under someone else's roof, they didn't want to be under someone else's control. They wanted to be the lords of their own domain. And we saw this across Africa. So let me give a couple of other examples. So after that, with the with the emergence of wage labor, Zambia saw the emergence of the male breadwinner model. And similarly in Uganda and in Kenya, a couple of hundred years ago, maybe in the 1800s, men in matrilineal communities might raid other societies to capture women because then

the women and her children would belong to him instead of him being a member of someone else's matrilineal kinship system yeah because she was a slave because she had nobody no family the children were his so he created his own patrilineal system so getting a slave is a good way to avoid. Now, let me give you another example. We're going to jump, Adam, with me. We have to go on a couple of little trips. No, this is exciting. I love this.

No, we're on a tour right now. This is amazing. Oh, yeah. Forget COVID. You're going on a world tour. Okay. So let me talk to you about the Yoruba. The Yoruba I find fascinating.

And Nuando Achebe has a brilliant book on African gender relations traditionally. And she documents how throughout Africa, as I was saying, there were these queen mother, these merchants, these female goddesses. Lessa, the African word for God is gender neutral. It can be either male or female. if you look at sculptures there are female fertility is valorized and champions okay but now in nigeria 94 of parliamentarians are men the whole of west africa is very patriarchal how on earth did that happen yeah so the yoruba in southern nigeria uh the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th century, it also encouraged domestic slavery because to protect themselves from raiding people increasingly raided other slaves so then they could afford local iron. Then they could afford weapons from the Europeans. Now, with militarization and also marketization, the emergence of export crops, suddenly two things happened. One,

with the rise of cash crops, there was a huge economic advantage to having more wives. Because as the economic returns to agriculture increased, suddenly by having more wives, farming more land, producing even more, you could get even richer. Because you have more children, because you have more wives? Yes, exactly. More children, more wives, more workers. So across Africa, there's always been this concept of wealth in people. It's not about wealth in land, because the soil, maybe you don't have the plow, you don't have cereal cultivation. Soil, there's land abundance, you can move to a new

place. So soil isn't what's valuable. It's not about land, but it's about wealth in people. So with the emergence of marketization and cash crops, suddenly these wealthy men could become even wealthier by procuring more wives. So Adam, question, what do you think happens to bride prices when wealthy men suddenly want more wives uh do they go up or down they would they would go they would go up right exactly demand goes up price goes up now how would parents respond if the price of brides is going up what do you think parents do in terms of controlling their daughters oh Oh, well, they would issue more control over their daughters so they can control the product. And, ah, okay.

And that's for two reasons, Asim. That's for two reasons. Because one, if you've got a son, to ensure that he can marry, you need the money to pay the bride price, right? Because the bride price inrica gets you the control over the children which is super valuable so one you need to make sure that the daughter is married to the best possible suitor so there's a heightened incentive to control her marriage don't just let her you know travel freely to anyone you want your daughter to marry the best possible suitor

so you get the best possible price and you can also help out your sons so that leads to a rise in control now also imagine we've also got the rise of domestic slavery and in africa many of the domestic slaves were women again used for their reproduction and used for their labor and all these wealthy men now have multiple polygamous co-. What do you think it does to a woman's bargaining power within a marriage if she's competing against a bunch of other women? That bargaining power is going to go down. On top of that, suppose I'm in an unhappy marriage. How do you think my parents would feel about me divorcing? Remember that they've just accepted a large bride price for me going into that marriage. Yeah, they're like, no, we can't do a return.

Yeah, it doesn't work for us. Yeah, we don't do, we can't give them store credit. No. Right, exactly, exactly. So that is an example of how wealth strategy. So as I can say, you know, you and I can tour the world and I can tell you a slightly different story in every place we go to, right? The Zambian story was different from the Yoruba. But it's always the same that

this wealth stratification tends to lead to more patrilineal, more control over women, etc. Right. So what you're describing is, first, the matrilineal system is is somewhat unstable in the case of Zambia, where there was a system, but you introduce some European modes of wage product or whatever, you know, colonization and wage labor and that sort of thing. And then you have opportunistic men who are going to bust out of that system and basically institute patriarchy. And then the patriarchy itself is a flywheel where the faster it moves because of the bride price, you know, that ends up making brides more viable, which results in more control. And then you need to be able to pay a price for your son. And, you know, by the way, what you're describing sounds like, you know, every popular book I've ever read about, you know, the Middle Ages in Europe, too. You know, it's like very Game of Thrones, which is, of course, not history, but, you know, like popular book I've ever read about, you know, the middle ages in Europe to, you know, it's like very game of Thrones, which is of course not history, but, you know, like dowries and whatnot. Right. So I get all that, but my question is, can I just say that's a great summary that you did it better than I could. You should write.

