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Sexual division of labour


The sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between males and females. Among human foragers, males and females target different types of foods and share them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food - but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labor. Many studies on the sexual division of labor have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza-a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania.

Both men and women have the option of investing resources either to provision children or to have additional offspring based on life history theory. Males and females monitor costs and benefits of each alternative to maximize reproductive fitness; however, trade-off differences do exist between sexes. Females are likely to benefit most from parental effort because they are certain which offspring are theirs and have relatively few reproductive opportunities, each of which is relatively costly and risky. In contrast, males do not have an absolute certainty of paternity, but may have many more mating opportunities bearing relatively low costs and risks. Though not every hunter-gatherer population pinpoints females to gathering and males to hunting (most notably the Aeta and Ju'/hoansi), the norm of most current populations divide the roles of labor in this manner. Natural selection is more likely to favor male reproductive strategies that stress mating effort and female strategies that emphasize parental investment. As a result, women have been relegated to the low-risk task of gathering vegetation and underground storage organs that are rich in energy to provide for themselves and offspring. Since women provide a reliable source of caloric intake, men are able to afford a higher risk of failure by hunting animals.

This classic theory of natural selection positing a difference in male and female reproductive strategies has recently been reexamined, with an alternate theory being proposed that promiscuity was encouraged among women and men alike, causing uncertainty among males of the paternity of their offspring, allowing for group cooperation in raising all offspring due to the possibility that any child could be the descendant of a male, similar to observations of the closest relative of humans, the bonobo. Moreover, recent archaeological research done by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that the sexual division of labor did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 and 10,000 years ago) and developed relatively recently in human history. The sexual division of labor may have arisen to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently.


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