cultural pressure on sex differences

Abstract

This paper suggests that sex differences in the behavior of children exist but are not necessarily intensified under certain cultural conditions. Under conditions of culture change to a sedentary economy, certain elements of male and female differentiated behavior are exploited in the process of increasing sex differentiation.

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

“…Co-wife cooperation is mentioned frequently in cultures where women hunt (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981;Romanoff 1983). Even among the !Kung, where allomaternal care is less common than in other foraging societies, Draper (1975) states that young unmarried women are more likely to forage singly, whereas married women with young children tend to work in groups. Presumably, allowing children to play in groups diverts their attention from their mothers, increasing the mothers' work efficiency.…”

Household Task Delegation among High-Fertility Forager-Horticulturalists of Lowland Bolivia

“…While both sexes voluntarily increase work effort with age, age-related decline in the probability of delegation is more strongly evident for boys than for girls (table 1). With age, boys may spend less time under parental supervision than girls and may be afforded more leisure time (Barry, Bacon, and Child 1957; Draper 1975). The extent to which children’s voluntary maintenance of proximity to parents influences the number and types of tasks delegated to children remains unexplored.…”

“…Girls may be delegated more tasks than boys, in part, because girls maintain closer proximity to the home and adults. This “opportunistic delegation” hypothesis is an alternative to the “systematic delegation” hypothesis, which states that parents delegate tasks to prepare children for adult roles (Draper 1975; Draper and Cashdan 1988; Erchak 1980; Whiting and Whiting 1975). The latter hypothesis implies that sex differences in delegation reflect the sexual division of adult labor.…”

Material Indicators of Family Busyness

“…Scan sampling is an ethological method developed by early 20th-century behavioral psychologists for the purpose of obtaining temporally near-simultaneous data on a group of organisms by observing individuals in turn and recording behavioral states at the instant of observation (Altmann 1974;Dunbar 1976). Numerous anthropologists have since innovated and applied variants of scan sampling and other methods for standardizing the rate and types of behavioral observations to studies of human activity and everyday behavior (e.g., Draper 1975;Erasmus 1955;Hawkes et al 1987;Johnson 1975;Konner 1976;Munroe and Munroe 1971;Nerlove et al 1974;O'Connell et al 1991). Goals common to many of these studies include the reliable (and replicable) documentation of the total time humans allocate to a range of everyday activities (see review in Gross 1984), as well as discerning patterning in decisions underlying the distribution of activities across space (e.g., O'Connell et al 1991).…”