I suggest that we consider the market for romantic love. In crude econ talk, men are more likely to provide devotion under two conditions: they want female companionship and women say that the price of intimacy is commitment. When both hold, men compete for female companionship by offering affection, monogamy and long-term support.

If these mechanisms break down, male devotion is under-supplied. If he is not eager for companionship or child-raising, why invest in costly commitments? If women’s bargaining power is weak, they may struggle to insist on devotion or contraceptives.

This essay explores five possible factors affecting the market for romantic love in Southern Africa:

1. Traditionally, conjugal unions were secondary

2. Apartheid and migrant labour ruptured families

3. Inequality raises employed men’s bargaining power

4. Transactional sex

5. Poor contraceptives

6. Risk-taking

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Together, they may help explain why many women struggle to secure men’s love and long-term support.

(1) Traditionally, conjugal unions were secondary

Historically, Sub-Saharan African men gained power through “wealth in people.” Given land abundance, a man could cultivate as many fields as he had wives, concubines, slaves and children. Girls and women were thus economic assets - paid for with bridewealth, captured as slaves, or loaned as pawns, thereafter carrying heavy loads, growing crops, and nursing babies. From the West African Hausa to Southern African Basotho and Zulu, chiefs were often polygynous (Hunter, 38; Murray 1981, 125).

Across many African societies, marriage was not primarily a union of the couple, but rather of two descent-based groups. A man might certainly show affection, woo his beloved, elope and secure her consent (Hunter 38), but they were not necessarily idealised. Instead, many communities put greater weight on kinship, obedience to elders, age-set solidarity, or bridewealth. Echoing such traditions, South African president Zuma referred to a woman’s genitals as “isibaya sikababa wakhe” (her father’s cattle kraal) (Hunter, 2010: 2).

As African Christians spread the gospel, they championed marital consent and monogamy, while condemning bridewealth and polygyny (Hunter, 54). As urban elites headed to Church, read English novels in school, and aspired for modernity, they increasingly embraced ideals of personal freedoms and romantic love.

Recognising this particular cultural inheritance, some scholars argue that many African young people may continue to put greater weight on segmentary lineages (clans) and fertility, rather than necessarily seeking conjugal ties. Who’s to say they should follow the West? Perhaps grandparents and agnatic parenting may provide a satisfactory substitute, and young women are voluntarily choosing to become single mothers?

However, this hypothesis does not seem supported by the available data. The 2019 South African National Antenatal HIV Sentinel Survey enrols 36,015 pregnant women across 1589 public health facilities from across South Africa. Over half said their pregnancies were unintended.

Unintended pregnancies were highest among teenage girls (15-19) and singles (76%). 64% of those in relationships but not cohabiting also said it was unintended.

Since these pregnancies were unintentional, it does not seem like teenage girls are really embracing child-bearing or solo parenting as a cultural ideal. Instead we must ask, what’s weakening companionship?

(2) Did Apartheid & Male Migration Weaken Conjugal Ties?

From the early to late 20th century, South Africa’s government spurred men’s labour migration, while obstructing family formation in towns and cities. Men ‘oscillated’. As multiple generations of sons grew up with absent fathers, this may have suppressed their desire for female companionship.

The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted African land ownership to less productive peripheries, while the 1894 poll tax payable only in cash pushed men into wage labour. Rural households became increasingly dependent on wages from male migrants, who gained greater autonomy to pursue their chosen bride (Hunter 44).

Apartheid restricted Africans’ mobility, property ownership and living arrangements. Their place in towns was now contingent on carrying passes. Black photographer Ernest Cole wrote, “It is an extraordinary experience to live as if life were a punishment inflicted because you are Black.. Not a day goes by without a reminder of your guilt, without the disapproval of your condition and without the risk of running into trouble for transgressing laws designed solely to repress you”.

African men thus tended to be away from their homes for long stretches, while women often remained behind with the children. Urban sex ratios were highly skewed: in 1970 there were 201 men in Cape Town for every 100 women.

Oscillating Labourers across Southern Africa

By 1973, foreigners comprised 80% of black labour in the South African mining industry. These were mostly young men, working on 10-14 month contracts, returning home and taking up another contract. Typically, they might be abroad for 13-16 years. Yet few could retire on their own savings; instead they would depend on junior kins’ remittances (Murray, 1981: 41)

During apartheid, Basotho miners were not permitted to stay in South Africa beyond the length of their contracts, nor could they bring their families. They stayed in single-sex barracks. The South African Aliens Control Act of 1963 mandated passports, residence and work permits, which made female migration difficult, but the mines were exempt from this legislation.

Back in the 1970s, surveyed wives expressed significant strain and disruption, yet husbands often sought control and would “punish a wife severely if his instructions are not followed”. Since 1990, cross-border migration has dramatically increased.

By 1971, 26% of all adult men and 5% of women in Botswana were migrants to South Africa. Mothers increasingly managed alone, often struggling but ultimately becoming more entrepreneurial, and also prioritising their own happiness.

Through life history interviews, Unaludo Sechele finds that absentee husbands did not necessarily prioritise their wives’ welfare. They were absent for long stretches, did not necessarily send remittances, and then returned to be controlling or violent.

As South African mines drew in male migrants but restricted family formation, it effectively stretched conjugal ties to the point of breaking. In 1993, only 35% of South African children lived with both parents. Sons of single mothers may not necessarily have grown up wanting a conjugal union.

Apartheid may have thus weakened men’s preferences for female companionship. But it does not explain why over half of all South African births are unintended. Why are women embarking on these relationships?

(3) Extreme Inequality

Three economic conditions could suppress the market for romantic love by weakening women’s proclivity to bargain for male devotion, fidelity and contraceptives:

• Inequality invariably generates envy, status consciousness and heightened demand for scarce positional goods, so as to signal one’s own status. In highly unequal societies, poorer women may feel acutely behind rich elites and try to gain goods that signal higher status.

• Absolute deprivation could also motivate young women to be more materialistic when looking for partners.

• High unemployment implies an artificially low sex ratio, as so many men become ineligible. The few men with stable incomes thus exercise tremendous bargaining power in the mating market.

South Africa meets all three conditions. For starters, it is extremely unequal, the bottom 50% earn just 5% of national income. The poorest decile of South Africans are as poor as the poorest decile across low-income Sub-Saharan countries, yet the richest 10% of South Africans are as rich as the richest 10% in Eastern Europe.

South Africa also has an extremely high incidence of absolute poverty. Over 30% of South African households have no working adults, and rely on alternatives like government grants.

Youth unemployment is high across Southern Africa, this means that the majority of young men may be seen as ineligible (as emphasised by ethnographer Mark Hunter). South Africa is distinct in that it also has an unusually small informal sector, for its income level. Men with formal jobs are scarce and can thus exercise strong bargaining power over poorer girls and young women.

(4) Transactional Sex

Some men embark on short-term relationships, providing gifts and care in the hope of sex. When impoverished girls receive gifts from men, they may struggle to negotiate for devotion, monogamy or condoms.

In South Africa, a ‘taxi boyfriend’ may be highly coveted by other women as he provides free transport, and such competition lowers her capacity to bargain. As a 16 year old explained,

“Those guys, they can beat you anyhow, anywhere, even in front of your family. They don’t care, because they can have so many girls. I was a taxi queen for two months last year. I went everywhere. Then I became afraid of AIDS because I knew he had many girlfriends... Sis, those guys can be trouble”.

A growing literature suggests that transactional sex is widespread. When over 3000 Tanzanian school girls were surveyed, over half said their peers sometimes received money or gifts for having sex with older men, and around 40% said they were often sexually harassed (Berge et al 2026; see also Dean and Wamoyi 2015; Wamoyi et al 2010).

Of 1645 randomly-selected South African men, 60% reported that they participated in transactional sex, generally providing her with gifts of clothes or beauty products. Men often offer girls prestigious consumer goods - like scented beauty products and fashionable clothing. Over a third of surveyed young women in rural Mpumalanga, South Africa, said they spent such transfers on prestige goods, like perfume, hair extensions, expensive underwear, cosmetics, handbags and jewellery. As a young women shared: “Sugar daddies have money and I want their money. So nowadays girls want to make themselves beautiful, look nice and wear nice clothes… Look at me I eat well because I have a relationship with a sugar daddy”.

“AmaBlesser” became a South African smash hit in 2016, as a young male encapsulated the woes of losing love, as his girlfriend cheated on him with his wealthy uncle and became pregnant. With the official video racking up 38 million views, he laments: “Uhambile ama-baby... Uhambe namablesser” (My baby is gone, Blessers took her away).

A Nigerian reader articulated similar dynamics:

Sexual Harassment & Abuse

If men provide money and expect sex, yet feel little emotional attachment, then intimate relations become risky.

In South Africa, men who have ever engaged in transactional sex are also much more likely to report that they have committed sexual assault. Among surveyed rural young men in Eastern Cape, those who had been physically or sexually violent towards a partner in the past year also reported inconsistent condom use. Meanwhile, women who embarked on transactional sex were more likely to acquire HIV.

If only a few men have jobs, they can exercise considerable bargaining power over impoverished girls and young women. This could include inconsistent condom use, infidelity, or emotional and physical abuse.

“If you are lacking and you are getting pressure from the way your friends are looking, you will definitely find someone to sponsor you (sugar daddy). In the end you get pregnant, because you have no say and you will give in and get what you want” (young woman, urban Zambia)

“[I had sex] because of money. I wanted to buy something and I didn’t have money. In that situation, a man can tell you to sleep with him, especially when you are assured that he will give you something” (young woman, urban Zambia).

“I was not ready for a child but my boyfriend told me that his friends were teasing him about not having children. He wanted me to fall pregnant and give him a child. He said this would prove his manhood and this would secure our relationship”. (Kwa-Zulu Natal)

Even if only a few young women are enticed by small gifts, men may still adopt this general strategy of sexual harassment on the off-chance they’ll get lucky. The downside risks are invariably low when police are overstretched and male predators harass with near impunity. 29% of girls surveyed in Sub-Saharan Africa said that they had experienced physical or sexual violence. In Kwa-Zulu Natal, school boys pressure girls to engage in sexual activity, sometimes touching or publicly humiliating the girls.

“Sextortion”

Many poor girls and women are navigating schools, markets, offices and state services where corruption is rife. At each chokepoint, men may abuse their positions of power to extract not just financial payments but also sexual favours - ‘sextortion’.

The 2019 BBC documentary “Sex for Grades” exposed lecturers at the University of Lagos and the University of Ghana pressuring students for sex in exchange for better grades. In Johannesburg and Bogota, male water utility staff demanded sexual favours from women in exchange for water services.

This persists more widely, as a Nigerian woman shared with me,

(5) Poor Contraceptives

Why don’t sexually active women use contraceptives? While Southern Africa has higher rates of contraceptives than other African countries, as well as high knowledge, there is still a sizeable share of sexually active girls and young women who are not using contraceptives.

South African clinics often steer women towards injectables, since these are relatively cheap, can be obtained once every two or three months and do not require daily adherence. But interviewed women sometimes express negative side-effects:

“It was not good for my body… I felt dizzy, had terrible headache, menstruated for a long time and lost weight… I lost weight because of losing so much blood… I was bleeding too much”.

Intrauterine devices are an alternative, but in South Africa these are rarely used (1.6% of South African married women). Clinics may be steering women towards injectables (which do not require the same level of training), which are then discontinued due to negative side-effects.

(6) Risk-tolerance

Since sex carries risks - of disease, reputational damage, abandonment, unwanted pregnancy, and the cost of raising a child - women’s conditions for intimacy may partly depend on their tolerance for risk.

Anke Becker and co-authors demonstrate that there is considerably cross-country and within-country heterogeneity in self-reported patience, risk-taking and positive reciprocity. While different surveys yield slightly different results, these regional trends are broadly persistent.

What might explain this heterogeneity in long-termism? Unclear. Oded Galor and Ömer Özak suggest that agriculture may have reinforced a propensity to toil for later harvests. Beyond deep roots, delayed gratification may also be reinforced via cultural persuasion in folklore, religion and literature.

Obviously, risk-tolerance interacts with poverty, inequality and age. If a man with a job offers an impoverished teenage girl gifts and financial support, then she may be more inclined to take risks and not insist on a condom, so as to preserve that relationship.

Why is Male Devotion Under-Supplied?

Puzzled by Southern Africa’s exceptionally high rates of single motherhood, I’ve tried to theorise the market for romantic love. I’ve suggested that men are most likely to provide devotion if they want female companionship and children, while such women credibly insist on commitment. Men then compete with affection, reliability, monogamy and long-term support. But if men do not want female companionship or hands-on fatherhood then their incentives to signal devotion are considerably lower.

In Southern Africa, men with good jobs are scarce and they can bargain for preferred terms, sometimes pressuring poorer teenage girls and young women to have intimate relationships without using contraceptives. Opportunists may even harass girls and young women more widely, knowing that sanctions are weak.

Severe inequality and poverty mean that the market for love is lopsided. Although women may want love and long-term support, men can often obtain sex through lower-cost strategies. Today, only 38% of absent fathers in South Africa support their children financially.

Given these structural constraints, one plausibly effective intervention might be to increase access to safe, effective IUDs, so that Southern African women can truly control their bodies and have the children they want.

Their goal is to estimate the general-equilibrium effects of slavery by modelling what the antebellum economy would have looked like under full emancipation. Under this counterfactual, formerly enslaved workers would be free to choose their own labour supply, sector and location. Many would leave Southern agriculture and head north, to manufacturing and services. Allen et al estimate that “aggregate GDP rises by 9.1%”.

Did Female Emancipation raise East Asia’s GDP?

Similar questions can be asked about the general-equilibrium effects of female emancipation. But here we must distinguish between two transitions:

1. When societies loosen restrictions on women’s labour, enabling them to work in more productive sectors, this will mechanically raise economic output. But..

2. If those women also seize the means of persuasion and raise their standards for marriage and child-bearing, while men refuse to provide caring, committed egalitarian companionship, then fertility takes a hit, shrinks populations and mechanically lowers aggregate economic output.

Modernisation thus unleashes something once suppressed by patriarchy, a mismatch in men and women’s preferences. For this reason, female emancipation significantly raises women’s welfare, but whether it boosts long-run GDP depends on men’s adaptive preferences.

Stage 1: Industrialisation

Back in 1900, East Asian girls were raised to be obedient, uphold filial piety, accept being sent off to unknown homes, where they would toil for their in-laws, bear children for their husband’s lineage, even enduring abuse. To quote a historic saying “The husband sings and the wife follows”. Without her own ideas or independence, she was merely supposed to echo. Since divorce was condemned and girls were taught to please others, patrilineal clans were able to extract more labour and fertility than women would have otherwise supplied. I call these “patriarchal rents”.

Some communities even extracted that labour through physical violence - breaking and binding girls’ feet so that they might spend all day at the loom, unable to run away. Ideologies of male supremacy also trapped women in less productive sectors, since they were not permitted to take the imperial examinations nor even compete for prestigious domains.

20th century structural transformation was then transformative. Massive demand for factory labour raised the opportunity cost of keeping your daughter at home. Entire villages then despatched girls and women to work in sweatshops, bundled into over-crowded trains, sharing dirty dormitories, toiling long hours into the nights in bustling cities, expecting them to duly remit earnings back home.

Female employment thus raised East Asian GDP through both extensive and intensive growth.

• It was extensive because women who might otherwise have been secluded at home entered market work, increasing the sheer number of labour inputs in the economy. Women then did more work than before, raising children and working for pay.

• It was also intensive growth because women also moved out of unpaid household production and low-productivity agriculture into factories, offices, schools, hospitals and services. Even without any technological change, this sectoral reallocation mechanically raises economy-wide productivity: more labour is deployed in activities with higher output per worker. East Asia thus gained twice over: it mobilised more labour and moved that labour into more productive sectors, which in turn drove industrialisation and structural transformation

The USSR likewise mobilise female labour so as to spearhead industrialisation - not just in Russia but also in Muslim Central Asia.

By contrast, societies with a stronger preference for female seclusion have forfeited these economic benefits. In a geographical band that stretches from Casablanca to Calcutta, patriarchs confine women in home-based social reproduction and low-productivity agriculture in order to maintain honour. India has just as many working-age women as China, but far fewer of them work. Moreover, Indian women outpace men in higher education. Female seclusion mechanically reduces the size of the labour force, haemorrages talent, as well as aggregate GDP and GDP per worker.

Of course, there are other factors (such as labour demand, human capital, and infrastructure), but halving your workforce is significant.