No, this is my job. This is my job is that I listened to something that a very smart expert, expert says, and then my only skill is I distill it down into like one sentence for dumb dumbs like me uh it was perfect thank you that's all i do but so here's my question still is is why is it that matrilineal systems are more unstable because that must be based on some root difference between men and women you know if you're going to see the same phenomenon happen across the world, the same instability, the same flywheel effect, starting from different starting conditions, different social infrastructure, different, you know, like you said, in Zambia, it was like this, you know, this was the social system, very different than what have existed in North

America or, you know, in Europe or, you know, talking about way back in history. So why, what is the like root underlying difference that would cause that pattern to happen over and over again? Is it something about, you know, the, you know, simply the sexual difference between men and women that, you know, women have to carry children and men do not, or, you know, differences in... I agree. I think it's two things. It's one, it's how the matrilineal kinships is set up. So matrilineal kinships encourage slightly greater redistribution within the group because the man would share maybe with his children and his sister's children. So they tend to be more egalitarian. Matrilineal societies tend to be less stratified. So there are mechanisms within the kinship system that kind of suppress the emergence of patriarchy. And two, as I was saying, whenever men have this opportunity to bust out of the system due to commoditization, they seize it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, sorry. opportunity to bust out of the system due to commoditization, they seize it. Yeah, sorry. Why have women never had the chance to, in any example, right, to bust out likewise, you know, and say, I mean, maybe we can actually find examples where that happened. But, you know, if we have a matrilineal system and men are able to bust out in that way and say, no, we're going to like sort of take this apart piece by piece, why does it not happen in reverse? Or does it happen? Or is there some reason that it happens less often? Okay. So why is it that matrilineal systems usually convert to patrilinear, not the other way around? Why is it that once you're locked into a patrilineal system women

can't bust out of that i think it's because i was saying before that well okay so this comes back to your point about biology because it's women who reproduce within the map within a matrilineal system women don't really cloister men we don't you know in a matrilineal system in Zambia, they don't put men in a box or men behind walls at veil, right? But in a patrilineal system, and the patrilineal is where descent is traced down the male line, then there's this concern for female seclusion and female chastity. And that can be manifest in many ways. So can we all, Adam, do we have money to go to China? I want to take us to Song China briefly. Yes, I'll write you a check.

Here's my travel agent, let's go. Okay, so let's go to Song China. So Song China saw the emergence of, well, increased use of writing, increased meritocracy in the civil service system and increased marketization and trade. well, increased use of writing, increased meritocracy in the civil service system, and increased marketization and trade. Now, increasingly, they were upwardly mobile men, because if you pass the civil servants exam, and you manage to get into the state bureaucracy,

then there were many more economic opportunities for you. Similarly, with trade, especially in northern China, men could prosper as merchants. Now, suddenly, men could really lose a chance of making a fortune, making something better than themselves by being a peasant eating rice. Now, what also happened at the exact same time is one, dowries went up because women and their families were competing for these upwardly mobile men. The other thing that started in northern China in the Song period was foot binding. And one possible explanation of this is that men had a preference for female seclusion because of this idea of patriline, because of this idea that then they would know that their child was really their victim. Right, because you'd be incentivized to seclude your woman because you want to make sure that no one else is going to have her child, right?

Like sneak in in the night and, you know, sleep with your wife. Exactly. So from the Song period, and especially in Northern China, and then the foot binding persisted ever since. And it tended to be stronger in areas that subsequently farmed cotton, because then girls could be kept in the loom for longer, doing more domestic work. So the point is, there is this enormous heterogeneity in how male kin, patrilineal clan,lude women it's foot binding in china it's veils and walls in the middle east it's um uh virginity tests in parts of the middle east it's all kinds of things it's female gender manipulation so it's manifest in many different ways but when i study the global history of gender when i I look at every single society, I see these same things happening. With more wealth stratification, there's more concern for female chastity to ensure purity, etc.

Yeah. So it's exactly the same thing happening time and time again. this is sort of what I'm feeling around for. Like, what is the asymmetry that leads to the social asymmetry that we see? And I see what you're saying that a patrilineal system requires the control and seclusion of women because you could always have the sneaky dude coming in the middle of the night and having sex with your lady. And then you end up with a kid who's not really yours. That would be a sort of really deep down male fear that would come out of that system. And a matrilineal system would not require women to control men in the same way because it's like, well, yeah, the man can go out and fuck, but it's not going to end up being part of my clan, right? Like accidentally because.

Absolutely. So, okay, right. So you want to talk more about the mechanism so for example in Zambia and in other matrilineal communities where they valued wealth in people they just wanted more hands on deck so in Zambia they practice slash and burn agriculture which is you uh clear the woods and then you burn the fields that raises the ph value and then you can farm the land for a couple of years while the soil is good. So they just want more and more children. So they're not really going to be concerned with secluding women.

They just want to harness their labor. Right? So there's no incentive to seclude anyone. Whereas in a patrilineal system where dissent is traced down the male line, families face what I call the honor income trade-off, that men gain honor and prestige by secluding their kin. Because in honor cultures like the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, men's reputations, men's honor depends on the propriety and the chastity of their female kin.

So then they face a trade-off. Yes, it would be economically advantageous to put her to work, for her to go to work in the city. But then they would be vulnerable to rumors, to gossip, to stigma. And that could lead to social alienation they could be outcast literally and then they would be cut off from all those valuable insurance networks and neck and chip group so for that reason these societies are caught in what i call the patrilineal trap because as long as female employment is low then everyone continues to think that it's reprehensible and dishonorable. And any woman who is seen talking to a man, well, that could trigger rumor.

