What Explains Differences in Men’s and Women’s Production?

Bird, Rebecca Bliege; Codding, Brian F.; Bird, Douglas W.

doi:10.1007/s12110-009-9061-9

Cited by 28 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Today Martu reside in remote settlements within their native title and frequently forage for wild resources. Martu have a female-biased foraging economy, with women bringing in the majority of total kilocalories on average [25]. Data examined here come out of an ongoing project and the current sample was collected from 2000 to 2009 [16,25,26].…”

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Martu have a female-biased foraging economy, with women bringing in the majority of total kilocalories on average [25]. Data examined here come out of an ongoing project and the current sample was collected from 2000 to 2009 [16,25,26]. Meriam live on islands in the eastern Torres Strait in permanent settlements, many of which were occupied prior to European contact.…”

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Provisioning offspring and others: risk–energy trade-offs and gender differences in hunter–gatherer foraging strategies

Codding

Bird

2011

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Offspring provisioning is commonly referenced as the most important influence on men's and women's foraging decisions. However, the provisioning of other adults may be equally important in determining gender differences in resource choice, particularly when the goals of provisioning offspring versus others cannot be met with the acquisition of the same resources. Here, we examine how resources vary in their expected daily energetic returns and in the variance or risk around those returns. We predict that when available resources impose no trade-off between risk and energy, the targets of men's and women's foraging will converge on high-energy, low-risk resources that allow for the simultaneous provisioning of offspring and others. However, when minimizing risk and maximizing energy trade-off with one another, we expect men's foraging to focus on provisioning others through the unreliable acquisition of large harvests, while women focus on reliably acquiring smaller harvests to feed offspring. We test these predictions with foraging data from three populations (Aché, Martu and Meriam). The results uphold the predictions, suggesting that men's and women's foraging interests converge when highenergy resources can be reliably acquired, but diverge when higher-energy resources are associated with higher levels of risk. Social factors, particularly the availability of alloparental support, may also play a major role.

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Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Provisioning offspring and others: risk–energy trade-offs and gender differences in hunter–gatherer foraging strategies

Codding

Bird

2011

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…Such contributions had been often categorized as “gathering”, or simply ignored, as the focus of “hunting” had been on relatively large, mobile prey. This bias could be large for groups in arid regions, e.g., the Western Desert in Australia 51 , 52 , for which the recorded hunting percentage is about 30% while the true meat fractions are up to 80% when women’s contribution to hunting is included 51 . The bias appears to be lower for groups in the tropics like Amazon Basin and Congo Basin 53 , where recent field observations show less than 10% of total hunted food from women 53 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global hunter-gatherer population densities constrained by influence of seasonality on diet composition

et al. 2021

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The dependence of hunter-gatherers on local net primary production (NPP) to provide food played a major role in shaping long-term human population dynamics. Observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers have shown an overall correlation between population density and annual NPP, but with a thousand-fold variation in population density per unit NPP that remains unexplained. Here we build a process-based hunter-gatherer population model embedded within a global terrestrial biosphere model, which explicitly addresses the extraction of NPP through dynamically-allocated hunting and gathering activities. The emergent results reveal a strong, previously unrecognized effect of seasonality on population density via diet composition, whereby hunter-gatherers consume high fractions of meat in regions where growing seasons are short, leading to greatly reduced population density due to trophic inefficiency. This seasonal carnivory bottleneck largely explains the wide variation in population density per unit NPP, and questions the prevailing usage of annual NPP as the proxy of carrying capacity for ancient humans. Our process-based approach has the potential to greatly refine our understanding of dynamical responses of ancient human populations to past environmental changes.

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“…Recent work has proposed that gendered patterns of difference in human foraging decisions arise, at least in part, because women tend to be more averse than men to variance in energy returns. This perspective may explain why men often prefer to hunt prey associated with high rates of failure, and why women often do not hunt and, when they do, take mainly smaller, less mobile prey with lower rates of failure [1][2][3][4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

To kill a kangaroo: understanding the decision to pursue high-risk/high-gain resources

Jones

Bird

2013

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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In this paper, we attempt to understand hunter-gatherer foraging decisions about prey that vary in both the mean and variance of energy return using an expected utility framework. We show that for skewed distributions of energetic returns, the standard linear variance discounting (LVD) model for risk-sensitive foraging can produce quite misleading results. In addition to creating difficulties for the LVD model, the skewed distributions characteristic of hunting returns create challenges for estimating probability distribution functions required for expected utility. We present a solution using a twocomponent finite mixture model for foraging returns. We then use detailed foraging returns data based on focal follows of individual hunters in Western Australia hunting for high-risk/high-gain (hill kangaroo) and relatively lowrisk/low-gain (sand monitor) prey. Using probability densities for the two resources estimated from the mixture models, combined with theoretically sensible utility curves characterized by diminishing marginal utility for the highest returns, we find that the expected utility of the sand monitors greatly exceeds that of kangaroos despite the fact that the mean energy return for kangaroos is nearly twice as large as that for sand monitors. We conclude that the decision to hunt hill kangaroos does not arise simply as part of an energetic utility-maximization strategy and that additional social, political or symbolic benefits must accrue to hunters of this highly variable prey.

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What Explains Differences in Men’s and Women’s Production?

Cited by 28 publications

References 56 publications

Provisioning offspring and others: risk–energy trade-offs and gender differences in hunter–gatherer foraging strategies

Provisioning offspring and others: risk–energy trade-offs and gender differences in hunter–gatherer foraging strategies

Global hunter-gatherer population densities constrained by influence of seasonality on diet composition

To kill a kangaroo: understanding the decision to pursue high-risk/high-gain resources

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