Stage 2: Women Raise their Standards

As East Asians headed into cities and secured wage labour, they increasingly forged independent friendships, chose their own partners, and placed higher value on their own individual happiness.

For the first time in history, East Asian women then seized the means of persuasion. Rather than patriachs praising filial piety, female submission and sacrifice; feminist journalists, novelists, comic bloggers and stand-ups comedians challenged everyday sexism, pushed for their own prerogatives. Bestsellers include ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’ and ‘the Vegetarian’, movies like “Her Story” made $98m at the Box Office, and UrbanGirl Vivian’s story about women breaking out of stereotypes went viral. Now here’s a sprinkling of Yanyi Yangue’s performances on “Rock & Roast”:

In 2020, Yang Li asked, “Why are men so ordinary yet so confident” and launched thousands of memes, including male vitriol. She replied,

In my own interviews, Chinese young women tend to rejected the drudgery of cooking and cleaning for Lunar New Year festivals only for the men to have all the fun. Seeing their mothers’ social reproduction as a sacrifice, they increasingly put themselves first, and prioritised their own welfare. Young women became increasingly selective. Many are now raising the ‘reservation wage’ at which they will provide all the sex, care, companionship and laundry traditionally bundled with marriage.

But while East Asian women increasingly want egalitarian companionship, many men still prefer deference. Given this mismatch in preferences, they remain single. Moreover, men have myriad outside options, including drinking baijiu with male friends, enjoying sexy ladies in karaoke bars, online video games, convenience foods, marrying imported brides from poorer regions, or even turning to AI companions. As such, they are not necessarily prepared to pay the new price of marriage: egalitarian respect, care, companionship and emotional attentiveness. Instead, male-dominated platforms brim with resentment.

Now that women are free to avoid unsatisfactory unions and prefer egalitarian companionship, which many men are unwilling to supply because they prefer hierarchy, we see a rise of singles and collapse in fertility.

Some men still form families, of course. This may be because they are exceptionally charming, providing women with such love and care that they eagerly want to form a family together. Others may offer highly attractive terms on other dimensions. Meanwhile, in conservative communities, marriage may still be paramount for social respectability. But in East Asia’s big cities, where women can stay single and stigma-free, then the most disagreeable men on lower incomes generally struggle to attract.

Falling fertility has major macroeconomic implications

While AI could enable a massive boom in productivity, and may reduce the economic benefits of a larger workforce, East Asian growth could be slowed by ageing populations, rising dependency, higher savings and weaker domestic consumption.

Japan illustrates these headwinds. Between 1991 and 2019, Japan’s economy grew by just 0.83% annually, while the US achieved 2.53%. Many economists blamed Japanese monetary policy. But Fernández-Villaverde, Ventura, and Yao look at GDP growth per working-age adult; by this metric, Japan’s performance (1.39% annually) comes close to that of the United States (1.65%). Japan’s macroeconomic malaise is partly a function of its shrinking working-age population.

Is Female Emancipation Good for Growth?

When women are permitted to work, the labour force expands and this boosts aggregate GDP. If women also ditch low-productivity agriculture and bustle into more productive sectors (factories, hospitals and offices), then rising female labour force participation also means higher GDP per worker. East Asia thus prospered by mobilising women’s labour.

But this was only partial emancipation: East Asian patriarchs still instilled female sacrifice and filial piety to motivate marriage and social reproduction. In short, they extracted patriarchal rents.

As women forged careers, they also started rewriting the script, challenging sexist ideas of deference and duty. Many became more selective. Since men have often been unwilling to offer more egalitarian terms, women around the world appear to be going on strike, refusing patriarchal rents.

Modernisation thus unleashes something once suppressed by patriarchy: a fundamental mismatch in men and women’s preferences. For this reason, female emancipation is good for women’s welfare, but whether it increases long-run aggregate GDP really depends on men’s reactions. When women are free and prioritise their own happiness, they seem more inclined to make long-term investments with collaborators who offer more attractive terms. ❤️

Related Essays

• Patriarchal Rents

• Feminism:

  • Structural Transformation Enables Women to Rewrite the Script!

  • The Emergence of Chinese Feminist Consciousness

  • Ghosting the Patriarchy

• Misogynist backlash

  • China’s Economic Slowdown & Social Media

• East Asian culture:

  • How does exogamy affect economics and culture?

  • Economic Development & Cultural Change

  • Ideals of Upward Mobility

  • Does Filial Piety clash with Romantic Love?

• Singles and fertility:

  • Why are Childless Singles on the Rise in East Asia?

  • Why are Chinese Marriages Plummeting?

  • The Global Rise of Singles

  • The Global Collapse of Coupling & Fertility

  • Why don’t men want so many kids?

Colonial officials relied on chiefs to collect taxes, coerce cheap labour, and keep order in their overstretched territories. When senior men protested that wives, pawns and slaves were escaping to mines, markets and railway camps, officials began to bargain. The resulting colonial-patriarchal compromise preserved husbands’ control over wives’ labour and fathers’ claims to bridewealth. But, as I learnt during my PhD research in Zambia, women leveraged new opportunities to secure their own advantage.

To recall, the binding constraint on Sub-Saharan African agricultural production was not land but labour. A man could cultivate as many farms as he could command workers, and he did so by acquiring more wives, children, slaves, pawns, clients and junior kin. Women planted, weeded, pounded grain, fetched water and firewood, made pots, bore and raised children and produced the surplus that advanced men’s status. In both matrilineal and patrilineal societies, men incorporated wives to expand their own lineage. Girls and women were also valued booty: seized by warriors to become concubines, resold for profit, or redistributed to consolidate male alliances. Commercialisation made command over labour even more valuable, raising bride prices.

European colonisers marshalled superior firepower and brutal coercion to secure their own commercial advantage. African chiefs were integral to governance: collecting head or hut taxes and supplying contingents of able-bodied men so as to build infrastructure, like ports, roads, bridges, telegraphs and railways. These projects were invariably violent - in 1940s Portuguese Mozambique, over 800,000 Africans were compelled to cultivate cotton.

To maintain this alliance, European authorities permitted courts to uphold bridewealth, paternal authority and domestic servitude, while officials curbed women’s independent migration by requiring urban passes and punishing adultery. Cumulatively, they sought to reinforce men’s labour rents - extracting more labour than women would supply if they valued their own welfare and could freely exit.

But women, girls and junior men nevertheless resisted - seeking greater autonomy, as well as relationships based on mutual attraction and even companionship. Former slaves, concubines and unhappy wives escaped to small but emerging opportunities for wage labour at seaports, plantations, timber concessions, mining centres, railway camps and urban markets. Flocking to towns, women brewed beer, traded food, formed informal unions, cooked food, cleaned clothes, and sold sex, and sought men who would treat them better. Growing export markets thus raised the importance of command over labour, while simultaneously threatening to weaken men’s rents.

This cultural fist-fight is revealing. Slavery waned as pacification curtailed raiding, wage labour provided exit options, and missions emboldened quests for personal freedoms. However, husbands’ claims over their wives’ labour proved more durable, because marriage and child-bearing remained both prestigious and constraining. Patriarchy - as a social technology of extraction - certainly outlived slavery.

My argument rests on three core claims. First, in pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, men gained wealth and power by commanding women’s labour and bridewealth. Second, the colonial administrations relied on chiefs and thus protected many of these claims. Third, women, junior men, slaves, converts, and migrants nevertheless leveraged urban markets, native courts and Christian missions to secure their own advantage.

Pre-Colonial Wives as Workers

Paul Du Chaillu became famous in the 1860s as the first European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas. Journeying through Gabon, staying in different villages, he also observed local gender relations:

“The women not only provide all the food, they are also the beasts of burden…

A man’s great ambition is to have a great many wives… It is, in fact, their duty to feed him... The man buys his wife of her father for a sum agreed on, often when she is but a child… Men marry at every opportunity... Obedience is the wife’s first duty, and it is enforced without mercy…

Such a whip as is figured below is an important instrument found in every house. It is made of the hide of the hippopotamus or manatee, and is a barbarous weapon, as hard and heavy as iron. This is laid on with no light hand, the worthy husband crying out, “ Rascal, do you think I paid my slaves for you for nothing ?” The wives are more harshly treated than the slaves-a stroke of the whip often leaves a life-long mark; and I saw very few women in all my travels who had not some such marks on their persons…

Our party from here consisted of twenty men, thirteen women, and two boys. I caused the women to be relieved of their loads, to their surprise, and that of their idle husbands, who could not understand why I should object to a woman doing all the drudgery”.

Raiding for Wives and Slaves

Young men also sought wives and their labour, but often struggled to afford the bridewealth. In this context, slave-raiding could be alluring. In what is now Guinea-Conakry, Layes Kunda recalled that Samori’s men returned with women captives and were asked,

“Where did you get these beautiful women? … The men said, “A new war has just started, if you go and capture some people, they are yours.” This is how Samori’s war became popular. They captured people then took them to Sierra Leone to exchange them for guns”.

19th century Sub-Saharan Africa was especially violent: girls were often taken as captives, later used as wives, concubines or gifts to maintain fraternal alliances. Beyond warfare, girls were also given as pawns or wives, expected to work as service labourers.

The Colonial-Patriarchal Alliance

Sub-Saharan African men accrued wealth in women - as slaves, pawns, or servile wives. They prospered through labour coercion. But this created a predicament for European authorities who had promised their publics they were on a ‘civilising mission’, yet that same project required partnering with African authorities who gained strength through labour coercion:

“The task of the emancipation of the individual,” wrote Governor General Brunet in 1920, “which our ideological concepts incline us to follow, risks profoundly troubling the native order and loosening a social system upon which our domination rests”.

African authorities were often so reliant on slavery that colonisers were nervous that bans would trigger revolt. The West African Frontier Force, comprising 12 British officers and 500 African rank and file, was originally mandated to stop the slave trade, yet with strict instructions not to enter any house or yard. But even this triggered unrest. Chiefs petitioned, voicing anger that women were being abducted and deserting their husbands. (It remains unclear whether women were leaving voluntarily or not). To quell backlash, police were prohibited from interfering with domestic slavery.

When officials feared unrest, they trod cautiously. In the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (a protectorate and Muslim-majority), the commissioner-in-chief warned his troops not to cause ‘trouble’ by interfering with people’s slaves. Likewise in French Soudan, when senior men expressed resistance, Brevie (1937) urged local administrators to ignore violations of individual liberties.

If colonial authorities were nervous to intervene against slavery, they were even more hesitant to challenge patriarchal rents.

Bridewealth or Slave-Trading?

European officers were deeply divided over whether to intervene in local patriarchy. Some saw bridewealth payments for young girls as akin to slave-trading (which they had pledged to curtail), while others stayed quiet for fear of upsetting rural authorities. One administrator in Koutiala (French Soudan/Mali) described it bluntly,

“Under the pretext of marriage, the exchanges of young girls or women are practiced. In reality, these exchanges are nothing less than disguised purchases and sales. In her new milieu, this child is, in reality, considered to be a captive... She is [often] exchanged a second time, either for another woman or for a horse, cattle, or some cowries… Under the pretext of bridewealth exchange, this is nothing less than a brutal sale”.

He argued that such marriages should be considered ‘acts of trade’ in people, which was prohibited in 1905. But Dakar refused. An official from the governor general’s office warned,

“Do not meddle in native custom except with the utmost circumspection. The act of agreement among two families to exchange two women is the guarantee of reciprocity. Marriage, in both Muslim practice and native custom, has all the characteristics of a sale. Do not, however, treat this as an infraction of the slave trade ordinance”. As a compromise, he suggested that young women ‘give their consent’.

In Bamako’s provincial courts, adultery cases comprised a third of all misdemeanours. One local commander emphasised that this was not about sexual passion, but rather women’s desperate escape:

“The young girl is married, or more exactly, exchanged against bridewealth, by her father or brother who has paternal power over her… Once arranged, the bride is never consulted regarding her antipathies, the disproportion of ages, or the incompatibility of character. One only examines the amount of the bridewealth.

The social condition of the married woman is thus very close to that of servitude: the most arduous work is given to her, she is often beaten. It is not necessary to search for passion in adultery; instead, it is simply the actions of a servant seeking a less onerous master”.

Patriarchal Parallels in French & British Africa

After the French colonised Gabon and Cameroon, they required, and even paid, chiefs to monitor girls’ age at marriage and the costs of bridewealth, hoping to encourage marriages based on the couple’s consent. But payments remained significant. As long as men profited from additional labour hands, they sought more wives and bridewealth from their daughters’ marriages.

• In 1924, a Catholic missionary in Edea reported that “Polygamists have many resources – all his wives work for him and so he can more easily buy young girls”.

• Chiefs in Southern Cameroon’s forests often had 10, 35, or even a thousand wives working on their cocoa farms. By cultivating more land, they could pay for yet more wives. To compete, men without resources might sell their own kin to raise cash.

• In 1929, an African woman in Dschang was murdered by her father after she deserted her husband and returned home, because her father did not want to repay the bridewealth.

• In 1935, a French administrator reported that a Balu man had inherited his dead brother’s widow and was “eager to sell her again to the highest bidder”.

• Four years later, French attorney Robert Blin condemned African fathers for “speculative profiteering, slavery and prostitution”, recommending that such practices be punished with imprisonment and heavy fines.

• Chiefs reportedly raided villages, stripped female captives naked, chained them at the neck and dragged them to construction zones.

• In Southern Cameroon, chiefs expanded practices known as mvia and mgba -providing temporary sexual access to their own wives.

• In Gabon, a Fang husband could give male guests and neighbours temporary sexual access to his wife in exchange for field labour or other compensation.

• In Gabon, fathers and uncles forced their daughters into marriage or remarriage in the quest for maximum bridewealth. They rejected French accusations that this was equivalent to the sale of women.

Yet French authorities moved carefully. A 1935 report acknowledged that “encouraging moral and religious evolution risks the grave perturbation of native leaders.”

While many rightly emphasise Africa’s cultural and geographical diversity, as well as differences between French and British rule, similar conflicts over women and bridewealth occurred in East and Southern Africa.

A Gusii patriarch (in what is now Kenya) could cultivate as much land as he had labourers, aka wives. As Sarah LeVine remarks, “the more wives he married, the more land he could bring under cultivation, the more daughters whose marriages would bring in cattle as bridewealth, the more sons to herd and defend the cattle and keep the homestead safe from outside attack. The ideal was proliferation - of wives, children, herds and crops”. Much of the food was farmed and processed by women, who were still derided as inferior minors. Women themselves often saw men as superior and more powerful.

Most fathers wanted to marry daughters to richer, often older men who could pay substantial bridewealth. When young women eloped with younger men, fathers and brothers lost prospective cattle, so some appealed to Native Courts (African-staffed, British-backed), which usually stipulated bridewealth for legitimate marriage, thereby affirming men’s labour rents.

But women fought back, leveraging newfound rights. In 1959, Nyaabe told the court that her kin had gone “to see cattle near Nyaramba in order to marry me off by force”, so she ran away to the accused. Her brothers had accepted eleven cows, but that union later collapsed over bridewealth disputes. When she returned home, her brother “tied me up with rope and beat me so much”. To legitimise their claims, women emphasised their own ‘agency’: “I went by my own choice” (kwa hiari yangu) or “by my own desire” (kwa upendo wangu). This speaks to a new moral lexicon.

In court, Kemunto expressly resented being “auctioned like a goat”.

Female Runaways

In 1914 Southern Rhodesia, chiefs and elders complained to colonial authorities, “You do not help us in the only thing that is vital to our tribe and our family”. Officials likewise recorded, “The great complaint we hear from natives is in regard to the women who get on trains and run away”. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, rural patriarchs were alarmed by women escaping to towns, jeopardising their control of bridewealth and young men’s labour obligations.

In early 1900s Abeokuta, some women fled to railway camps where they sought men on higher earnings. The Egba ruler requested the Railway Commissioners’ help in returning the women or restoring bridewealth.

In court, women presented their cases strategically so as to secure their own autonomy. As part of colonisers’ compromise with native authorities, slaves were legally entitled to self-redemption upon payment, but wives were not. In Abeokuta records, therefore, women perennially insisted they were former slaves (not wives).

“Kehinde bought me as a slave when I was a child, after some years he made me his wife. I have two children living for him out of ten, others died during child labour. Kehinde hardly liked me or cared for me; I have to serve as a labourer to earn a living and feed my children. I offer to pay redemption fee; I want to be free” - Amuda from Ijemo, 1916. The court granted her freedom without payment of the redemptive fee, but gave him custody.