So what these cultures tend to do is to seclude their women. And a great example of how this evolved over time, let's take a leap to southern Mesopotamia, one of the oldest civilizations in the world. southern mesopotamia one of the oldest civilizations in the world yeah so in the early years so our archaeological research suggests that in the very early years then we had women scribes women were in the citadels of learning even taverns were registered in women's names as business owners but over hundreds and thousands of years um what is now Iraq, southern Mesopotamia became much more stratified by wealth. I think that was as a consequence of better irrigation, better control over water management. This led to very high crop yields, phenomenally high crop yields, but terrible exit options because you either have got great crops or you're out in the desert.

or you're out in the desert, right? So this led to great wealth inequality. There were also raids by nomads. So with the rise of wealth inequality, we also see this very strong patriarchal culture, and that was reinforced through religion, Zoroastrianism. A third of sins in Zoroastrianism concerned female sexuality. A woman who has said something to a man which she should not have said must have her teeth smashed with burnt bricks. Ah! With burnt bricks? Yes. A woman who is adulterous should be dunked in the river and drowned. Now we also, so if men are the ones roaming around running businesses because they're not secluded, then they can make the laws of the land. Then they can design all the religions in their image.

So if we take any Abrahamic religion, all the Eurasian religions, whether it's Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, they all have these ideas of, you know, let's cloister women, women should do what we say etc etc so once men have you know economic advantage once men are roaming more freely then they make the religions to say listen if you sin against us you face eternal damnation and still if you look at ethnograph ethnographies and interviews with women in iran Iraq, some women believe that if they refuse to have sex with their husbands, then they could face eternal punishment, fines, the angels who burn them. So religion is a pretty good motive to comply with these patriarchal ideas. So you're asking, why can't women bust out of the system? Number one, their male kin, the honor of male kin is predicated

by keeping women close by. Two, the religion is saying, man, you gain piety. You gain purity through adhering to these norms. And then the laws of the land, you know, restrict women. And then once men are governing and so let's take another example let's leap over to medieval europe i don't need to get whiplash here but uh in the okay so uh with the reformation with the rise of protestantism and catholicism as catholic and protestant churches were fighting and competing for souls, what did they do?

They burned women in their thousands, especially in Germany, where that competition was most intense, because those churches wanted to demonstrate their power to vanquish the devil. And they preyed on the most vulnerable. the most vulnerable. So as long as women are excluded from government, as long as women aren't making the laws, as long as women aren't represented in religious hierarchies, then men can really amass greater advantage. So what I'm trying to say is it's a system that starts with wealth and stratification, but then we see cultural evolution, whether that's the rise of Persian theologians, etc. So all these processes are slightly different all over the world, but it's that cultural evolution that occurs that keeps women trapped in their home. And people either internalize these ideas that there's eternal damnation for stepping out of line,

or it's not that they really believe it, but they might be privately critical, but the costs of noncompliance are so huge that you have to comply. So let me give an example. Let's go to contemporary India today. Sure. We have to take a break in a second. So make this the last example, and then we'll come back for a break. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I want to hear it though. Okay, okay, okay. So India today is about 65% rural. And even in urban areas, the vast majority of people rely on informal employment. It's not a fixed salary job where you get the guaranteed income every month.

Rather, you go to the labor troops, you get the, you know, you're scrambling for cash. It's incredible precarity. And given the lack of social insurance, given the lack of guaranteed salary jobs, people continue to rely on their caste. They continue to rely on their jati network for economic support in a crisis. And as long as people are reliant on their caste and kinship networks, they need to maintain their honor and their prestige in those communities. And so they have to continue to adhere to local ideas of purity to maintain respect. And it's exactly the same in places like Iran.

So in Iran, honor is called aberru. Maybe I've mispronounced that, aberru. And again, it's to maintain inclusion in those vital networks that men have to act as honorable. And you do so by secluding your female kin. So even if you're privately critical, even if you think, hey, wait a minute, if you're reliant on kinship because of weak economic growth and few economic alternatives, then that's absolutely essential. Yeah. So if I can summarize, maybe here's what I've, I start with a question, what is the origin of patriarchy and why do we see it so globally with exceptions here and there? Like it's not an inevitability yet.

We seem to see it everywhere. Right. So why is that? And it sounds like the the answer is there's this fundamental asymmetry where where patrilineal systems of inheritance, once you have wealth and you have wealth inequality and inheritance, patrilineal inheritance creates this incentive to seclude and oppress women in a way that matrilineal inheritance does not. And that means that when you have matrilineal inheritance, there's always this sort of like, well, if we can bust out of that and go to patrilineal,

you get locked in to patrilineal inheritance. You get stuck in this patrilineal, sorry, patriarchal trap, as you said. And then once you're in that trap, there's a flywheel, all the incentives compound upon each other. And then once you're in that trap, there's a flywheel, all the incentives compound upon each other. And you end up in these systems of social organization where it's sort of in everyone's incentive, like including women who are stuck in this system to continue playing by those rules, because otherwise you end up very, you know, hurting yourself economically, hurting yourself socially in all these ways. And so we end up just sort of always tilting towards that patriarchal model everywhere throughout history to varying degrees.

