Angarika Deb

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and further perpetuation of inequalities. We provide a multidisciplinary explanation, focusing on the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying the perpetuation of inequalities within households. The article begins with a broad, economic approach that details the role of outside options and how they impact available decisions across different subsistence communities. We then discuss the role of cultural narratives and norms in shaping internalized structures of inequality. Finally, we unify these perspectives by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin self-perception and motivated assessments of fairness within households. We end with a brief discussion on the policy significance and avenues of future work.

An influential account of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity and fairness evolved as community sizes grew, markets and institutions stabilised and world religions came about. The account rests on the assumptions that humans predominantly interacted with kin in the evolutionary past, lived in genetically related groups and did not have formal norms of cooperation. In this article I present anthropological evidence to the contrary. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies from around the globe live in nomadic camps with fluid membership and low genetic relatedness; cooperate extensively based on principles of need, and equity; have high prevalence of food sharing, cooperative hunting and alloparenting; and demonstrate formal norms of redistribution for essential goods. I suggest therefore, that this account of fairness is in need of revision. Fairness – understood as equity in distributions – is not a recently evolved disposition in market-integrated societies; but has likely existed in hunter-gatherers too.