“He said I was his father’s slave and fought with me, he threatened to sell me. I and my children want to leave” - Oyelabi, 1915.

Slaves or Wives?

On the Gold Coast, women increasingly petitioned the courts, claiming to have been former slaves now seeking their freedoms. Adjuah Filamponomah insisted that her husband had exploited her so severely that it had all the characteristics of slavery.

“He pawned one of my children! and with the money he married a young woman. I work in the gold mines and bring in gold and give it to him but he gives me none of it.. and whenever I go in search of gold and am unsuccessful, he scolded me.. He gives me no food... He does not consult me as his wife on family matters... I looked upon him as my master and as he is free I considered I was free too”.

Colonial authorities perennially struggled to ascertain whether a woman was a slave or a wife, since both cases involved a man making a payment and thereafter asserting dominance. This created a real challenge, because they had promised to respect native customs regarding wives.

Men leveraged this same legal loophole. In 1920s Sierra Leone, British officers raised concerns that African men were redeeming their slaves only to rename them as ‘wives’, who laboured under similar circumstances.

“Young girls would be redeemed in large numbers for the purpose of cohabitation, as being a cheap form of marriage by which dowry is avoided”, Captain Stanley.

“The word wife is deployed as a blind, there being no marriage, as native custom requires. If a case so clearly proved as this one elaborate cannot secure a conviction, it is a step towards legalising slavery under this form of alias,” Lieutenant Cowrie.

Urban Passes & Female Flight

To placate rural elders’ concerns about female runaways, the governments of both Southern and Northern Rhodesia came to insist that women could only enter towns with passes. Also in Basutoland, it was an offence for a woman to leave without her father or husband’s permission. As a chief native commissioner wrote in 1933,

“We are endeavoring to assist the kraal natives to control their women”.

But enforcement was weak. Escaping across the lengthy border, Basoto headed into the Rand, where they brewed beer and supplied domestic and sexual services to single men. So too on the Copperbelt, women kept manoeuvring. Some maintained economic independence through beer-brewing, trading or prostitution; others hid savings with friends and relatives, built networks of reciprocal support, or avoided binding marriages in favour of informal liaisons with easy exit. Even when repatriated to rural areas, women covertly returned to town.

Testifying to their quest for autonomy, a rural official in Southern Rhodesia declared in 1924 that “native women are asserting their rights under our law to quite an extraordinary extent”.

African Christians & Romantic Love

A more genuinely disruptive force came from young African Christian leaders and teachers, who preached a modern message of romantic love. These charismatic young men condemned older patriarchs as greedy and predatory, then positioned themselves as moral leaders.

Such discourses were immensely appealing to other young unmarried men, who struggled to afford bridewealth. African catechists condemned the chiefs for “wife hoarding” and “debasing their race”. Beti priest Leon Messi championed Christian love marriage as a romance between a free man and a free woman, based on individual desire and understanding. African Christians Joseph Zou and Hermann Mbono likewise built chapels, married rural couples, fought polygamy, preached consent and presented themselves as the moral vanguard of a new society founded on personal choice. In Gabon too, younger, mission-educated, literate men contested chiefs’ power.

Christian Domesticity & Mission Schools

Many historians have argued that colonial governments and Christian missions promoted monogamous domesticity. Girls were often trained in sewing, cooking, hygiene, and childcare, while boys were more likely to be prepared for skilled work. Girls’ aspirations were thus circumscribed. Campaigns against indigenous religions and political institutions also displaced those those women who had gained authority as spirit mediums, queen mothers and oracles.

But to assess whether Christianity really reinforced patriarchy, we must consider the entire ideological package and relevant counter-factual. In many regions, communities had legitimised child marriage, pawnship, slave-raiding, wife-sales, assimilative slavery, polygyny and domestic drudgery. African Christians ostensibly rejected all but the last. They pushed for radical ideas of romantic love.

Mission schools certainly reaffirmed marriage and motherhood, but they do not deserve blame for the gargantuan burden of domestic labour. That was sustained by persistently high fertility, poverty, and a dearth of social infrastructure. In the mid-20th century, very few African homes had private taps or electricity. That meant long walks to fetch firewood and water, scrubbing clothes by hand, cooking for 6 or 7 children. Bearing many children, many women were reluctant to leave abusive marriages. Instead, they tended to ‘shipikisha’ (endure).

A further issue is that even when communities formally endorsed marital monogamy, men still championed the husband’s authority over the wife, but now sought to obtain without paying bridewealth. Even if women only had one husband, many still complained of abuse, abandonment, neglect and infidelity.

In some ways, monogamy merely led to a more egalitarian distribution of wives, permitting more men to marry and benefit from women’s labour, while wealthier men still formed multiple relationships on the side. In Gabon, wealthier men would simply enjoy ‘une copine’ (girlfriend) whom they gave gifts.

Christianity thus weakened some older patriarchal institutions - like slavery, child marriage, polygyny and bridewealth - while preserving others.

Polygyny

As with other European interventions, missionaries often struggled to secure local support. Patriarchs were often so adamant to maintain polygyny that they refused to send their children to mission schools, for fear of a corrupting influence.

Bastian Becker finds that mission schooling spread less successfully in communities that favoured polygyny. Mission presence raised primary completion by 8.2 percentage points in non-polygynous areas, but only 3.9 percentage points in polygynous areas. Literacy rose by 11.0 percentage points versus 6.4. Polygynous African men valued this institution so highly that they sacrificed schooling rather than limiting themselves to just one wife.

In Belgian Africa, Manono put it bluntly,

“As long as the Government does not improve the situation of native farmers by providing them with agricultural machines, I do not think polygamy can be suppressed in the customary areas”.

Colonisers protected Gender Rents

African rural patriarchs lobbied hard to maintain control over women’s labour and children because these were central to their own wealth and power. While colonial authorities expressed strong reservations about slavery, polygamy, child marriage and bridewealth, they nevertheless authorised restrictions on female mobility, paternal custody, and punishments for adultery. In this patriarchal alliance, gender rents were preserved.

When we study how European colonialism impacted gender relations across diverse world regions, we must remember that they struggled to rule alone, but instead struck bargains with local patriarchs. They sometimes condemned or prohibited the most violent customs - slavery, pawnship, sati, forced marriage - especially when pushed by humanitarians back home. But they generally permitted men to maintain gender rents, so as to keep them on side.

The specific protections varied by place. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, men prospered through control of women’s labour and lobbied for these rents. In South Asia, men’s honour and business networks were more dependent on arranged marriages, chastity and purity, so sought to preserve these ‘kinship rents’. In both regions, colonisers allied with patriarchs, so that both could maximise extraction.

Colonisers neither imposed European patriarchy nor preserved timeless tradition. They forged alliances with male elites and supported the patriarchal claims those men valued most. In Sub-Saharan Africa, moral panic over female runaways exposed patriarchal priorities: labour rents.

Related Essays

• Patriarchal Rents

• Female Power for Whom?

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

In talk at Stanford, I synthesize cross-regional evidence to assess competing explanations, then offer a novel theory on the Global Islamic Revival.

To persuade you of this topic’s importance, let me share some new graphs on how Muslim-majority countries differ in terms of religiosity, beliefs towards gender and sexuality, as well as women’s economic outcomes.

Muslim-majority countries are exceptionally religious

Only 3% of Muslim-majority respondents say that religion is not very important.

Besides tracking beliefs over different waves, we can also compare by age.

Young Latin Americans are increasingly leaving their faith, becoming less likely to say that religion is very important, pray daily, and attend weekly church. By contrast, Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims show no such departure, they are just as religious as their parents.

Muslim-majority countries place far greater weight on the afterlife.

In the graph below, I distinguish between Muslim-majority and ex-communist Muslim-majority countries, since in the latter Islam was heavily repressed. Multiple generations were not free to practice their faith.

In my interviews, Muslims repeatedly tell me that this life is “temporary”:

• In Mumbai, Abdul told me that when a fellow market trader was economically distressed and brought his wife to work, he intervened saying, “this temporary life is just a drop in the ocean, endure whatever hardship”, keep the wife in seclusion so as to get to eternal paradise.

• In Luton, Hassan (a restaurant owner) translated the Quranic sura on the wall, adding “our time on earth is just like a bird perching on a branch, before making its journey”.

• In London, Zainab warned her nephew, “Don’t let your dunya be your akhira” (meaning don’t prioritise the temporary life over eternal paradise).

Believers may forgo material rewards in order to maximise utility over eternity. I call this “the paradise premium”.

Muslim-majority countries have closed gender gaps in education

Back in the 2000s, international development agencies championed female education, hoping that this would spur higher female employment. The good news is that Muslim-majority countries have belatedly closed the gap in schooling. However…

Female labour force participation is still 16 percentage points lower in Muslim-majority countries.

The exceptional high scorers include Sub-Saharan African countries like Mali and Niger (where women work in agriculture) as well as Qatar (which is mostly immigrant).

Muslim-majority countries tend to affirm male supremacy

Muslim-majority countries cluster in agreement that when jobs are scarce, men have more right to a job.

The Afterlife Penalty

To theorise how strong religiousity, belief in the afterlife and concern for gender segregation may suppress female employment, I’ve made a little visual.

Below, I show how the utility gained from women working alongside men varies by religiosity and concern for ‘free-mixing’.

• For secular people, even as there is a greater likelihood of mixing with unrelated men, women’s work generates the same utility. This blue line is flat.

• For religious believers, women working alongside unrelated men generates much much lower utility. The red line slopes downwards.

This visual is downward sloping because (1) some religions care more than others about interactions between unrelated men and women; and (2) even within the same religion, there is still significant variation (e.g. Indonesia versus Egypt).

Muslim-majority countries tend to prefer male leaders and condemn homosexuality

For those interested in cross-cultural variation, these differences are rather large, and worthy of further study.

British Muslims have different beliefs to their compatriots

British Muslims tend to be much more religious and strongly support the criminalisation of burning holy books. Unlike the general public, they do not strongly oppose gender segregation nor do they strongly oppose the legalisation.

What caused the Global Islamic Revival?

In my talk, I’ll discuss the competing explanations then offer a novel theory.

First, I argue that there was a crucial transformation in Muslim identity: from locally-based syncretism to state-attempted secular modernization to a reinvigoration of a transnational Muslim identity.

Second, I propose the Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop: modernization paradoxically amplified strengthened adherence to jurisprudential Islam and deference to credentialed religious authorities. As Muslims gained unprecedented access to jurisprudential knowledge, then piety and gender segregation became primary markers of status, with profound implications for women’s status.

Feedback is always welcome.

Related Essays

• The Paradise Premium: How the Afterlife affects Economics

• The Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop

I call these benefits patriarchal rents.

This departs from conventional conceptions of rents. In classical political economy, landowners accrue rents by virtue of ownership rather than labour. A broader literature of rent-seeking refers to actors manipulating rules in order to capture a larger share of the pie without making an equivalent contribution. In Marxist theory, surplus value is created by workers but expropriated by capitalists.

Patriarchal rents draw on all these intuitions, but are distinct. They refer to the benefits that men gain through institutional privilege, religious persuasion or violent coercion. Patriarchal rents come in several forms:

• Labour rents, where husbands and male kin extract women’s work, care, sex, and child-bearing beyond what women would provide if they prioritised their own happiness and exercised bodily autonomy within a durable partnership, and could credibly exit.

• Kinship rents, where arranged marriages and divorce stigma consolidate clan networks, enabling male insiders to access club goods, credit and advancement. This can be measured against what men’s business opportunities would be if their female kin refused to marry or got divorced.

• Exclusionary rents, where discrimination enables men to monopolise senior jobs. Here, the relevant counter-factual is what men would earn or command under meritocratic competition.

• Impunity rents, where male sexual harassment and rape go unpunished. Theses rents can be measured against a counter-factual in which perpetrators faced credible deterrence, and men can only secure sex with a woman’s willing (if not eager) consent.

There was significant regional variation in which rents were extracted and how they were allocated.

Labour, exclusionary and impunity rents existed across all patriarchal societies. The major points of variation were (1) whether the benefits generated inside marriage accrued primarily to the husband or strengthened an entire clan; and (2) whether women produced a large share of the surplus that was then controlled by men. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, men extracted significant labour rents from women’s work, fertility and exchange value. In South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, clans and jatis used endogamous marriage to consolidate trusted networks, enabling male insiders to access credit, club goods and business opportunities. In Northwestern Europe, labour rents were more privatised inside the nuclear family, alongside exclusionary rents in the professions and impunity rents for abuse.

To be clear, women also benefitted from male provision and protection, as well as broader networks of kinship. Throughout history, men have worked long days, pursued dangerous work, or even battled to protect their kin. These burdens are real, but men’s repeated efforts to preserve marital control, occupational exclusion and sexual impunity suggest that patriarchal systems also delivered highly valued net benefits to men.

None of these systems are set in stone. Job-creating economic growth has weakened kinship rents, while preserving exclusionary and impunity rents. Migration to prosperous economies similarly enables families to join more diverse networks, and lessening their insistence on kinship rents. Feminism has proved equally powerful, as women come to demand greater autonomy, reciprocity and accountability.

Let’s explore, by region.

Labour Rents in Sub-Saharan Africa

Labour rents can be extracted from women’s reproductive labour, domestic service, subsistence production, market production, and the direct trade in women’s bodies through slavery, pawnship, and coerced marriage. While all societies have engaged in this extraction, Sub-Saharan Africa stands out because women produced a large share of the surplus, which was then controlled by men.

Elizabeth Schmidt’s Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 provides extremely useful details about labour rents, female resistance and patriarchal backlash. As she details,

“although women and children played a crucial role in the overall economy, they were considered minors in society, possessed few goods, and received little more than the food they ate, which was substantially produced by their own labour”.

Men inherited land, but only prospered from it through the labour of their wives. One traveller observed in 1892 that “in the morning hundreds of women and children are to be seen making their way to the gardens - the women are the workers and the more women a man has the wealthier he is. He is able to cultivate more land”

Women planted, weeded, fetched water and firewood, brewed beer, cared for children, panned for gold, made pots, pounded grain, and prepared food. At marriage, her father also profited from bridewealth (lobola). But although women enabled labour and capital accumulation, this was controlled by men. Cattle were considered an exclusively male wealth and status, symbolising their prestige.

Women’s labour, fertility and exchange value circulated through male networks. When young Shona warriors went raiding, they hoped to return with cattle and women, whom their fathers might accumulate or redistribute to gain favours. Subordinate chiefs also paid tribute with cattle and women. In battle, male enemies were usually killed, while women were captured and kept as enslaved wives. They were premium labour rents: expanding a man’s labour and lineage, while lacking both recourse to natal kin, as well as their own independent resources.

Upon conquest, the British imposed Pax Britannica, which curtailed intra-African cattle raiding, yet women and children were still pawned. If a Shona man lacked cattle to pay a fine or tribute, he could offer a female dependent as a pawn. If he did not subsequently buy her redemption, then the new guardian could keep her as a wife, or marry her to someone else in exchange for cattle.

Ordinary marriage was also structured around female subordination. Girls were raised to obey husbands whose rights to their children were secured by payment of the lobola. Maria Tekwa Tirivanhu, born in 1910, recalled that “a woman was supposed to obey her husband’s instructions and rules”. Juliana Dzangare similarly explained, “I had to do what my husband wanted. My husband had paid lobola for me”. Wives then gained status through bearing more children, but this constrained their capacity to exit.

Violent punishments were used to enforce labour rents. In 1902, Elijah Marwodzi detailed that if a girl refused to marry an old man to whom she had been pledged she might be beaten and tortured. Her father might,

“take a very big branch of a tree, and split it into two and tie it on her head, and screw it, clamp it... knocking so that it increased the pain ... until the daughter says, “Leave me alone. Release me. I plead to go” .

After marriage, a husband might punish a wife who refused to cook or have sex by restoring his authority with beatings. Her natal family often urged her to endure abuse, since divorce threatened kin ties and required repayment of bride wealth (22). A Shona woman who failed to bear healthy children might be accused of witchcraft. Older women were also acutely vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. Thus, women who were post-menopausal, infertile or difficult were punished.

Pounding millet into flour, women might sing songs expressing frustrations and grievances, complaining of ill-treatment by mothers-in-law, co-wives and husbands.

Shona women seized new opportunities to resist unwanted relationships, as revealed by court records. In Goromonzi District, 345 cases were heard between 1899 and 1905; 95 involved young girls refusing to marry men to whom they had been pledged by guardians, while 65 involved married women running away, many from frequent beatings. In 1900, Tshenjeni testified,

“I don’t want to go back to my husband. He always ties me up. At the present time he has ropes ready to tie me up.. He is always beating me”.