Did I get it mostly right? Because that does. I'm like, OK, I feel like I understand that now. OK, Adam, Adam, I want to say two things before the break. Okay. Number one, absolutely spot on Bravo. Oh my God. Number two, number two, but there is one exception. Oh, Europe was patrilineal and it busted out of that system. East Asia was patrilineal and it's busted out a little bit of that system. It's Taiwan, especially. So after the break, I want to talk about regions that bust out.

Alice, this was going to be my segue. I was going to say, how did we get out of it? I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. And you anticipated it. So we are right on the same wavelength. We're going to come right back for this incredible interview with Alice Evans right after this. Okay, we're back with Alice Evans. So we just spent close to 40 minutes explaining where the origins of patriarchy came from and why we get so locked into them as societies. But as you say, we do seem to be making progress in some parts of the world towards

busting out of, or maybe not ending, but eroding patriarchy. And so how is that happening? And why is it not happening simultaneously everywhere across the world why is it in some regions or some cultures or some nations and not others okay so first of all let's talk about europe because europe was patrilineal and there's plenty of evidence um from yeah so europe was patriline, but it became bilateral with nuclear families. And what you and I are about to tiptoe into, Adam, now is hugely controversial. So this is a massive, massive debate. All of this is pretty controversial.

We're talking about gender and patriarchy. We're in the deep end. Don't worry about it. All right. Okay. So Europe was patrilineal. But, and this is my understanding, and if people think I'm wrong, they should feel free to correct me, et cetera, and call me out. I welcome all critique because we're all learning together. But as I understand it, from 300 to 1300 in the Common Era,

the Roman Catholic Church and the Carolingingian empire they tried to stamp out cousin marriage and polygamy and it was not just the church saying don't marry your cousin but also noble families leverage these incest prohibitions to stop their other noble families from getting wealthy by marrying additional wives and marrying their cousins because if you marry your cousin you're keeping wealth in the family. So one of them will be like, boy, he's marrying his cousin. They're preserving all their wealth. You know, church, stop them, stop them.

So the prohibition against cousin marriage, because a lot of us are brought up telling, oh, that's incest, it's bad genetically. But really, this was a way to stop people from hoarding wealth, or it was a tool used by the competition between noble families. So I think, yeah, there's strong evidence from evolution that there would have been incest taboos across the world, but people may have still married relatives to amass wealth. Yeah, of course they did.

So, but with the church increasingly tried to stamp it out. So naughty dog. And one of my favorite books is by Barbara Hanawath. And what she does is she looks at coroner's reports in England in the 13th century. So she looks about reports about where people died, what they were doing when they died. And so we can trace all their movements and all their antics. So she looks about reports about where people died, what they were doing when they died. And so we can trace all their movements and all their antics. And through these coroner's reports, like 2,000 coroner's reports, we see that English families were nuclear before the Black Death.

They seldom relied on their kin. They seldom lived with their kin. It was a man and a wife would set up their own home together and live with their children, just as is common throughout Europe and North America today. So peasants disregarded lineage and they rarely depended on their kin. And so looking at a wealth of data across medieval Europe, there was also lots of compliance with lots of things that the church said people should do. Like people weren't getting married during Lent, for example. That suggests it was motivated by the church. And young men and women in northwestern Europe often worked in service. So they performed labor.

They worked for other households to earn money so they could then set up their own nuclear homes. Because if you have to live independently as a man and a woman without the big extended family, you've got to be economically autonomous. You've got to be able to provide enough just the two of you. So that system meant that men and women had to work, had to earn money, had to acquire income, had to be independent. So that would have motivated much more female mobility in the public sphere. And the age of marriage was unusually high in Northwestern Europe. In Sweden, they are marrying maybe 26, 27. Same in Norway, same in England. And so this was accelerated even more by another distinctive feature of Europe, which was deep wage labor markets. Lots of wage labor, more opportunity.

Now, people were still earning a pretty crappy wage, but there were opportunities for wage labor. People sought those opportunities. And when you went outside the village to work, you were much more likely to go outside the village to marry. You know, maybe if you're working for a big house, then you saw a blacksmith and, oi, oi, he's a bit of all right. So people married outside the village, right?

Oh, look at that blacksmith. Oh, he's a bit of all right. So people married outside the village, right? What? Look at that blacksmith. Oh, he's a strapping lad. Right, exactly. Better than your cousin. Yeah, look at those. He's got those big forearms. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All over it.

So these deep wage labor markets would have accelerated exogamy. And so Europe would have been different from South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, because these nuclear households were much more economically vulnerable and precarious. So married women and young women had to work. Now, so we see the evidence that they were working as dairy farmers, as spinners, as seamstresses, as hawkers, as midwives. And men actually trusted their wives. And we see this by looking at men's

estates. They bequeathed it to their wives. They saw them as people. Women can manage this estate no problem. Now, as you were saying, let's go back to biology. Women's work was mostly low-skilled, unorganized, home-based. And that's partly because before the 20th century, before contraception, infant formula, washing machines, women's lives were relentlessly interrupted. We estimate that about 60% of a woman's prime age years would have been spent either pregnant or nursing. So that makes it much harder to be a merchant trader to really amass economic opportunities. So women would have been more stifled, you know, by screaming toddlers. It's harder to, you know, develop a skill, trade, pursue it. You've got constant interactions.

