Tracking Cross-Cultural Gender Bias in Reputations

Abstract

While ethnologists have long noted that females lack access to social capital across cultures, the magnitude of this effect is rarely examined. Here, we investigate the nature of gender bias in one dimension of social capital, reputation. We extract data on reputations from the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) database, specifically the societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and analyze whether there are fewer instances of feminine reputation relative to masculine reputation. In addition, we assess whether aspects of social structure or institutional biases in the production of ethnography affect the rate at which feminine reputations occur. We find that (a) most reputations are gendered male; (b) patrilocality and matriliny increase the rate at which feminine reputations occur, while patriliny decreases their occurrence; and (c) as female authorship increases over time, inclusion of feminine subject matter increases, which resulted in a greater incidence of feminine reputations. Ultimately, our analyses highlight the need for increased focus on feminine subject matters and gendered social capital in the discipline of anthropology.

The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences

“…While this finding is consistent with research demonstrating that, across cultures, male social life is typically more public than female social life [46][47][48] we cannot disentangle male bias in ethnography from putative male biases in more overt sociality and reputation diversity. This male-biased pattern is consistent, however, with perspectives suggesting societies disproportionately channel opportunities to men to differentiate themselves, at the detriment of women who have fewer avenues to develop social capital [32,47,49,50]. As Rosaldo [48, pp.…”

“…Ethnographic materials related to the social, economic, and cultural lives of women are systematically underreported, especially in the early history of the field [30,31,80]. Thus, the extent to which women have fewer avenues for gaining reputations cross-culturally remains unclear and cannot be evaluated via these methods.…”

“…We attempted to assess potential biases in our data owing to meta-ethnographic measures (see the electronic supplementary material); however, it is possible other features of ethnography or ethnographers influenced results. Ethnographic materials related to the social, economic and cultural lives of women are systematically underreported, especially in the early history of the field [32,33,83]. Thus, the extent to which women have fewer avenues for gaining reputations cross-culturally remains unclear and cannot be evaluated via these methods.…”

“…Research on reputations has remained agnostic, however, about the scope of reputation domains within societies, their frequency across cultures, and potential gender biases [30]. Furthermore, research has often occurred in a piece-meal fashion focusing on a single domain, obfuscating the degree to which domains interact and shape behavioural responses as a suite of integrated parts (however, see [3]).…”

Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation

“…The qualities that are found in leaders, for example, may not necessarily be the reputational domains that everyone works to pursue; only relatively few may aspire to positions of prominence within a community (Power & Ready, 2018 ). Unfortunately, much of the cross-cultural work on status and leadership has focused exclusively on men; recent work (Post & Macfarlan, 2020 ) suggests that women’s reputations are often less well defined in the ethnographic record, but they appear to become more salient in matrilineal societies. Among the Tsimane (von Rueden et al, 2018 ) and the Chabu (Garfield & Hagen, 2020 ), women’s reputational domains are indeed different from men’s, with less emphasis on dominance and knowledge.…”