Women repeatedly ran away to missions and mining towns in order to escape unwanted terms, including forced marriage, polygamy or because their husband spent too much time and money on beer, or refused to provide reciprocal labour. In 1931, Ariyenyanwi left her husband “because he would not plough lands for me.”

Churches, bent on a “civilising” mission, vehemently opposed child pledging, forced marriage and polygamy, so encouraged young girls to seek refuge and further their education. In 1924, one official wrote “Most native women are well aware that they cannot legally be forced into marriage against their will and refusals are far from uncommon.”.

This alarmed African men. Chiefs and elders repeatedly complained to the colonial government that women were fleeing to towns, mines and mission stations. Some called for pass controls to limit women’s escape, so as to enforce labour rents.

Colonial authorities were ambivalent. On the one hand, the colonial government outlawed child pledging, required women’s consent to marriage, and supported the principle of Christian monogamy. On the other hand, indirect rule required the cooperation of African men. One official warned that unless the government supported African men’s “rights over the wives,” the “whole existence of a nation” might be jeopardised. Another cautioned that“any legislation to improve the legal status of the woman” would “cut at the very root of Native institutions”.

The colonial state therefore helped protect patriarchal rents. After repeated complaints from chiefs, headmen and other African men about wives leaving husbands, the government imposed laws punishing female adultery, while permitting married African men to have sex with unmarried women. By the 1930s, native commissioners increasingly ruled in favour of husbands, pressuring women to remain married if they wanted custody of their children. In 1936, the Natives Registration Act stipulated that unmarried women could only enter towns with an authorised pass. Colonial officials wanted cheap labour and cheap rule. Supporting male control over women helped secure both.

The Shona case shows labour rents operating in several ways: fathers converted daughters into pawns or bride wealth; warriors captured women in raids, or gave them as tributes; while husbands benefited from women’s labour. Yet many women were clearly unsatisfied, and sought to escape. Eager to extract rents, Shona men repeatedly petitioned the colonial government to coerce female obedience.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, women’s work generated such high returns that they constituted the majority of slaves and commanded higher slave prices, which men then converted into military prowess and fraternal solidarity.

Today, African women continue to work at high rates. This should not be automatically read as ‘empowerment’. Where women work intensely while men control land and cattle, it may simply mean that women produce the surplus while men capture the rent.

Kinship Rents in South Asia

Glittering in diamonds, posing for the world’s media, celebrities posed at the MET Gala. Within India, this industry can be tremendously lucrative but nonetheless risky. Rough stones must be imported from Antwerp, then cut and polished domestically, sold to buyers in Mumbai or abroad, often passing through different hands, traded on credit, with few written contracts. Courts are slow, credit enforcement is weak, and there is a perennial risk of buyers disappearing.

Economist Kaivan Munshi shows how this industry is sustained by community trust. This industry operates through referrals, as one exporter vouches for another member of his community. The supplier then extends credit, enabling the recipient to get rough stones, and putting the referrer’s reputation on the line. If the recipient cheats, the entire community is imperilled.

This industry is built on jati endogamy. Over 96% of firms in his Mumbai diamond survey come from just three communities. When his team asked exporters to name close contacts, they disproportionately named members of their own group. Kathiawari exporters gave 74% of their referrals to Kathiawaris; Palanpuri exporters gave 79% to Palanpuris. Marwais are more mixed, as they tend to focus on polishing where community affiliation matters less. But the pattern is clear, trust extends within jati.

Munshi argues that Hindu subcaste endogamy creates dense webs of obligation, improving information flows and reducing commitment problems. In his sample, 35% of entrepreneurs and 57% of their children married within both their subcaste and the diamond industry. Among Kathiawaris, almost no early entrants who established firms before 1975 married within the industry, but by 2004, it was 50%. To consolidate business networks, they arranged marriages among their children. By 2004, 65% of Kathiawari children were marrying within the industry.

Endogamous marriage creates a social collateral which makes credit enforceable. A trader is someone’s son or brother, whose misconduct threatens their children’s marriage prospects, and can be pressured to pay on time.

But India’s diamond industry isn’t sustained by male handshakes alone. Daughters, sisters and wives supply community trust by safeguarding their modesty, staying close to the home, marrying chosen grooms, pleasing their in-laws, staying put and enduring any abuse. A brother’s reputation and future business opportunities are partly contingent on his sister’s purity and propriety. She provides the social collateral.

Divorce is widely condemned as it would undermine trusted networks. Since she cannot credibly threaten exit, her in-laws can extract ever greater labour rents (fresh rotis for every meal). Men’s preferences trump her time, comfort and welfare.

Even if he turns violent, she must stay put. A growing body of experimental evidence finds that even when the Indian police become more responsive and female-friendly, fielding more women’s help-desks, this does not increase women’s proclivity to approach the police.

The glittering diamond industry, like so many other commercial ventures in India, is partly predicated on policing female chastity, arranging marriages, and prohibiting exit.

Exclusionary Rents in Western Europe

Age 11, I started constructing my “family history”. Together with my mother, I tracked down genealogies, dug out old records, and traversed the country interviewing distant relatives. What I discovered, at that young and rather naive age, was striking: my male relatives were prominent and pioneering, celebrated with public accolades, while the women were noticeably inconspicuous, at least until very recently.

My grandfather excelled at the University of Cambridge, became a physicist, developed radar and guided missiles, travelling to Australia and San Francisco under top-secret military protection. He was certainly intelligent, but possibly benefitted from exclusionary rents. It wasn’t till 1948 that Cambridge permitted women to become full members and receive degrees. My grandmother obtained her degree elsewhere in Economics, but was repeatedly discriminated against, became a teacher, and accommodated his jet-setting career.

Across Western Europe, men consistently defended their exclusionary rents: in guilds, trade unions, universities, parliaments, civil service and suffrage. Men monopolised the pathways to power, prestige and the means of persuasion, dominating every single institution and reaffirming their righteous dominance. They monopolised credentials, then congratulated themselves on superior competence.

Men also enjoyed impunity rents. Anglo-American common law once recognised a husband as master of the house, entitled to chastise his wife as long as he did not cause permanent injury. Later authorities tended to treat marital violence as a private matter, looking away. Out on the streets, men could lecher and harass, yet get off scot-free.

Female suffrage and entry to male-dominated domains (like Cambridge) were vociferously resisted because they challenged men’s rents. Suffragettes didn’t just bruise men’s egos, they threatened unearned and non-consensual gains.

How Might Patriarchal Rents Decline?

Within this broader system of patriarchy, men’s ability to extract each rent rests on specific mechanisms, and declines with different structural shifts.

• Labour rents weaken when women can refuse unsatisfactory partnerships. This often involves a cultural shift, as women reject ideals of sacrifice and submission, instead seeking love and reciprocal care. Men’s sentiments are equally relevant. A man in love prioritises his partner’s welfare, listens to her preferences, and offers better terms. Far from extracting labour or sexual favours, he offers generously. In this context, men who do not up their game may remain single.

• Kinship rents may weaken when families do not heavily depend on clan networks for business ventures. This can occur by migrating to thriving economies with salaried jobs, pensions, insurance, social welfare, and impartial courts. Given these alternatives, threats of ostracism lose their bite.

• Exclusionary rents decline when male monopolies become morally and legally indefensible. Feminists must persuade wider society to reject old boys’ clubs and professional gatekeeping. When courts also provide credible deterrence, punishing sexist discrimination, employers are either persuaded or enlightened to select on merit.

• Impunity rents end with effective criminal justice, enforced by feminist lobbying and strong states.

So patriarchal rents do not decline all at once. Labour rents weaken when women avoid unsatisfactory partnerships; kinship rents lessen in meritocratic economies; while exclusionary and impunity rents only fold under feminist pressure and legal accountability.

Let’s explore this in action.

Economic Growth Can Displace Kinship Rents, But Not Exclusionary or Impunity Rents

Before the twentieth century, East and South Asia shared important patriarchal features: arranging marriages, doing business with kin and glorifying female submission. But East Asia had one major structural difference: families generally built outward, exogamous alliances.

As economic growth kicked off, young people flocked to cities, and built wider networks. Daughters now demonstrate filial piety by supporting their parents financially. As families can secure salaried jobs, pensions and bank loans, they become less reliant on favours secured via marriage. No longer beholden to close-knit kin and increasingly prioritising individual happiness, East Asians have tolerated rising divorces. As women seek more companionate, respectful relationships, poorer and rural men now struggle to match. They can no longer rely on family pressure to secure wives’ labour, fertility and deference.

However, growth has not abolished exclusionary rents. East Asia’s large firms remain dominated by men, and gender pay gaps loom large. Fraternal solidarity is consolidated through late night drinking, banqueting and karaoke. Socialising together, men bond, and favour their own. Men still benefit from managerial favouritism, fraternal guanxi and sexualised entertainment - with impunity.

Impunity rents can also be extracted, as the Chinese government represses feminist activism and the police turn a blind eye to domestic violence. South Korean men may install spy-cams in public loos, take upskirt photographs then circulate on message boards, all reveling in women’s humiliation.

Thus even if women individually deny labour rents, without strong feminist activism they struggle to challenge men’s exclusionary and impunity rents.

Kinship Rents are Substituted by Diverse Business Opportunities

When Hindu South Asians migrate overseas, many cease to depend on their narrow jati but instead form larger, more diverse networks. In the US, where Hindus are only 1% of the population, they meet classmates, colleagues and neighbours from different backgrounds. Ideals of jati pride and purity do not evaporate but they are less tied to business opportunities. As a Punjabi man in San Jose remarked, “my community is tiny here, everyone intermarries, it’s melting”.

The Carnegie Survey of Indian Americans points to broader networks. Among Indian Americans born in the US and now married, 29% have spouses of non-Indian origin. Of those born overseas, 15% have non-Indian spouses. A further 16% say they have no religious affiliation, identifying as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular. 44% of those born in the US say that they feel more American than Indian.

Only 25% of US-born Indian Americans say that all or most of their friends are of Indian origin. Only 21% of Indian Americans say that most of their Indian friends are from their same caste. The overwhelming majority express comfort with having Muslim friends.

As part of this broader mixing and mingling, 57% of Indian Americans say they celebrate US Independence Day, 54% celebrate Christmas and 39% enjoy Valentine’s Day. 88% of US Hindus support legal same-sex marriage - another marker of liberalism.

While we should be mindful of social desirability bias, these survey responses all point to more diverse mixing and mingling amid weaker caste policing. As communities step back, American Hindu women can incrementally push for greater personal freedoms, pursue more diverse friendships and aspire for careers.

None of this implies that kinship rents have withered. Caste matchmaking, family pressure and abuses certainly persist (especially for wives tethered to men’s visas), but the available data suggests casteist policing weakens in the diaspora. The jati no longer monopolises opportunity and thus ostracism loses force, paving the way for more female self-assertion and marriages based on mutual consent.

As Hindu fathers gain wider economic opportunities, many choose to loosen their grip over their children.

Feminism delegitimises Patriarchal Rents

Female altruism has long been celebrated as love, devotion, respectability and duty. “Good girls” were praised for quiet obedience. Shamed, disbelieved and threatened with reputational ruin, rape victims often remained silent - which in turn enabled male impunity.

Feminism challenged rents by attacking their moral foundations. Women should be free to choose, refuse, dissent and compete on merit, while men should be answerable for violence. This was the ultimate liberal power move. What had once been glorified as maternal altruism was now damned as exploitation.

Second-wave feminists questioned women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care work, filed law suits against discrimination, demanded reproductive freedom, and marched to take back the night. After Betty Friedan called domestic dissatisfaction “the problem which has no name”, women’s magazines brought these radical ideas to the mainstream, encouraging middle-class women to seek more egalitarian marriages, and to raise their daughters for careers. The private was now political.

This revolution has gone global. Across Latin America, feminists have broken the shame, stigma and silence around rape, with “Un violador en tu camino” becoming an international anthem. South Korea’s MeToo movement has been similarly disruptive, denouncing abuse. In China, young women increasingly reject marital sacrifice, preferring careers and economic independence.

By weakening the moral legitimacy of patriarchal rent-seeking, feminism encouraged women to expect and demand better. Men’s capacity to extract labour rents has thus radically declined, since women in many middle and high-income countries are now refusing to settle for less. Disadvantaged men are now more likely to be single.

But individual refusal to marry does not mitigate fraternal loyalty, cronyism and discrimination in firms, courts, or political parties. Nor does it force criminal justice systems to punish violent offenders. Challenging men’s exclusionary and impunity rents require both a concerted feminist revolution and exceptionally strong states to provide credible deterrence. All this requires continued mobilisation.

All this goes to the heart of The Great Gender Divergence.

Notes

‘Patriarchal rents’ has already been used in other contexts by Braunstein (2008), Braunstein (2014), Small (2023), Purkayastha (1999). This term is excellent and I encourage it to be explored more widely!

Related Essays

• Why is Indian Women’s Welfare Devalued?

• Glorifying Sacrifice

• Only 11% of Indian women who have been beaten by their husbands have sought help

• Why Do Hindu Women Work Abroad but Less so in India?

• Are Queen Mothers Over-Rated?

• How do Radical Ideas Go Mainstream?

• Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity

• “Flowers of Fire” by Hawon Jung (review)

• The Emergence of Chinese Feminist Consciousness

• Will Female Graduates Break Chinese Patriarchy?

• “Violent Intimacy” by Tiantian Zhen

But I must make 4 crucial rejoinders:

1. Sub-Saharan Africans valued ‘wealth in people’ - as repeatedly emphasised by anthropologists, political scientists and economic historians. Women were especially valued: comprising the majority of slaves within Africa, and commanding higher slave prices. Their labour, sexuality and fertility were valued commodities.

2. Patriarchs captured, controlled and expropriated these rents. Men could pawn nieces, accumulate polygnous co-wives, gift girls to chiefs or exchange captives for warhorses. Women’s work generated such high returns that men could convert it into military prowess and fraternal solidarity. These were ‘patriarchal rents’.

3. Even where royal legitimacy passed through mothers, this did not necessarily strengthen ordinary women’s status or freedoms.

4. Data is extremely scarce. For historians with few written records, historians rely on genetics, archeology, historical linguistics, oral traditions, and foreigners’ observations. These are useful, but do not justify sweeping projections about how women were perceived or treated in earlier centuries.

Loyal readers will recall my previous essays on the Sahelian-Sudanic belt, detailing how militarised fraternities secured power through outbound raiding, as well as how matrilineal societies could still be extremely patriarchal and coercive (like the Ashanti) or violent and aggressive (like the Bemba). Now let us turn to a society celebrated by Saidi for its prominent Queen Mothers.

The Great Lakes and Buganda

Lake Victoria’s fertile shores supported productive agriculture, especially intensive banana gardens, enabling high population density and political centralisation. In the 19th century Great Lakes, the East African coast sought ever more slaves and ivory. This raised the commercial returns to trade, warfare and slavery. From the 1850s, enslaved people became one of became Buganda’s primary commercial export. Under Kabaka Mwanga, this violence increasingly turned inward, exporting his own people, while older chiefs who had controlled land and followers were increasingly displaced by young male militias with guns.

Wealth in Women

Ganda kings consolidated their control over clans by incorporating additional wives and concubines. They were often acquired through diplomacy. Reverend John Roscoe, a missionary who lived in East Africa for 25 years, details that “it was customary for a person to present the king with one or two girls when asking for a favour… or make “the king a present of women in order to obtain forgiveness”. Girls thus functioned as a form of currency, consolidating economic and political ties between militarised fraternities.

Elite polygyny drastically expanded with warfare, as female captives were distributed among generals. As Musisi remarks, “the more wives a man had, the higher his status on the political and social ladder”.

Echoing the Mughal zenana, the king’s wives were kept behind a high reed fence enclosure (ebisakatte).

Devalued Labourers

Luganda language indicates a wife’s primary value: okufumba means “to cook,” okufumbira means “to cook for someone”, okufumbirwa is “to wed.”

In Buganda, women were economically vital, working on banana gardens,and ritually important in succession. Patriarchs expropriated that labour to consolidate their own dominance. Commoner women could not legally inherit gardens nor build patronage networks, explains Schoenbrun.

“Wives’ and children’s labor made property valuable under the control of a husband’s patrilineage”.

Men sought hard-working, submissive labourers, and looked for brides who demonstrated “obedience to her guardians and parents”. Roscoe adds, “Women were not free to move about without the consent of their husbands or masters”.

Male elders could gain power by acquiring more land, followers and wives, but non-royal women had no comparable routes to accumulation and authority.