So men could really seize economic opportunities. And then this goes back to what you were saying before. When women, sorry, when Europe transitioned from feudalism to commercialization, then men honed their crafts, men traveled as merchants, and they consolidated that advantage by creating guilds. So guilds monopolized lucrative ventures, and they locked women out. So here in Europe, the biggest impediment to a woman's economic autonomy and success was not necessarily from within her own family but from male competitors they didn't want so the tradesmen didn't want the billingsgate fishwives to be selling on their turf and so they would use the guilds to push them out to tramp out that competition and so then men's dominance was entrenched by a plethora of fraternal orders. But the important point is that Europe didn't really bust out. So Europe busted out of patrilinear, adopting nuclear families, right? But it was still governed by men. Men ruled the roost, right? In government, in religion, etc. religion, et cetera. When the Enlightenment hit, about 95% of clubs and associations were men.

Men were the inventors. Men were the scientists. Even if women were gifted, even if women were skilled, they toiled alone. The Enlightenment, men shared ideas. Men shared creative. Men protected each other. Men went to court to litigate for other members of their clubs they must huge advantage sharing knowledge sharing advantage establishing themselves so europe 200 years ago 100 years ago was very patriarchal but beneath the surface they had this latent advantage, which was nuclear families and participatory associations. Because then what happened over the 20th century is massive transformation in the form of, one, economic growth, rising demand for industrial workers, and especially skilled workers.

So employers the world over tend to prefer men. They see them as more reliable and more productive. But if growth is so rampant, if the drive is so high, then firms run out of skilled men and they eventually have to hire a few women. So as those job queues could get shorter, they have to hire women. And simultaneously, there were changes occurring that made women much more likely to seize those jobs. So those would be infant formula, contraception, also the rise of unilateral divorce laws, which increased the precarity of marriage. So women increasingly went to university. They increasingly pursued jobs. And as people saw women thriving in employment, in managerial jobs, in law, etc., then people thought, right, women can work.

We trust them. Let's hire law, etc. Then people thought, right, women can work, we trust them, let's hire them too. So Europe was patrilineal, but it busted out by three important mechanisms. One is this shift to nuclear families, which happened, you know, in the before the Black Death 1000 years ago, two is rapid economic growth in the 20th century. And then the third is feminist activism, because even if women are employed, they might still be mistreated. They might still be abused. They might still be poorly represented in government, et cetera. So that is how Europe busted out. And then I imagine you have some questions and then we can also talk about how East Asia busted out. Well, yeah. Tell me about East Asia. I mean, that's a fascinating

account. My question is, yeah, is that how we should expect it to happen everywhere? Or is that unusual that that happened in Europe? And is that something that we would seek to happen everywhere? I'm curious about the wider picture. Okay. All right. Yeah, okay. So let me answer that by saying, but let me answer it in two sections. Let me talk about one, what happened in East Asia, and then two, what we should predict going forward. Yes. All right, okay.

That sounds perfect. We've got a system now, Adam. Go for it. Lay it on me. Okay, so Eastia experienced rapid economic growth labor intensive manufacturing and you remember i said the patrilineal trap that this is this negative feedback loop whereby all families seclude their daughters because they're worried about sticking their neck out and being the odd one out yes so you can get trapped into um

trapped into a system where no one wants to do it because they worried about their daughters becoming less marriageable they worry about losing honor but in east asia in china in the 1990s in taiwan in japan in south korea growth was so rapid that in the village everyone's daughter was flocking to the economic opportunities in towns so if everyone is doing it it became expected it became a normal part of adolescence in fact people would start asking why isn't your daughter going to work in town right because the growth is so rapid you can really overcome that patrilineal trap and it's because you remember i was saying the honor

income trade-off the economic returns to putting your daughter to work overcame the loss of honor. And because this was a patrimonial system, it was very much controlled and governed by men. So in Japan, in China, it was poor desperate fathers who signed the labor contracts for their daughters to go out to the factories. So this was a system governed by men, absolutely. Now, so because of rapid economic growth, then women start going to the factories. And of course, that work is grueling. It's rubbish, it's poorly paid, it's abusive, it's hierarchical. But with rapid economic growth, with economic upgrading, one, those jobs get slightly better. Two, women are now exploring the cities for themselves.

They've got broader social networks. They're making friends with other women in the factories. They're hearing about different possibilities. So I did research in Cambodia in both rural and urban areas. I taught to women working in the rent flats. I taught to women working in factories. And by coming to the cities, for example example one woman hears about another husband who does the washing up so she pushes her husband to do the same or girls hear about other girls down the street going and getting going to school and having homework so they pressure their families too so it's by going to the cities by expanding their mobility

by expanding their mobility in the public sphere women women hear new ideas, they become emboldened. So what you have is this snowballing process of multiple attempts to bust out of the system. And so that can create a sort of positive feedback loop. But there's also heterogeneity within East Asia. So South Korea and Japan have ginormous gender pay gaps, about 30%, whereas Taiwan has a tiny gender pay gap of about 14%. Why is that? Taiwan... 14% still not nothing, but... Not nothing, but hey, Adam, I'm easily pleased here. When we're talking about 10,000 years of patriarchy, I'll take a 14%. Fair enough.