Enslaved Girls

The Saint Joseph’s Foreign Missionary Society recorded the life histories of 55 ex-slave women who were preparing for Catholic Baptism. They provide useful insights into women’s lives in slavery in the late 19th century

Over a third describe being directly kidnapped, amid endemic warlording. After initial capture, women might be sold, like Mwanika at age 9 was traded for a gun. Alternatively, they might be gifted to chiefs or redistributed to followers. Tuck concludes,

“Ultimately women were the social glue that bound men to one another in patron-client relationships, and also which bound families, clans and lineages to one another…

Senior men were able to use gifts or loans of slave women to extend their patronage. As a result, power in Ganda society also came to be more masculinised, with even senior women operating within the same fashion”

“By the 1880s in Buganda, women’s status was commodified to such an extent that they were virtually a currency traded on par with guns and cows. In fact, it was the exchange of women that tied clans to one another and patrons to clients”.

Autonomy Denied

Saidi, and many others, celebrate Sub-Saharan Africa’s Queen Mothers. In Buganda, the Nnamasole could mobilise her clan and allies in support of her son’s rise to power, protect the Kabaka from hostile chiefs, hold her own court, and extract taxes from her own estates.

But even Queen Mothers faced patriarchal constraints. In 1941, Buganda’s Queen Mother (a widow) became pregnant and sought to marry Kigozi, a much younger commoner. The Buganda parliament, the Lukiiko, voted against, threatening forced dispossession of her official grants, palace and mailo land. Namaganda married anyway, and lost all entitlements.

Chiefs maintained that they were rightful guardians of custom, including the right to control the Queen Mother’s sexuality. Even if some women were ritually significant, men often sought to monopolise control.

The Ganda nevertheless score highly for “female power”!

In the Standard Cross Cultural Sample, a society with female political influence (like a Queen Mother) is deemed to have high female power. On this metric, the Ganda get the second highest score. Hmm…

The Ganda also get exceptionally high scores for homicides, male aggression, overall warfare and political complexity. They also practised institutional rape.

Patriarchal Rents

Stories of ‘female power’ in overlooked places can be tremendously exciting, but diving more deeply, we so often discover a grimmer reality.

Sub-Saharan Africans valued ‘wealth in people’, specifically wealth in women - who constituted the majority of slaves within Africa, and commanded higher slave prices.

In Buganda, women were absolutely vital - for cooking, banana cultivation, as well as to consolidate patronage networks. Women’s labour increased the agricultural surplus, expanded lineages, and above all strengthened fraternal solidarity. Women were then commodified as assets: their farm-work, cooking, sexuality and fertility generated returns that men could convert into surplus, followers, alliances and status. These were patriarchal rents.

Precisely because these rents were so high, girls were frequently grabbed, gifted, inherited, exchanged, or redistributed to cement alliances between men. This only amplified their vulnerability to predation.

These rents were overwhelmingly captured by men. Male elders, chiefs and warriors used women to consolidate alliances, followers, solidarity and status. Women had few comparable routes to accumulate land, followers, office, or lineage authority. Instead, their submission was praised so that patriarchs could extract a larger, morally legitimate surplus.

So whereas Engels located women’s subordination in the rise of private property, whereby men extracted the surplus, I’ve demonstrated that patriarchal extraction also occurred amid land-abundant societies via control over women’s bodies.

Saidi’s error therefore is confusing value with status, so as to construct a historic utopia. Whereas in fact, African societies that have achieved greater peace and security in the 21st century have actually achieved progress towards gender equality.

Notes

‘Patriarchal rents’ has already been used in other contexts by Braunstein (2008), Braunstein (2014), Small (2023), Purkayastha (1999). This term is excellent and I encourage it to be explored more widely!

Related Essays

• Female Power for Whom?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

• Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

• Against Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

Further Reading

• Klein and Robertson, Women & Slavery in Africa

• Medard and Doyle, Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa

• Musisi, Lady Irene Namaganda

• Reid, Human Booty in Buganda: Some observations on the seizure of people in war c.1700 –1890

• Roscoe, The Baganda : an account of their native customs and beliefs

• Saidi, A History of African Women from Origins to 800 CE: Bold Grandmas, Powerful Queens, Audacious Entrepreneurs

• Saidi, A History of African Women from 800 CE to 1900: Bold Grandmas, Powerful Queens, Audacious Entrepreneurs

• Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place. Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century

• Schoenbrun, “Gendered Histories between the Great Lakes: Varieties and Limits”

• Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900

• Tuck, Women’s Experiences of Enslavement & Slavery in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Uganda

This SCCS index - widely used by social scientists - is largely based on Peggy Sanday’s Female Power and Male Dominance. Collating ethnographic records for more than 150 societies, Sanday tracked flexible marriage mores (the permissibility of divorce, punishment of adultery), whether women produce goods for markets, demand for those goods, female political participation, and collective organising. On these measures, the Ashanti and many other pre-colonial African societies score highly for ‘female power’.

Large Language Models repeat these same narratives, since they are trained on the existing quantitative and qualitative corpus.

But there’s one hitch.

Trawling through the primary sources, I realise that even when societies are given the maximum score for ‘female power’, they may still be extremely violent and patriarchal, whereby girls may be pawned, enslaved, genitally cut or otherwise expected to submit.

It’s time for a corrective.

The Ashanti

Sanday details that Ashanti queen mothers helped select chiefs and exercised political influence, priestesses led rituals, women traded independently, and in matrilineal societies royal blood passed through women. Her account of the Ashanti draws heavily on Rattray, a colonial officer stationed in the Gold Coast in the 1920s.

Curiously, she omits his repeated descriptions of pervasive labour coercion. While female elites commanded authority, ordinary women were constrained by obligations of servitude, or even slavery.

Servitude

‘Voluntary servitude was the essential basis of the [Ashanti] social system. There existed no person without a master”, writes Rattray (1929). An Ashanti proverb elevates submission to elders, “wu nni wura, aboa kye wo” (If you have no master, a beast will catch you”.

An uncle stood in a position of authority over his niece and nephew, entitled to pawn them as collateral on a debt. If a woman was pawned to a man, the creditor could claim sexual access, or give her in marriage. Rattray records that a female pawn could become “the wife of one man while still the pawn of another”. As a pawn, she was obliged “to rise up when called upon and accompany the husband to his farm, to cook for him, and to perform the household duties”.

Economic historian Gareth Austin provides the broader political economy. 19th century Ashanti was characterised by land abundance and labour scarcity. Since free people could usually work on their own farms, regular wage labour was prohibitively expensive. Slavery and pawnship lowered the cost of labour, enabling commercial expansion. After colonisers suppressed slavery, elders told Rattray that gold mining was no longer profitable because it depended on slave labour.

In a society where land was abundant, people were used as collateral. The Ashanti used pawnship to supply both labour and capital. “No pawn, no loan”. These workers served an unrelated master, as part of their obligations to their own matrikin.

Men had far greater opportunities for self-enrichment. Austin notes that while male owners are routinely specified in the archives, female owners of slaves or holders of pawns are rare, though not non-existent. That’s certainly at odds with gender histories of the Atlantic coast that selectively emphasise exceptionally successful women.

Polygyny, Enslaved Wives and ‘Public Whores’

Pawns and slaves were also valued for reproduction. Since the Akan were matrilineal, a free wife’s children belonged to her abusua, limiting paternal control. But a man who married a slave could wield far greater authority - circumventing matriliny.

Wealthy men could also acquire multiple wives, pawns and slaves, while other men had none. In small south-western Akan communities, Akyeampong (1997) argues, polygyny by wealthy male elders risked conflict with unmarried young men. To prevent discontent, south-western Akan villages sometimes included sex slaves who were ritually installed by chiefs, obliged to service local bachelors, but denied any profits.

So the Ashanti get the maximum score for ‘female power’, but simultaneously had pawnship, enslaved wives, coercive kinship, and arranged child-marriage. Elite Queen Mothers appointed chiefs, while ordinary girls were raised to endure.

Africa’s internal Slave Market mostly absorbed Women

Within Africa, female slaves consistently commanded higher prices. Claude Meillassoux notes that African women performed the labour-intensive tasks of agriculture, food preparation, housework, carrying heavy loads, and producing crafts. Robertson and Klein further highlight sexual slavery and women’s capacity to expand lineages as concubines. Enslaved women were therefore valued, and forced to work.

Amhara

The Amhara also get the top score for female power. This is revealing because one of the major sources for the SCCS is Messing’s (1957) Highland-Plateau Amhara of Ethiopia. This same ethnography details an hierarchical Christian society, where spiritual authority, land, literacy were overwhelmingly male.

Elite women enjoyed several exemptions. Emperor Menelik’s wife, accompanied his northern campaign, leading her own troops into the Battle of Adua in 1896. When a noble woman approached a church, the priest would bow before her, even permitting her to stand just inside the door of the outermost enclosure. However, reinforcing patriarchal ideology, a noblewoman who takes on male roles was addressed as male. And these were prerogatives of wealth.

“The commoner or peasant woman is much more exposed to the inferior legal status of women”, writes Messing. “Woman and donkey (must be trained) with a stick” goes one proverb, reflecting men’s widely-assumed intellectual, moral and biological superiority. She could not swear the traditional oath, it had to be contracted by male kin. Women were not even allowed to enter Church buildings. In 1952, only 60,000 children attended modern elementary schools in Ethiopia, 90% were boys.

In some regions, female babies have their clitorises removed, so she will not become a ‘selfish’ wife, and reduce the egotistical part of her sensuality. A bride was given two protective ‘best men’, but these are the groom’s own kinsmen..

Girls are taught to sit ‘shyly and wordless’ when among men. Those who appear daring or enterprising are mocked as ‘gobba’. Meanwhile, an 18 year old man is called ‘kobale’ (powerful warrior).

A patrilocal family typically formed its own hamlet, farming communal land, as governed by a male council of elders. Shanqalla slaves were only freed in 1942, and were thereafter treated as racially inferior, experiencing little change in status.

Kikuyu

The Kikuyu are another top scorer for female power. Lambert’s (1956) Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions is a core source for the SCCS. Lambert was a military lieutenant, then district commissioner, linguist and anthropologist, fluent in Swahili and respected locally. He describes a society with patrilineal descent, patrilocal marriage, run by male age-sets.

Kikuyu boys were raised to be warriors - entering age sects for initiation, hunting and war. In these tight-knit groups, boys forged solidarity, discipline and leadership. After the guthiga ceremony, boys would start wearing warriors cloaks and perform the ceremonial rape. To prove their manhood, Lambert reports that warrior bands (sometimes comprising a hundred men) would scour the countryside to find a married woman of the enemy Kamba tribe. Hearing her screams, others would come to join the rape, or masturbate and ejaculate.

While Kikuyu women could meet as a group and thus get the SCCS’s top score, this was not a form of feminist solidarity. Lambert details that one of their tasks was to ‘bring pressure to bear on girls who do not conform to the standards of propriety’. Political power was organised by bands of male warriors, in a society scored highly for violence, aggression, warfare and kinship patriarchy.

Most small-scale societies have some elements of the ‘Female Power’ index

Roughly 57% of coded societies get the second highest score for female power. Most have some form of ‘female political participation’. But if we read the primary sources, we may realise that the bar has been set so low as to be uninformative.

The Igbo and Dahomey are given the highest scores for female power, while simultaneously being extremely violent slave-raiders.

From Powerful Elites to Protections from Predation

Peggy Sanday was a true pioneer, asking the big important questions about why some societies were more patriarchal than others. Building on her scholarship, I suggest one modification: if societies instilled obedience to elders, while permitting capture and coercion, it is difficult to see how ordinary women had ‘power’ over their own lives.

Why didn’t anyone make these objections before? It is surprising since I have only cited respected sources that are used to justify claims of ‘female power’. I suspect that some communities were eager to celebrate non-Western societies and didn’t look too closely.

Thinking ahead, LLMs can be tremendously useful in collating diverse materials, but only if humans, with in-depth understanding, know what to look for.

Let me close with a proposal: whether we are tracking gender relations in the past or present, we can only understand that entire society if we go beyond privileged elites and explore whether ordinary women can exercise pursue their own preferences, openly engage in ideological persuasion, contest authority, and are protected from male predation. Only then do they have power.

Related Essays

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

Further Reading

• Akyeampong and Obeng (1995) “Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History”

• Akyeampong (1997) “Sexuality and Prostitution among the Akan of the Gold Coast c. 1650-1950”

• Austin (2005) Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana

• Klein and Robertson (1997) Women & Slavery in Africa

• Lovejoy and Falola (2003) Pawnship, Slavery & Colonialism in Africa

• Messing (1957) The Highland-plateau Amhara of Ethiopia

• Rattray (1929) Ashanti law and constitution

In Eurasia and North Africa, Islamic armies burst out of tribal Arabia and conquered preexisting, often ancient, imperial structures built on extracting agricultural surpluses from fertile lands. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, the methods and ideology of Islamic governance could not overcome Sub-Saharan Africa’s obstacles to constructing enduring territorial states. Islam could not make African soils richer nor its terrain easier to control.

But Islam was nevertheless a force for state-building. The distinctively African-Islamic solution was to build states by selling salt, gold and slaves to the Middle East in exchange for warhorses (and other goods). Since these states were largely organised around man-hunting rather than steady control of territory, they did little to build law and order, public goods, or national cohesion.

The consequence was that people came to identify as Muslim while still maintaining older loyalties of lineage, ethnicity and region. Islam was added to Africa’s heterogeneity. Islam would build states, but brittle ones.

All this generated long-run disadvantages that continue to haunt post-colonial states. Inheriting this fragility, governments struggle to police vast semi-arid frontiers or suppress peripheral rebellions.

As Islamic preachers marshalled modern communications to excite religious fervor, older conflicts have been recast as righteous jihad. The wider wars of the Muslim world then added further fuel: scattering weapons and fighters, denouncing rulers as unIslamic. Excluded young men are recruited to wage violence in the name of righteous jihad.

The region now accounts for over 50% of global deaths from terrorism. At the time of writing, Mali’s capital is under attack by jihadis.

Islamic Trade Networks

The Sahelian-Sudanic belt had a distinctive ecological package that aided early state formation.

This zone largely escaped the tsetse fly, which transmits trypanosomiasis and causes sleeping sickness in cattle and horses. As Marcella Alsan shows, tsetse-suitable areas were less likely to sustain large domesticated animals, intensive cultivation, higher population density, or political centralisation.

The Sahelian-Sudanic belt also lay within Africa’s cereal zone. Millet and sorghum could be grown, hoarded and taxed - supporting political extraction. Yet cereal yields remained relatively low, so states leant more heavily on trans-Saharan and Red Sea commerce.

Rulers and war-bands increasingly exchanged human captives for Arab and Barbary warhorses (which survived longer without the TseTse fly). These imported mounts provided a major military advantage, enabling riders to encircle a village, set it ablaze, chase down runaways, tie captives to their horses, and carry off children crammed into small sacks. Beyond slave-raiding, horses enabled leaders to build up control across a far larger expanse, subjugating peripheral communities who were captured, assimilated or escaped to rugged terrain.

As rulers procured yet more warhorses and profited from Islamic trade networks across the Sahara and Red Sea, they built up larger empires. In 1324, the Malian king Mansa Musa led a gold-laden slave caravan to Mecca to perform the hajj. This exchange in gold, slaves, and warhorses also underpinned the 15th-century Songhay Empire. Early states thus drew strength from ecology and trade networks built on trading gold, salt, and also slaves.

Military Might without Public Goods

Slave-raiding enabled militarily superior groups to seize captives and scale up, but these were not cohesive, developmental states. Raiders plundered peripheral communities and gained military strength, while the continual scramble for slaves generated destructive competition, as states and militias warred over people, generating endemic insecurity.

Eurasian rulers likewise built war machines and glorified militarism, but their ultimate goal was to acquire more territory. Governments sought to amp up agricultural production, extract revenue and prevent internal rebellion. Ultimately, this generated greater bureaucratic state capacity.

Sub-Saharan African wars were different - seizing people. And as Dincecco, Fenske and Onorato demonstrate, historical warfare in Sub-Saharan Africa is associated with both higher fiscal capacity and higher civil conflict. Wars helped rulers extract revenue, but did not build broader peace.

Powerful states existed, but excelled in raiding, rather than building law and order, public goods, or national cohesion. Without a strong sense of the national community, people’s strongest loyalties remained local.

Islamisation and Fractured Ethnicities

Trading with Arabs across the Sahara, Sahelian-Sudanic rulers usually converted to Islam. Clerics offered literacy, spiritual potency, and a unifying identity of religious brotherhood.

But the region’s encounter with Islam was distinctive. In Eurasia, Muslim conquerors took over older agrarian states, with established institutions of administration and taxation. In the Sahelian-Sudanic semi-arid belt, by contrast, many communities were highly mobile (like the Tuareg traders and Fulani pastoralists), settlements were sparse, and rulers struggled to project power at scale. Thus even as people converted to Islam, many continued to see themselves as different ethnicities.

In the late 18th century, Fulani scholar ‘Uthmān dan Fodio preached reform, denouncing Hausa rulers as unjust and insufficiently Islamic. His movement not only attracted religious students but also ex-pastoralist freelance fighters, eager for loot and female captives. Victorious jihadis then established emirates and the Sokoto Caliphate became the largest 19th-century state in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sokoto consolidated territory, built walled towns, established slave agricultural plantations, textile manufacturing, as well as Sharia courts. Learned scholars debated who precisely could be enslaved. But administration remained highly personalised. There was no standing army, no police force, no local coinage, no imperial buildings, and little durable public infrastructure. The state was not an impersonal bureaucracy, but rooted in local administrators and lineages.

Nor did Sokoto ever resolve the problem of cohesion. When dan Fodio died in 1817, allegiances fractured so badly that a second jihad had to be fought to re-establish the right to rule.Beyond the reach of cavalry, large zones of woodland and uplands sheltered dissidents, runaways, and raiders.

Older distinctions remained so salient that early Sokoto rulers used them to demarcate Islamic legal categories of enslavability. Commander of the Faithful Muhammad Bello explicitly identified peoples and regions such as Gwari, Bauchi, Borghu, and Nupe, along with Maguzawa communities, as legitimate targets for enslavement.

Subsequent colonialism, post-colonial independence and international intervention in the wider region have reinforced earlier militarism, but struggled to police vast territories and build up impartial public administration.

Poverty, Low Schooling & High Fertility

A growing quantitative literature suggests that African regions historically under Islamic rule now tend to have lower human capital, higher fertility, and weaker economic development.

Areas once governed by Islamic states now experience higher infant mortality, fewer years of education, and lower density of nightlights. Bauer, Platas, and Weinstein find this result, even after controlling for geography. They argue that regions under Islamic rule were treated differently under European colonialism, receiving less missionary education and educational investment as well as more indirect rule.

I would add that like many other world regions, Muslim African societies often resisted rival religions, seeing these as threatening their own legitimacy and prestige.

At independence, Muslim Africans were concentrated in poor, rural interior regions. They also tended to be less educated. That initial disadvantage has persisted. Even after controlling for parental education and location, Muslim Africans also have markedly lower educational mobility. Alesina and colleagues show that of Nigerian parents with no schooling, 80% of Christian children but less than 50% of Muslim children will complete primary school. Muslim Africans are also less likely to move to more prosperous places.

This gap in educational mobility is much larger in regions where Muslims are a majority, surrounded by other Muslims. So this is not just a story of a poor start, something is preventing uplift.

Muslim Africans also tend to have more children, even than Christians of the same ethnicity, find Phoebe Ishak and Mark Gradstein. These differences are strongest Muslims are a majority.

Muslim African fertility is higher because such women are less educated, younger at age of marriage, younger at age of first birth, less likely to work, and less able to achieve their preferences. Muslim husbands tend to want more children, and impose their will. In Chad, women under 39 typically have 2 years of schooling, and only 5% of married women use modern contraceptives.

Patriarchal beliefs are not only widespread, but routinely legitimised by Islamic preachers. When Mali’s government amended the law such that wives were no longer obliged to obey their husbands, Islamic organisations mobilised tens of thousands of people to march in opposition, forcing the president to backtrack. 60% of Malian respondents now say girls and women should not decide for themselves whether and when to marry.

Muslim African polities were thus initially disadvantaged by lower schooling and under-development, and have struggled to catch up. As preachers repeatedly reinforce men’s righteous dominance, while condemning contraception, Muslim African women bear more children than they actually want. This results in an expanding youth bulge, but without corresponding gains in job creation, productivity or state capacity. More young men struggle to secure status.

Muslim & Christian Nigerians have different moral priorities

Islamic preachers may be reinforcing development disadvantage by championing early marriage and large families, while reiterating that our primary objective is to reach paradise.

In World Values Survey data, Muslim Nigerians put greater weight on obeying religious norms (rather than doing good to others), reaching paradise, and are usually more intolerant.

Muslim Nigerians also express far more patriarchal beliefs, consistently valuing female housewives, boys’ education, and men’s right to jobs.

Polygyny

Polygyny carries prestige across Muslim West Africa, and is strongly supported. It also appears to have major developmental outcomes, with women in polygynous countries marrying 5.1 years earlier and having 2.2 more children.

Polygynous unions can also be fraught with rivalry, conflict and competition. Analysing Africa’s Demographic Health and Surveys, Opoku Ahinkorah shows that polygyny is a major predictor of intimate partner violence.

Polygyny also steepens marriage inequality, tilting the marriage market towards older men with livestock, land and status. As richer, established men procure additional wives, bride prices rise. Using georeferenced data on more than 800 African ethnic homelands, Koos and Neupert-Wentz find that ethnic groups sharing more border with polygynous neighbours suffer substantially more intergroup conflict. Young childless men from polygynous groups are also more likely to feel unfairly treated and more likely to view violence as justified.

In Northern Nigeria, families may prefer to match with richer, often already-married older men, squeezing out young men. Higher marriage inequality then predicts more Boko Haram violence, and more abductions.

Commanding Right & Forbidding Wrong

Preachers have leveraged radio, cassettes, and now smartphones to stir religious fervour, urging believers to command right and forbid wrong. As Muslim publics grew more orthodox and pressed for sharia, politicians cloaked themselves in Islam. In northern Nigeria, 12 states have expanded sharia, promising Allah’s blessings, while hisba agencies patrolled markets and punished deviance.

Islam can be intensely consoling. In my interviews, Muslim men describe collective prayer as profoundly peaceful and affirming, taking heart that our sufferings are merely temporary, and that emulating the Prophet brings righteous purpose, as well as eternal paradise. Moral policing can also be thrilling - denouncing others as lax, presenting oneself as pious. All this can be tremendously reassuring.

With this Islamic revival, old grievances are recast as righteous jihad. In the 1960s and ‘70s, many struggles across the region were expressed as ethnic, regional or separatist. But especially after 9/11 and the Iraq war, frustrated men have used the language of holy war, denouncing leaders as corrupt and unIslamic, while justifying violence with calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

Rural peripheries have proved easy targets. In borderlands, where the state is weak, ethnicities press grievances, desertification creates conflicts over scarce pasture, terrorists find safe passage for smuggling, training and illicit economies.

Interviewed combatants from across the Sahelian-Sudanic belt have shared that they joined because they were economically frustrated and were persuaded by Islamic militias promising material gains, community belonging and rewards in the afterlife.

“I joined because I felt frustrated with the conditions of everyday life, the life that I lead. I was so poor and vulnerable, with a family to take care of. I thought that in the group I would have a better status as a scholar, I would be better off and in the worst case scenario I would die as a martyr.” Moustapha, 39 years old, Niger

“We were told we will get money and wives when we join the group. We were told we will go to heaven when we die in battle.” Goroma, 23 years old, Nigeria.

All this created a tinder box - ignited by the contingent, proximate trigger of the Libyan civil war. After Libya collapsed Tuareg fighters who had previously been employed by Muammar al-Gadaffi then returned to Mali with their weapons, seeking autonomy in the northern region and joining militant jihadis to launch an insurgency. Conflict further inflamed ethnic divisions and triggered a military coup. Mali’s military junta then pursued support from Russia. Terror attacks continued to escalate, and in April 2026 Islamists stormed the capital.

Why Did Sub-Saharan Africa’s Earliest States Became So Fragile?

The Sahelian-Sudanic belt is the site of Sub-Saharan Africa’s earliest political centralisation, now marred by low human capital and jihadist insurgency.

My suggestion is not that Islam made states weak. Rather, Islam entered a region where population sparsity, mobility, and low agricultural surpluses made territorial administration difficult. Given these constraints, Sahelian-Sudanic rulers built power joining a wider commercial network, trading slaves, salt, gold and warhorses across the Sahara. And although people converted to Islam, this did not erase older loyalties of lineage, ethnicity, and region. They remained deeply divided.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, governments have struggled to raise human capital, build state legitimacy, overcome ethnic polarisation, control vast semi-arid frontiers, or suppress peripheral rebellions.

Islamic revival may be further entrenching this disadvantage by encouraging believers to prioritise paradise, early marriage, and large families. With the transnational Islamic revival, jihadists enlist new recruits with offers of quick wins and eternal rewards. Excluded young men wage violence in the name of righteous jihad.

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Excellent New Books on African History!

I greatly enjoyed Sharman’s (2026) Ties That Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa and Reid’s (2025) The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century. Reid superbly focuses on Africans’ agency, their prerogatives and ambitions. Sharman prevents a very compelling account of why endemic slave-raiding proved so devastating and destructive.

Postscript: what about Ethiopia?

Ethiopia also saw early state-development, as its highlands supported denser agrarian settlement, grain-cultivation, and territorial statehood. However, the state was still highly fragmented: soldiers were not paid but survived through plunder, so undertook opportunistic raids. Neighbouring polities paid tribute in ivory and slaves.

Ethiopia now has far higher population density and crop yields than Sahelian states, while it has reduced fertility much faster. Yet income per head remains low. So Ethopia does not refute my argument about the specific trajectory of the agro-pastoral Sahelian-Sudanic Muslim belt.

A tremendous new paper by Xiaoxia Huang, a PhD candidate at Syracuse University, shows this operating within the Chinese civil service.

Xiaoxia Huang uses administrative data from the Chinese National Civil Service Examination, covering 238,086 job ads, application records for 100,931 postings, and 742,563 shortlisted candidates.

From 2005 to 2015, the share of job adverts explicitly preferring male candidates grew from 0.05% to 15%, with virtually no postings preferring women. From 2016 to 2024, adverts increasingly preferred male candidates, reaching a high of 30%. There were also some adverts for women, but these were usually paired “split-gender” postings, for otherwise identical jobs.

What led to this shift?

In 2009, women outpaced men in college degrees, and often applied to the public sector. But rather than welcome new talent, many hiring units appear to have reaffirmed male bias.

Huang finds that as women’s share of shortlisted candidates rose, hiring units subsequently issued more adverts for men. Importantly, this pattern does not appear in the pooled cross-sectional comparison. It only emerges once Huang compares each hiring unit to itself over time, using hiring-unit and year fixed effects.

This effect was especially pronounced in lower-level bureaucracies, where about a quarter of county and city level adverts expressly preferred men.

A rise in male-preferred job adverts is associated with 40-45% smaller candidate pools, and with 4-5% lower exam cut-offs.

Xiaoxia Huang thus offers striking evidence of how the Chinese civil service has consolidated male advantage by blocking female competition.

Building Networks in China - Baijiu, Karaoke, and Sexy Ladies

Another important mechanism, explored in my earlier essay, is that Chinese companies explicitly seek men for outward-facing sales jobs, where they are expected to feast with clients so as to forge camaraderie and reciprocity (‘guanxi’).

Private and public sector fraternities are then mutually reinforcing. By drinking baijiu, banqueting and singing karaoke, men affirm networks of loyalty and reciprocity.

Chinese Social Media Feminism

Can women fight back? In my own interviews, Chinese women have shared how users increasingly decry sexism and validate righteous resistance on Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book”). In the post below, one poster says “A woman + 985 = male”.

985 means a prestigious university.

So an exceptionally clever and qualified female is equal to a mediocre male.

Another user invites women to share their experiences of employment discrimination. One replies that she went to a recruitment fair where they openly told women, “don’t bother applying” (i.e. we want men).

Meritocracy requires Countervailing Power & Persuasion

While social media enables women to highlight unfairness and legitimise feminist consciousness, these conversations tend to remain trapped in their own echo chambers, while men vent on Baidu Tieba. Resistance is further constrained by authoritarianism, and the CCP’s tendency to preserve social harmony by repressing dissent. Seldom seeing successful resistance, many women remain despondent. Absent independent organisations, women have little option but to navigate around bigotry.

Western feminists operated in far more permissive environments. The 1960s-70s counter-cultural movement and civil rights, condemned structural discrimination and condemned bias as categorically unfair. Harnessing this moral crusade, feminists persuaded their peers to regard sexism as similarly unjust. Liberal democracy proved equally crucial: turning to investigative newspapers and independent courts, women secured legal victories, won public support and created powerful deterrents. Because mass media had relatively high barriers to entry, these ideas became part of the wider cultural tide. By persuading the state to uphold merit and punish discrimination, female education thus became politically consequential.

But herein lies the Great Gender Divergence… In much of the world education does not break patriarchal gatekeeping, because men either discourage women from leaving the house or by closing ranks at the top.

(Xiaoxia Huang presented her paper at The Empirical Gender Network Conference, organised by Sole Prillaman, hosted at Stanford’s King Center on Global Development).

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But here lies an under-rated asymmetry. While an Uzbek factory can quickly install foreign machinery, it’s far harder to assemble rules-based governance. The UK’s Metropolitan Police only became impartial after decades of parliamentary wrangling, press scrutiny and civic activism, which slowly reshaped expectations. This was an uphill slog, lambasting corruption, forcing officials to treat everyone alike.

That asymmetry helps explain why cities can outrun the state, creating large ‘shadow economies’. This can include criminality. If formal job creation is weak and policing is ineffective, expanding cities can swell with people stuck in saturated informal economies, crowded in poorly serviced favelas, routinely exposed to violent predation. Criminal gangs profit from growth - running illicit markets, fighting for valuable turf, bribing politicians to look away. Under these conditions, the road to prosperity can widen the scope for violent predation.

Samuel Huntington made a related point in Political Order in Changing Societies. He was writing about political contestation rather than ordinary criminal violence, but emphasised the same problem of sequencing. When rapid economic and demographic change outrun governing institutions, this drives disorder. Building on his insight, I suggest that in weak states, rapid urbanisation often culminates in criminality.

Village Surveillance

“What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, caste and communalism”, asked Dr. Ambedkar.He rightly emphasised that villages can be oppressive, but this intense surveillance also tends to enforce order..

In the village, everyone knows your name, your business, and your mother. Whatever happens, others will soon discover. A young woman from Haryana shared that within three minutes of leaving her house, her parents would receive this news by observant neighbours. Impoverished villages also tend to be highly dependent on each other for support and loans in a crisis. This mutual dependence may be reinforced by collective rituals, like weekly worship and celebratory festivals, which all reinforce community cohesion. Combined, this mutual dependence, social policing and fears of ostracism can encourage pro-social behaviour.

East Asia Escaped the Trap

Early 20th century China was quite lawless. In 1923, bandits hijacked a train in Shandong, abducting over 300 passengers. East Asia escaped this trap by combining job-creating economic growth and repressive, muscular states. Cheap educated workers found employment in factories and offices, while states iteratively enforced the rules. A woman from Shanghai shared with me that her grandparents often worried about kidnappers, but this is no longer the case thanks to strong security.

Migration in Weak States

When states are weak and wage jobs are scarce, urbanisation can magnify disorder.

Rio de Janeiro’s slum-dwelling population rose from 7% in 1950 to 22% in 2010. In 2000, 26% of Rio de Janeiro’s residents were migrants. They usually built self-help housing in unserviced favelas, where land tenure was insecure, neighbours were strangers, and everything was unpredictable. Only 7% of Brazilians say most people can be trusted.

During my stay in São Paulo, my hosts warned me not to take my phone as we walked two blocks to the supermarket. Thieves cruise on motorbikes, snatching phones in the hope of accessing online banking. Just last year, a guy was shot on that same street - for his phone. As I realised while being punched in the face: if other people’s welfare is devalued, their bodies are just obstacles, inconveniently attached to something of value.

Latin American cities struggle with high crime. Soares and Naritomi argue that this reflects especially high inequality, combined with fewer police, fewer judges and modest incarceration. When a large bulk of the population struggles to find formal employment, while others have substantial wealth, this obviously creates incentives for criminality. Meanwhile, weak and corrupt state institutions fail to provide effective deterrence.

Ed Glaeser adds another layer with his idea of “poor urbanisation”. Developing countries have urbanised at lower levels of wealth, depriving municipalities of tax revenue to provide basic services and public order. This is surely correct. But low income is only part of the problem. Rising incomes do not automatically diminish corruption, bribery or gang warfare. In weak states, growth can coexist with criminality. Elites can enrich their cronies, intimidate opponents, expand illicit markets, and buy impunity. The deeper problem is not just premature urbanisation, but insufficient job-creation in the formal economy and weak states.