You got it here. Yeah, no, it's good. Yeah, sure. I'll take it. I'll take it. You can work on 14%. That's true. It's better than a bride price, you know? Right. So listen, so Taiwan's system relied on small and medium enterprises. And as these thrived in the 1950s, there were massive gender pay gaps. But over the 1970s, 1980s, they started to run out of skilled labor. And because these were small firms, they couldn't train up their labor force, but they had to hire and promote women. So as they needed women, and as the public sector also expanded, women gained wealth, women gained networks, women became independently wealthy and thrived in all these organizations. Then with democratization, feminist activism could push to overturn patrilineal systems. So in South Korea and in Taiwan, they pushed to overturn laws about male household headship, etc. So what we

saw in East Asia is this combination of economic growth and feminist activism enabling massive gains. And in South Korea, South Korea does have a massive gender pay gap, but thanks to feminist activism, it's a huge protest for Me Too.

There were 40 women's organizations demanding accountability. Senior male politicians were held accountable, sent to prison because women were mobilizing. So there is, so even in that patrilineal system, because the income returns exceeded the loss of honor, female employment increased. And that's the big lesson from East Asia. It's about growth and feminist activism. Well, so what the fascinating thing that you're saying is that,

you know, the story that we normally tell here in the U.S. is about the feminist activism, right? It's about, you know, the suffragist movement and, you know, all of that and, you know, first wave and second wave and third wave feminism and all these, you know, that history, right? But in the story that you tell, the causal, the real cause of these changes, you're saying, hey, feminist activism was part of it, but you're talking about the growth of global capitalism. I mean, when you say that there was enormous growth in Europe and, you know, you're talking about the industrial revolution, when you're talking about there was enormous growth in Japan and China, it's the, you know, it's the post-war years. And so in a lot of ways, when I hear that

story, and look, I am a labor activist, I'll say. I bring a labor point of view to these things, right? When I hear that, I'm like, well, hold on a second. This is also something that was done to people, you know, that a new system of of a new economic system was built that said, hey, we need as many people as possible in these factories because the men are in the mines or the men are at war or whatever. And, you know, we need you sewing, you know, sewing garments together. Never mind that a fire is going to roar through and like kill a couple hundred of you. Nevermind that a fire is going to roar through and like kill a couple hundred of you. But, you know, this is, you know, in a lot of cases, you're talking about women going to work because they had to and maybe not entering great conditions. And so that's, I understand that you mentioned activism a bunch of times as part of the story. Okay.

Well, I think, okay. I sense the underlying question is, am I a capitalist stooge? And is capitalism, how important is capitalism? Because I can answer that. I want to talk to you about communism. Let's talk about communism. I do not accuse you of being a stooge. I'm just noticing that that seems to be the causal thing in the story. Actually, let me say, and I'm so glad you raised that point, because I think communism is the world's greatest top-down intervention for female economic empowerment.

Because if we look at female employment, if we look at women's share of managing companies, being business leaders, being entrepreneurs, being self-made millionaires, then we've got to talk about formerly communist countries. Over 40% of Russia's published economists and business leaders are women. The gender gaps in employment are much, much smaller in formerly communist countries. And why is that?

So see, Adam, we don't pick any country. So you and I need to take a detour to the Soviet Union. I would love to travel with you, honestly. This is my new form of COVID travel. I just take you on these own journeys, right? COVID secure, COVID secure. Okay, right. So yeah, and if you look at other forms of competition, so chess, countries in Vietnam, Georgia, China, Mongolia. So what explains this? Why? Why is communism the world's greatest intervention for top down women's economic empowerment? So the Soviet Union or socialist central planners, because this is true for China, this is true for Cuba, Central Asia. They needed women because these fiveyear plans set high production targets. And in order to supplement, so the factories wanted women, the factories wanted as many

laborers as possible, because all they had to do was hit those stacanovite goals. And wages were pretty low. They didn't have to pay enormous wages to workers. In order to supplement their low wages, didn't have to pay enormous wages to workers in order to supplement their low wages um women were enticed with like generous maternity leave child care and also in the ussl the workbook was like your passport to apartments even holidays medical care so as a result most women worked across communist systems. But here's the catch. I need to add two catches. Number one, communist systems were also authoritarian and they suppressed civil society associations, including feminist activism. So that's why informally communist Russia and informally communist China, we see very low rates of female representation because there isn't that activism. All of the activism was suffocated. So if you don't have women speaking out,

if you don't have women challenging unfairness, then you don't see the emergence of feminist consciousness where women start to recognize structural inequalities and unfairness and start talking amongst themselves, highlighting the, you know, well, why is it that men don't have to do the housework? So feminist activism was suppressed. So for that reason, we need to sort of, when we talked about patriarchy as a vague term, it's worth distinguishing between, you know, women doing well in the world of work, which certainly they do in post-communist countries, and not so well in terms of representation. China's Politburo is 94% male. Central Committee has never, ever had a woman.

And also in China, there's very weak protections against gender-based violence, as we've recently seen in terms of rape, et cetera. That said, Central Asia. Central Asia, communism could have actually been beneficial. So if we go back to Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan 100 years ago, women were married at 13. These were patrilineal plans that secluded women. Women were entirely veiled. And these were Muslim countries, and men maintained their honor, their purity and respect by secluding women. Women did not work in towns.

They worked in family farms. They worked as nomads. But they did not mix with strangers in town. Then came the Soviets, and they had targets for productivity. They had targets for female employees. Girls were educated in secular schools. They competed in team sports. Now, this was also an incredibly brutal system. Stalin brutally suppressed religion. He destroyed mosques. He suffocated dissent. And combined with strong demand for labor, we saw rocketing female employment. So now in Uzbekistan, in Kyrgyzstan, in Tajikistan, women are training to be technicians.

They're as teachers, as managers. You know, we were talking about, you know, women who used to, their grandmothers were secluded, but now all of a sudden they're driving buses, they're driving massive trains and being celebrated as socialist heroes. they're driving buses, they're driving massive trains and being celebrated as socialist heroes. And if you could, so it's not the case, it's definitely not the case that Kazakhstan is a feminist utopia. But if you compare the life of women moving relatively freely in their communities, having their own job and gaining status with the sort of non-communist counterfactual, which is Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, then at least in Central Asia, communism seems to have advanced women's autonomy.

And communism seems to advance gender equality because there was a prior constraint on gender equality, which is patrilineal clans. So let's say there are two communities. In societies where female employment would have risen anyway with economic growth, like Russia, like China, like Cuba, then communism suffocated gender equality because it suffocated feminist activism, which is important.

But in societies like Central Asia, where there is a prior constraint that would have impeded the rising female wage labor in response to growth, because patrilineal clans are so concerned for honor, you would have never had female wage labor, and you would have never had feminist activism. So it's not a step backwards that authoritarian communism suppressed and suffocated feminist activism, because it just wasn't going to happen so coming back to your earlier question you were earlier saying that well in america people emphasize feminist activism the precursor to feminist activism is female mobility in the public sphere in order to mobilize in order to amass networks women must first of all be able to move freely in their communities and that from pattern to bust out into system, in a patrilineal society, you first of all need the economic returns to women's work. So I hope I'm being clear, Adam, but in a patrilineal system where men seclude women, they only allow women to travel more freely if there are some economic returns to it,

right? So once there are the economic returns to female wage labor, whether it's China, Taiwan, et cetera, then women move out into the public sphere. Then they start to organize their networks, right? But that's not the necessary precursor. Let's take a step and compare to Latin America. Latin America was not patrilineal. It was bilateral, tracing descent down the male and female line. So women moved relatively freely in the public sphere already. If we look at 16th century Sao Paulo, a third of households were headed by women already. You don't need such rapid growth to bust out of the system. You just need a little bit of growth because then there are more wage labor opportunities. Women go to towns. You know, there wasn't that strict, strict surveillance. And that's why Latin America, I mean, if you really want to talk about feminist activism,

we can talk about Colombia, which has just legalized abortion, following Argentina, following Mexico, following Uruguay. And Argentina has now, sorry, Latin America has converged with Europe in terms of women's representation. So they now have gender parity. Yeah. Chile's new constitutional assembly, gender parity. There's been tremendous, tremendous feminist activism across Latin America, pushing for reproductive rights, pushing for political representation, ginormous rallies against male violence in the streets of Buenos Aires. You can see women paint their eyelids green. They wear green handkerchiefs.

And this green handkerchief is symbolizing this feminist revolution. And why has this feminist revolution happened in Latin America, it reflects one, development, democratization, and weak constraints on female mobility. Those are the three important conditions. Development is important because you need urbanization, social media, sharing. So for example, there was this case a few years ago, back in 2015, where a woman was murdered, and a woman tweeted, ni una menos, not one more. And that created this social media firestorm. And across Latin America, there's been this regional networking,

this regional activism, sharing ideas, inspiring each other, realizing that if Argentina can do it, then so can Chile, pushing for more gender parity, demanding women's representation as part of democracy. So another important part of that has been the declining influence of the Catholic Church. Secularism, incredibly important in terms of questioning and challenging old taboos and ideas. So, yeah, that secularism, democratization, development of weak constraints on female mobility is the kindling, the tinder to the feminist flame. You have explained so much in such a short period of time. This has been really incredible.

And one of the things that really strikes me is how much you're talking about the material conditions in each place as a precursor to the social change and how specific it is in the economic structure, the social structure of each place, and the way you're talking about how you need social mobility or you need large growth as a precursor to the activism. And I think this might be an interesting question to end on because, again, in the United States, our story of the last century is one of activism making change. And in many ways, I think that story is wrong. and the anti-war movement of the 60s were actually failures to a much larger degree than we currently acknowledge because of the enormous backlash against them that we then wrote out of the history books. And by the way, there's backlashes to some of the movements that you're talking about. South Korea has a very powerful anti-feminist movement happening right now that is like really intense based on the limited amount that I've read about it.