Oil booms in Brazil actually amplified violence, amid weak policing. During the 2000s, GDP growth was nearly 100% higher in southeastern Brazil’s oil-producing municipalities. These regions also saw major increases in inequality and violence.

The struggles of informality, the lure of illicit gains, and the cloak of impunity, can all encourage young men to take dangerous risks.

The Machismo Trap

In areas where states are weak, toughness becomes defensively necessary, habitual and even glorified. Young men may project dominance to gain respect, deter attacks and avoid humiliation. Brazilian funk and Mexican reggaeton sometimes glorify retaliation, dominance and revenge. DJ Helinho’s “Kit Salve Da Quebrada” threatens to break arms, bind bodies, and shave heads. In communities where bravado is respected, studious boys may be mocked and maligned. Entire communities may come to prioritise brawn over books.

Biology comes into play. Boys’ and young men’s bodies surge with testosterone, amping up energy, aggression and competitive zeal. If channelled into sport and purposeful work, testosterone can unlock competitive advantage, but without such guardrails, young men may be more enticed by illicit gains. I call this the “Machismo Trap”.

Venancio (now 60) comes from Ceará (northeast Brazil) - where state presence is minimal and Catholic saints’ festivals incorporate indigenous rain rituals. Boys may be taught fearlessness by mounting an ox, while men typically carry knives. Unrestrained, Venancio’s father used to beat the entire family - one time whipping the cattle ropes against his son’s back.

A gay black man from a favela in Sao Paulo narrated his experience of violence - from his father’s beatings to school fights.

“I had be strong to show I was stronger. I wasn’t violent, but I had to be violent. If you do something that affects someone’s masculinity, they’ll start a fight and that will become a murder. Everything goes around masculinity: the man needs to show their strength, their power, they’re reckless, otherwise they’ll treat him as weaker. That’s how things works, you need to learn how to use violence… Everything is about honour”.

A young man from Rio’s City of God [favela] shared that he was previously part of a pick-pocketing child-gang. At age 8, a drug trafficker stubbed a cigarette out on his face. The following year, his neighbour was publicly tortured. Since gang leaders ruled the roost, some youths belted out rap music celebrating dominance. Chatting over lunch, another favela-dweller told me that girls often sought thuggish partners for protecters. Many of his childhood friends are now dead. When I confessed that I had never seen or heard of violence in my home town, they were shocked by this cultural difference. “Not even school fights?”.

Where states fail to protect, citizens turn to extralegal violence, like militias and vigilante lynching.

This can breed an escalating cycle - not just between criminal gangs but also with the police. Latin American security forces tend to respond aggressively. In Rio, new recruits are purposefully inducted with brutal training to “toughen them up”, “like pit bulls, crazy to bite people”. Meanwhile, weak oversight sustains impunity. Likewise in South Africa, the police force still use suffocation.

When States Make Violence Risky

When states make punishment more certain and public order more credible, violence often falls. Look at Sweden. After a surge in gang shootings, voters shifted right, the government increased spending on policing, lowered the age of criminal responsibility, and gave police wider search powers and expanded surveillance. As the risk of punishment rose, deadly gun violence declined.

San Francisco has seen a similar shift. As voters backed Proposition E, police gained broader powers over vehicle pursuits and surveillance technology (e.g. drones), with fewer reporting requirements. Crime fell.

The reverse is also true. In Britain, austerity weakened both prevention and deterrence. Between 2010-2019, budget cuts led to widespread closures of both youth centers and police stations, creating two distinct natural experiments. Youth centre closures triggered a surge in teenage crime, while shutting London’s police stations led to spikes in violent crime. Together, these studies nicely demonstrate how youth clubs help channel young energy productively, while effective policing provides a powerful deterrent. When the state retreats, the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods suffer.

When Cities Outrun the State

Economic growth can raise incomes, but only a capable state can enforce urban security. When cities outrun formal job creation and rules-based governance, they get nasty.

Migrants head to cities in search of opportunity, but if they struggle to find waged work and punishment is uncertain, they may be tempted by illicit gains. Criminal gangs prosper from illicit markets, gun down opponents, extract protection rents, and bribe politicians to look away.

Under these conditions, powerful syndicates permeate state institutions - bribing judges, politicians, and law enforcement officials, who then selectively target certain criminal groups while protecting others. In Latin America, Feldmann and Luna suggest that criminal networks enter society’s ‘bloodstream’.

The challenge, especially in societies undergoing rapid demographic change, is to build responsive policing and credible deterrence before criminal governance takes hold and young men come to revere aggression.

Otherwise, the gains from growth are lost to extortion, gunfire and intimidation. Young men are killed in gang wars, girls are assaulted, and entire communities come to prize toughness over trust and cooperation.

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Female labour force participation provides a reliable proxy for whether the society permits women to move in the public sphere, but this is not sufficient for gender equality. In low-income Africa, women may move independently, but her life is still marked by relentlessly drudgery and insecurity. Too often, poor women wake before dawn and labour long after dusk, only to be stuck in the same place.

Domestic Drudgery

Across many Sub-Saharan African countries, access to safe water and electricity have radically improved. Ghana has been a clear leader, alongside wider economic growth.

But absolute levels remain low, especially in rural hinterlands where households live far from pipes, grids, and tarmac roads. Only 22% of people in the DRC have access to electricity.

While Sub-Saharan African women work at high rates, many are also spending long stretches fetching water and firewood, and such labour is often shared with children. In Rwanda, 35% of surveyed households report that collecting water is a 30 minute round trip. And that’s just one journey. Imagine several buckets, every day, before cooking, washing, or bathing can even begin.

In Niger, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia, less than 10% of households have fridges. This is partly a function of household poverty but also state capacity, and a reliable electricity grid.

Dinkelman and Ngai have a nice paper, tracking African women’s time use. They find that South African and Ghanaian housewives often spend as much time as American housewives did in the 1920s, but under much harsher conditions, with fewer labour-saving appliances, and much more time spent on cooking, cleaning and laundry. In Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana, women spend 32-48 hours a week in home production, then only 25 hours a week in marketised work.

In richer economies, many activities once performed within the household have long since been marketised. At the supermarket, we buy food that has already been grown, milled, processed, packaged, and transported by specialists (whether that’s breakfast cereal, bagels or sausages). Shopping online, we can treat ourselves to new clothes, then wash and dry with machines. And if those (divine) appliances break, we hire someone to fix them. As housework shrinks, mothers and fathers can spend much more playing and caring for their kids, enjoying shared leisure.

But when I lived in rural Africa, it was radically different. In Zambia, I can honestly say that I rarely saw parents ‘playing’ with their children. There was simply too much work - whether that’s hauling buckets back from the pump, scrubbing clothes, making fire, getting vegetables from the market (since we didn’t have a fridge).

What if you wanted to make dinner? Raw cassava can be poisonous because it contains cyanogenic glycosides that release cyanide. In rural Luapula, it was often dried in the open, pounded into flour, then cooked over fire as a thick porridge (nshima). In Northern Province, we would head to the bush, forage for a very specific tree with edible roots (ubusala), then boil it for three hours, yet the nutritional value was meagre. High inputs, low returns. In The Gambia, we would sit with a large calabash (dried gourd) and sort through the rice for grit.

Poor Sanitation

72% of households in Niger report that they have no toilet or latrine. This means they do not even have an open pit or bucket. Instead, they are going to the bush.

Open defecation is not only risky in terms of safety, but also contaminates the local area, sometimes resulting in outbreaks of cholera.

When kids get sick, mothers usually step in to provide much-needed care.

Half of Sub-Saharan Africans work in farming

In African countries where more women work, a large share of that work is still farming. Yet African agricultural productivity is extraordinarily low. In Zambia, the agricultural value added per worker is just $244, compared to the US’s $85,000.

But without any money, how can you leave an abusive relationship? You are trapped.

Working in agriculture does not necessarily improve women’s status

In Luapula, men are widely perceived and revered as providers. As Sarah (30-year-olds, rural homemaker and mother of four) explained:

It’s men who provide for us, who buy us everything. Husbands help parents [financially] but we women don’t do it much. We don’t really concentrate on school. … We get pregnant. You’re finished now, it’s over. … A boy will make her pregnant and he will return to school; whereas the girls’ parents will refuse to educate her again. They’ll say “You will get pregnant again,” thinking it’s a waste of money.

Her mother, Mary (55), likewise maintained:

Rural girls - paying for their education is a waste of money. They’re just interested in men.

In villages, where most women bear many children and work on farms, and virtually no one has social media or televisions showing alternatives, then marriage and motherhood are often taken for granted as aspirational goals. Whereas rural girls, without social media or exposure to alternatives, didn’t necessarily see the value in education or envy such advances. As Nsenga remarked,

“In the village they just give birth and it’s all over. It’s because of early marriage. There’s nothing else they see and aspire to.

And while global elites may host glitzy conferences about ‘valuing women’s work’, I will report that this hasn’t punctuated rural Zambia. Cooking, cleaning, sweeping, fetching water and firewood, as well as weeding and planting (for subsistence agriculture) are commonly referred to as ukwikala (just sitting).

Wage labour with a contract is extremely rare in Sub-Saharan Africa

Most African women who do escape agriculture ultimately become self-employed, e.g. selling donuts or hawking dried fish in the market. Over 80% of SSA women workers are in what the International Labour Organization calls ‘vulnerable employment’ - either working on their own account or contributing to a family enterprise.

African cities have boomed in population size, but manufacturing jobs remain scarce. Instead, ever more young people crowd into saturated, low-productivity informal services - buying and reselling goods from Tanzania or South Africa - where profits continue to dwindle. All these challenges are compounded by demographic growth.

On meagre earnings, women are often extremely reluctant to leave abusive relationships. I saw this starkly in Kitwe, where I lived in a shanty compound with the elected local councillor. One day, a woman came to our house with a terribly swollen eye, pleading for help. USAID had funded a one-stop shelter for survivors, but she had no wage, no savings, and children to feed. Desperate, she returned home.

Another time, driving down a dirt track beside the fields, we passed a sixteen-year-old girl who was covered in bruises, gashes, and hay. She’d been badly beaten by her ill-tempered husband, but she was illiterate; where could she go?

When I visited a school, a 17 year old girl approached me saying that she was being raped by her uncle (also her foster-parent). Again: where could she go?

Scarcity and Harassment

Where waged work is scarce, employers gain the upper hand. Workers may be reluctant to leave or even voice grievances.

When Precious Zandonda surveyed 160 female staff at Barclays Bank and the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services in Ndola, most reported that their male colleagues made discriminatory remarks, slighted and ignored them, or habitually shade ‘suggestive stories or offensive sexual remarks, either publicly or privately’. 9% reported men ‘implied faster promotions, reward or special treatment” if they were sexually cooperative. One shared,

“I work in an office surrounded by male colleagues. Every other day I receive comments about my breasts, my thighs when am wearing a skirt and general talk about bedroom issues”.

For me, the most striking part about this dissertation is that the workplaces are named and published. Perhaps no one anticipated accountability.

Poverty is a major barrier to gender equality

In high-income countries, employment can be a source of great fulfilment, friendships and independence. Seated comfortably at her desk, surrounded by photos of her loved ones, she typically engages in cognitively engaging work, allowing for creativity, skills and pride. Colleagues and bosses generally play by institutional rules, knowing she has outside options, and that if things turn ugly she could complain to HR, consult a union, or pursue litigation. Returning home, yes, there are chores, but much of the pain has been marketised: step into the shower, fetch supper out of the fridge, chuck dishes in the machine. Easy mode.

In low-income countries, it’s the opposite. Productivity is extremely low, so earnings are threadbare. Much of the population is stuck on family farms, or scratches out tiny returns through petty trade, seldom sufficient to accumulate savings. She may also bear heavy (and physically painful) domestic burdens because the state is incapable of providing infrastructure and her family is too poor to afford market substitutes. Poor women thus wake before dawn and labour long after dusk, only to be stuck in the same place.

Only a privileged few have secured formal jobs, and may endure humiliation and harassment rather than risk dismissal. On the Zambian Copperbelt, you’ll hear a common refrain, especially among women: “ukushipikisha”. It means to endure.

Related Essays

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Note: all figures use the latest available Demographic and Health Surveys, most are from 2015 or later. A few countries have older data like Chad (2014) or Namibia (2013). All scatters exclude countries which only have older data.

In many SSA countries, “improved water” is not necessarily piped water, it can be boreholes and protected wells. People still have to walk and collect. Some jumps in this measure can reflect DHS methodology changes in water classification.

That, I think, helps explain a central challenge in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Before European imperialism, much of the region was politically fragmented, comprising numerous competing polities, with weak authority over their hinterlands. Europeans then redrew borders and scaled up political units very rapidly, bringing together ethnically diverse populations that had little prior experience of shared rule or common institutions. Nairobi, for example, was only founded in 1899 as a railway depot, yet within decades it became the administrative centre of a vast colonial territory. Post-independence leaders thus inherited diverse populations without the slow historical accumulation of national institutions to govern at scale.

From 1960 to 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa’s population rose from roughly 230 million to about 1.3 billion. Western technologies and externally-financed health interventions saved millions of lives. This includes vaccination campaigns, malaria control, insecticide-treated bed-nets, indoor residual spraying, antiretrovirals and humanitarian relief. Without these interventions, especially against HIV, malaria, measles, tetanus and diarrhoea, mortality would have remained far higher.

But there was a catch. Mortality fell faster than incomes, taxes, schools and courts scaled up. Municipalities across Sub-Saharan Africa often lacked the resources to police expanding populations, process court cases, or prevent environmental hazards - like lead pollution. Schools are built, yet teachers and health care workers are often absent. This creates severe learning crises: 94% of Sub-Saharan African youth are not reaching basic skills in maths and science, while even among those enrolled in secondary school, 89% still fall below that threshold. With poor services and checkered accountability, 53% of Nigerians do not trust the police. One in five Africans remain under-nourished. What should have been a triumph of human survival has become a story of institutional overstretch.

Ed Glaeser makes a related argument about ‘poor urbanisation’: cities in low- and middle-income countries are expanding at relatively low levels of wealth, leaving municipalities unable to finance core services or uphold public order. He suggests that cheap food imports can enable urban growth without productivity improvements in domestic agriculture. Let me suggest a complementary mechanism: mortality fell rapidly through imported health technologies and donor-backed public-health interventions, while fertility remained high. Populations surged, while already weak states were increasingly overstretched.

Demographic Overstretch in Zambia

Back when I lived in rural Luapula (Zambia), people would say ‘balitulekelesha’ - they have abandoned us. The village has grown, but it’s still two hours walk from the nearest health clinic, two hours drive from police posts. So who should teenage girls turn to when their school teacher keeps groping them?

A year ago, I received a message on Instagram about a Zambian friend with 5 children. Abandoned by her husband, she had become destitute, living in a shack. She couldn’t simply start trading as she lacked the tiny capital to buy dried fish for re-sale. Obviously, I wanted to send money, but even that was difficult since she didn’t have her own phone and there was no local infrastructure for digital payments. Instead, another relative had to travel six hours by taxi then coach to Lusaka to collect the cash in person.

I saw the same pattern when living in a shanty compound in Kitwe, Zambia’s second largest-city. Walking home in the evenings, it was pitch black. No street lights. Weak environmental regulation of nearby copper mines also created risks of pollution. To wash, I pinned a sack of maize across a bush then threw a bucket over my head. One time my eyes stung from a toxic leak.

Schools revealed a similar pattern. For three months, I sat at the back of local classrooms. Teacher absenteeism was rife. We were meant to have six classes a day, teachers typically came to two. If they went to do other business, they faced zero penalties. One time the neighbouring class grew so noisy that our teacher walked over and beat them all with a hose pipe. Ironically, she was writing on the board about ‘human rights’. Curious, I asked one student what she thought of the subject? “Ukulemba fye”, she replied - meaning it’s just something to learn for the exam, not actually enforced.

These are among the more benign consequences of demographic overstretch. When I was travelling with small-scale traders across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the coach ahead toppled and we had to dig it out of the mud, but that was surely the country’s least egregious form of state weakness.

African civil servants and parliamentarians recognise these challenges. When I shared an office at Zambia’s Ministry of Health, the most common refrain at donor-funded workshops was “The problem is implementation”. But if the state does not deliver public goods, then legitimacy is severely strained.