That is like really intense based on the limited amount that I've read about it. So, you know, however, that is the narrative that we have in the United States, that activism, you know, the long arc of history bends towards justice if we show up and we raise our voices and that sort of thing. And as much as, you know, I love to have holes poked in that because I think that's more accurate. It's also this deep down desire that we have, right, to say that, hey, we can make change if we raise our consciousnesses, raise our voices, make our case in the public sphere. And what you're saying is, hey, you only get to do that if the economic and the social conditions are right. And guess what? That's something you're not going to have a lot of control over. That's going to be the rise of capitalism or the rise of communism, or, you know, you happen to be born into a society that is bilineal rather than patrilineal. And there's a real tension there that seems like kind of a bummer because like, hey, if you're listening to this and you're in a society that is on the

short end of that stick, you know, is there something that we can tell that hypothetical listener or perhaps real listener who's listening that that is something that they can do? Can activism still make a difference in that circumstance? Or do they need to sit around and wait for there to be some kind of economic revolution that, oh, by the way, as a side effect, causes better gender parity to finally come into possibility. Okay, Adam, do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill? Right, this is where I get the choice. Holy shit.

I mean, I'm a huge Matrix fan, so I guess I'm going to say red. Okay, so listen. That's the pill you got to take in the Matrix. We should do a choose your own adventure where your listeners can swap which ending they want. Oh my God, do it like a video game. Let me hit save and then I'll take one

and then I'll see what message it gives me and then I'll reload and hit the other one. Okay, so this is a key question about structure and agency. So let me give some reasons for caution why we might not expect continued progress. So climate breakdown, unstable temperatures, falling agricultural yields will make it much harder for places in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East to prosper. So that's going to weaken, dampenen economic growth dampen the demand for labor second structural shift is robotization and automation and that's occurring in the u.s

that's occurring throughout the world now the impact on work is debated in the u.s maybe people can upgrade into more productive opportunities but in in the global south, in places like India and Bangladesh, as those garment factories, which have always been condemned as terrible, Rana Plaza, horrific, horrific, deaths, etc., etc., as factory work becomes increasingly automated, that will reduce the demand for labor. So we're no longer seeing that labor-intensive, manufacturing-led increase in employment which occurred in East Asia.

So that, again, is going to affect the honor income trade-off, because if the demand for female labor is lower, then there's less incentive for families to let girls go to the cities in search of jobs. So female seclusion may persist in India and Egypt for those reasons. We also see the rise of authoritarianism. So a small fraction, 64% of the world now lives in authoritarian regimes. That makes it much harder. And it's not just in terms of suppressing feminist activism. So, for example, Al-Sisi in Egypt made it much harder for women to contest sexual harassment if you live in a culture where there isn't that culture of

resistance if you don't see people constantly challenging the government's and securing results then you may become despondent you've got caught in a despondency trap you don't believe that activism works so you're less likely to invest in sustained mobilization. So those three structural factors, climate breakdown, automization, the rise of authoritarian regimes, make it much more difficult to see rising female employment and feminist activism. That said, there are constantly examples where women are organizing against the odds. So let's take the Kurds. The huge demand for female militia, guerrillas their own sections, and they instituted more greater female representation. And they now have gender quotas, there are women presiding over courts for domestic violence, or women creating greater equality. So across the world,

we see these pockets of resistance against the odds. And I think if you want the inspirational story, the best bet is Latin America. I mean, Chile's government in the 1990s, you know, macho, macho, but there has been an enormous progress. So the odds are not in our favor, but, you know, change is always possible. Well, and change is inevitable. I mean, change will happen. Change will happen. I can't predict the direction though. Change will happen. Change will happen. I can't predict the direction though.

Yeah. Alice, this has been an absolutely incredible interview. I feel like I have such a more thorough understanding of this than I did before. Like I have a model to understand it. And I have the specificity of all of your examples of all these places. You're working on a book about this right now. Yes, yes. Does it have a title yet?

It does. The Great Gender Divergence. Oh, wow. book about this right now yes is does it have a title yet it does the great gender divergence oh wow about how how all societies have become more gender equal but why some are more gender equal than others and you're writing this right now does it have a release date yet probably not i knew so my method is to study the history of every single country in the world from the adam i'm not joking i need to be thorough about this. It'll only take you a couple more weeks, probably. Yeah, right, right, right. So no, it'll take me a few, it'll take me some years, but if people are interested, I have a blog, draliceevans.com forward slash blog,

and they can come join me on Twitter too. draliceevans.com forward slash blog. Exactly. That's where I've got a few things going on. And you're on Twitter where? I'm on Twitter underscore Alice underscore Evans. Alice, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't thank you enough. This has been incredible.

And I hope you'll come back again in the future. Thank you. And I hope you enjoyed the tour. Oh, I did. Oh my God. I'm exhausted. My arms are so tired. All right.

Have a good one. Thank you. Bye. Bye. it. My arms are so tired. All right. Have a good one. Thank you. Bye. Well, thank you once again to Dr. Alice Evans for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. If you did, you can support the show by heading to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And I want to thank our $15 a month Patreon subscribers, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska,

Antonio LB, Aurelio Jimenez, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Drill Bill, M, Hillary Wolkin, Kelly Casey,

Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck, Robin Madison, and Spencer Campbell for making this show possible. Thank you once again to our producer, Sam Roudman,

our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I recorded this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually. That was a hate gum podcast.