Overstretched states struggle with nation-building

France, Thailand, the US, Russia and China have all used schools, story-telling, symbolism and public goods to cultivate national pride, teaching children to see themselves as part of a wider national community. That project has been far harder in African polities where political centralisation came very late, linguistic diversity is very high, and ethnic particularism remains pervasive. It is even more of a challenge if teachers do not even show up.

The state then struggles to foster a sense of unity, trust, and confidence in state impartiality. 40% of Batswana said they do not trust people from other ethnic groups. 30% of surveyed Basotho and Mauritanians said they would dislike neighbours from a different ethnicity. Low trust creates frictions for markets, encourages ethnic favouritism, sharpens grievances, and can fuel unrest.

Climate stress is intensifying agro-pastoral conflicts in northern Nigeria, but these tensions are magnified by demographic pressure, as more people try to make a living from semi-arid and fragile terrain, pushing up food prices. Yet despite rising dissatisfaction, Northern Nigeria’s security forces fail to contain jihadi insurgencies.

The consequences of such failure can be deadly - Sudan’s civil war has displaced 11 million people, eastern Congo faces rebel violence and foreign-backed militia, while the Sahel is becoming the epicentre of global terrorism.

Demographic overstretch slows progress towards gender equality

While Sub-Saharan African women often move freely in the public sphere and achieve high rates of labour force participation, many remain extremely vulnerable to male predation. Analysing Demographic and Health Surveys of the 20 most populous African countries, David Evans and colleagues find that “one in four adolescent girls report having experienced violence, and one in seven report having experienced sexual violence in the previous year”. In Montserrado (Liberia), 35% of women reported early sexual engagement [statutory rape], 40% of male assailants worked at schools.

Just this week, Médecins Sans Frontières published a report on sexual violence in Darfur. One 40 year old woman is quoted as saying,

“Every day, when people go to the market, there are four or five cases of rape. When we go to the farm, this happens. Men, they will cover their heads, and they will rape women. If there is more than one woman, they can try to escape. When a woman is alone, it is difficult for her to run away and escape. A few days ago, a woman tried to defend herself against rape, nearby, and she lost her tooth… There is no way to stop the rapes. The only way is to try to stay home, and to not go out as much”.

Ed Glaeser is right that poor urbanisation creates severe governance challenges. But I would go one step further: where population booms collide with low incomes and weak state capacity, the result is demographic overstretch.

In 15th Century Paris, Christine de Pizan crafted beautiful manuscripts, championing female heroes, lampooning misogyny. England’s Queen Elizabeth I kept Christine’s books in her royal library and hung City of Ladies tapestries on her palace walls. European aristocracy noblewomen likewise passed her works among themselves like precious heirlooms. But below the upper bourgeoisie, her brilliant works remained unknown, largely forgotten. Without printing, de Pizan could not bypass the state and church. Her rebellion failed.

The Printing Press famously enabled large-scale ideological persuasion - both by dissidents like Martin Luther and also establishments like the Catholic Church. Writing in pamphlets and periodicals, Europe’s Enlightenment thinkers later lobbied for liberty and secularism. Governments also got in on the act: mandating mass education and standardising curricula. Circulating libraries brought novels to the middle-classes, enabling female authors to celebrate loving companionship. In this new era of nation-building, villages were no longer isolated but swept into wider intellectual tides.

No longer isolated in remote peripheries, Muslims in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa bought radio and cassette sermons to learn from clerics trained at prestigious centres of Islamic scholarship. Sufism and traditional spirituality, like offering rice porridge to ancestral spirits, were increasingly condemned as bid’ah (deviant innovation). Soviet satellites, meanwhile, followed Moscow and Westerners imitated Hollywood.

All these technologies required relatively high capital investments in production and circulation, and were therefore usually controlled by organisations - national governments, book publishers, radio producers, cassette makers. Whether communist, nationalist or Islamist, gatekeepers in patriarchal countries were invariably men. They tended to amplify ideologies that reaffirmed their righteous dominance.

Smart phones smash the barriers to both entry and dissemination. No longer do women need men’s permission or approval before seeking out, sharing and promoting ideas. With a device and headphones of her own, she can bypass gatekeepers, privately pursuing whatever she finds appealing or affirming, then share it with friends, encouraging wider emulation. Fathers, clerics, and broadcasters may still scold her behaviour, but they can no longer so easily police what she sees, admires, or reposts to her peers.

Smart phones enable radical decentralisation: anyone can become a content creator. But they do not entail a particular ideological direction. They simply erode older monopolies over what people can see, admire and imitate. In Malaysia, TikTok carries both BlackPink and petitions to censor subversive movies.

So while some currents tug towards piety and control, others glamourise female freedom. Algorithms may then compound those initial differences, sorting users into polarised worlds. Young men and women from Hohhot, São Paulo, Mexico City, Puebla, San José, Istanbul and Seoul have described swiping into worlds that are more glamorous, entertaining and amusing than their immediate vicinity - whether that’s irreverent comedy skits, influencers’ glamorous travels, or K-dramas in which doe-eyed guys show tender devotion. These are all alluring adverts for women’s freedoms and status. In Istanbul, a Kurdish woman invited me to her favourite church. “Do you have Christian friends?” I asked. “Of course!,” she grinned, fully immersed, “I watch Desperate Housewives.”

But can feminist revolutions be won with YouTube shorts?

Vitriolic messages may ferment righteous anger, but passive scrolling does not furnish young women with the charisma, competence or clientelist networks to move upwards in business or politics.

In private conversations, South Korean women repeatedly described male bosses promoting junior men, then bonding over drinks in bars staffed by sexy hostesses. But they nonetheless stay silent, for fear of ostracism. Reposting content to like-minded friends doesn’t necessarily persuade wider society that men’s dominance and impunity for abuse are unjust. The individual costs of dissent thus remain extremely high, and fears of such backlash inhibit women workers from speaking up. As Kim sighed, “I must do 24/7 nunchi” (i.e. be polite to maintain harmony).

Many young men still remain in their own self-adulating message boards - where entitlements, grievances, and sexist humiliation garner constant applause. So while some women may seek more gender equal partnerships, they often face supply-side constraints. Recognising that mismatch, many young women in big cities are increasingly choosing to remain single, unwilling to cook and clean without love: “Don’t settle for less”.

My reading of the available evidence is that smart phones have not ushered in a feminist revolution. They have, however, made ideological persuasion far more decentralised, with rival visions battling for power.

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In Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSE) (2025), she documents chronic failures of policing, social services, local councils, and political leadership. Police and local governments repeatedly denied abuse; dismissed victims; suppressed whistleblowers; failed to record basic offender characteristics; cited fear of community tensions and accusations of racism as reasons for inaction; and resisted external scrutiny by obstructing public access to data.

Absent a full inquiry, the true scale of abuse remains unknown. Where suspect ethnicity has been recorded, such as in Greater Manchester, South Asians are over-represented relative to their share in the local population. But for the vast majority of cases, the police do not report ethnicity. The lack of systematic data means that political discourse becomes marred by anecdotes, speculation, and aggressive vitriol.

Below, I present a pathway forward, showing how standard methods can answer the most important questions. Any government committed to gender equality and women’s safety will doubtless provide full support.

Estimating ethnicity when records are incomplete

The lack of data is not insurmountable. Economists studying immigration in the United States routinely infer ethnic origins from names linked to large population datasets. Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan use historical census data and surnames to study how Jewish and other European immigrants assimilated over the twentieth century. Because names carry persistent signals of cultural origin, researchers can identify group-level patterns even when ethnicity itself was never directly recorded.

Muhammad Usama Polani (my collaborator) and I suggest applying a similar approach to British data on group-based child sexual exploitation.

The 2011 Census for England and Wales contains around 56 million records linking names with self-reported ethnicity. Kandt and Longley (2018) developed an ‘Ethnicity Estimator’ - the probability that particular names belong to different ethnic groups. Such models cannot determine an individual’s ethnicity, but if given 1000 names, they could say what percentage are probably Hispanic.

This approach has already been used to fill gaps for English hospital admissions. Kandt and colleagues successfully used name-based predictions, validating against records where ethnicity was recorded.

Geography further improves accuracy, as shown by Elliott and colleagues (2009). Name-based probabilities are more informative when combined with data on where someone lives and the ethnic composition of that neighbourhood. Since Bradford is home to many British Pakistanis while Tower Hamlets has more British Bangladeshis, an “Ahmed” from Bradford is statistically more likely to be Pakistani than an “Ahmed” from Tower Hamlets. Subsequent work has provided improvements.

Suffixes - like ‘-ewski’ and ‘oğlu’ - also provide clues about cultural origins. Sood and Laohaprapanon (2018) trained such a model on millions of names, achieving around 85% accuracy in predicting ethnicity.

Analysing UK police data

These methods could be applied to the UK’s national police datasets on child sexual exploitation - including the earlier CPAI database and the more recent COCAD system. By linking suspect names to large population datasets, we can estimate the ethnic distribution of suspects, e.g. 25% Hispanic.

Some police forces do record ethnicity. These cases are tremendously valuable because they allow the probabilistic estimates to be validated and refined.

Historical reconstruction

This approach could also be extended historically. Although COCAD was created in 2023, it draws on police data that goes much further back. If the earlier CPAI records also contain suspect names, the same ethnicity classifiers could be used to those records.

Unfortunately, earlier cases were not classified consistently. But analysts have already read and labelled COCAD cases, probably adding explanatory notes. AI could learn from these examples and classify older CPAI case narratives in a consistent style. Human analysts could then validate the model’s accuracy before applying it across the full dataset.

Institutional failures and attrition

The 12-week COCAD snapshots suggest substantial attrition. Within this timeframe, only around 5% of suspects are charged or summoned, while roughly 30% of cases are closed because victims do not support prosecution and 23% because of insufficient evidence. Casey’s National Audit documents similar institutional failures.

All this can be studied systematically: which cases moved forward, and which stalled. Did prosecution rates vary across regions or ethnic groups?

If the government were to provide access to older CPAI records that could be reclassified and linked to outcomes, researchers could examine whether patterns changed over time, such as in response to greater scrutiny.

Court records & victims’ testimonies

Court records provide another rich source of evidence. Roughly 400 cases of group-based child sexual exploitation have gone to court in Britain. Their transcripts contain detailed evidence on offenders’ coordination and institutional responses.

Large language models could help extract structured information from these transcripts, identifying recurring patterns. Since the number of cases is manageable, the resulting dataset can be cross-checked by humans.

Survivors’ testimonies also remain paramount, alongside nationally representative surveys measuring attitudes towards gender norms, victim-blaming and whistleblowing.

Evidence and Accountability

Building a transparent national dataset is an essential step - towards evidence-based discussions, greater institutional accountability, and ultimately stronger protection for vulnerable children.

I write this in support of all victims, everywhere.

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Discussions on boys falling behind in school usually focus on delayed entry, more male teachers, more technical education, and more support for atypical male jobs like health and education. Richard Reeves’s best-selling book Of Boys and Men has been catalytic, but says very little about cultures of violence.

Yet teachers repeatedly insist that the biggest problem is violence. 56% of surveyed US teachers said they experienced some form of physical violence from students during the past year, while 80% report verbal or threatening aggression. 60% said student behaviour as worsened.

In Germany, 47% of teachers report psychological or physical violence among students at their school, rising to 69% in socially disadvantaged schools. The French Education Ministry records increased assaults on teachers - last month, a 14 year old repeatedly stabbed a 60 year-old art teacher in front of 20 other students. During a bag search last summer, another teacher was stabbed to death.

Over in Britain, 24% of surveyed teachers say they’ve been pushed or shoved in the past year, while 62% report recent verbal abuse. 1 in 7 British secondary school teachers say they are attacked by pupils at least once a month. In 2023/24, there were a million suspensions at state schools. Teachers at two primary schools in Greater Manchester recently went on strike against ‘almost daily’ pupil attacks: biting, kicking, ripping skin off hands, throwing chairs through windows, and bringing knives. Allegedly, one was “locked in the room by students so I’ve not been able to get out”. Scotland’s largest teaching union reports that a quarter of its members in Aberdeen were physically assaulted last year, while a third see violence every single day.

Strikes and surveys are not necessarily representative. Distressed teachers may be more likely to express their grievances and mobilise for industrial action. But all this does raise alarm bells, which societies might take seriously if they value human capital. Classroom havoc is obviously disruptive, undermining everyone’s learning, also causing bullying, trauma and physical harm.

“We still have teachers experiencing on a daily basis, objects being thrown at them and being pushed, punched, slapped, kicked and bitten” - Scottish trade unionist.

“Increased anxiety, more pupils becoming more introverted, more pupils ‘playing along’ so as not to be targeted themselves.” - British teacher.

The Machismo Trap

Yet it can be difficult for adolescents to escape cultures of violence. Naturally, we all seek status and social approval, but in communities where this is achieved through brutal aggression and physical dominance, boys may project toughness in order to gain respect, deter attacks and avoid humiliation. Bravado may even be glorified - like Russian men uploading videos of their fights and YouTubers streaming house invasions for clout. Academic boys may then be mocked, maligned, belittled and bullied. Entire communities may come to prioritise brawn over books. I call this the Machismo Trap.

How often do men get into fights?

Over the past three decades, surveyors have dramatically improved our understanding of violence against women. Yet male victimisation remains strangely neglected, even though men suffer the vast majority of assaults and homicides worldwide. Official statistics are also patchy. In countries with weak state capacity, both lethal and non-lethal violence are routinely under-reported. When I was attacked and left covered in blood in Mexico, the police showed little interest.

So, how can we systematically study men’s violence? Surveys are useful, but must be triangulated with wider data. A thug who smacks randoms in the street seems unlikely to diligently complete our questions. If the survey is in person, what administrator is brave enough to enter areas under criminal governance, and request a full compendium of brutality? Even if the survey is representative, will men truthfully report their own violence or victimisation? Given social desirability bias, questions must be designed carefully.

Fight Club, USA?

This week, I collaborated with YouGov America to design several questions. With the caveat that violent people are unlikely to answer polls, the survey usefully depicts significant variation.

27% of young men say they got into fights at least a few times a year while growing up. 11% say they fought once or twice a week.

Older women usually say they never got into fights, but this gender gap is smaller among younger generations.

Imagine a young man was publicly disrespected but walked away without fighting. In your local area, would he be viewed positively or negatively?

With this question, we wanted to gauge whether retaliation would be respected. Personally, I would have preferred the wording to be that he ‘hit back’, so as to signal that such behaviour could be acceptable, and thereby reduce social desirability bias.

In response, most Americans say this would be ‘positive’. There is some variation, but overwhelmingly a lot of support for ‘turning the other cheek’.

Putting this all together, we see “The Machismo Trap”. Americans whose friends get into fights are more likely to say that walking away would be viewed negatively. This fuels a vicious cycle: if boys grow up believing that respect comes from intimidation, then classrooms become battlegrounds.

If every classroom of 20 pupils includes 2 with a proclivity for fighting, this may be highly disruptive. Discussions on boys falling behind in education might take this Trap more seriously, and engage with the rich empirical literature on how to promote emotional regulation, reduce the social returns to retaliation, and ensure that policing creates effective deterrents. Such moves would benefit everyone.

How does male violence vary worldwide?

Going forward, I am keen to study male violence across all regions, triangulating responses from surveys with official crime statistics.

So, what do you think of the following questions:

1. How often do you get into physical fights?

2. How often do people you know get into physical fights?

3. How often did you get into physical fights while growing up?

4. Imagine a young man who is insulted in public and fights back. In your community, how would others see him?

5. Do men in your community get more respect if they win fights?

6. How often do you watch fighting matches, eg boxing/ wrestling?

7. Men gain protection from being part of a group known for toughness. Dis/agree.

8. Can the police be trusted to punish criminals?

9. Would you report theft to the police?

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Warlords organised coalitions of armed men to seize new territories, capture labour, extract tribute, and return with concubines. The route to power and prestige thus lay in commanding militias who unleashed bloodshed in the anticipation of honour and booty. Masculinity thus became synonymous with dominance, and women’s security depended on the strength of their male protectors.

The earliest surviving writings typically commemorate conquest. Egyptian hieroglyphs celebrate pharaohs’ victories, Sumerian cuneiform glorifies warrior-king Gilgamesh; the Book of Moses narrates the Hebrew conquest of Canaan. Chinese bronze inscriptions commemorate campaigns against rival states, Homeric epics enshrine martial glory as male virtue, Assyrian annals list their captives, Roman triumphs revel in the humiliation of enemy defeat, while Mayan murals record subjugation. Across civilisations, elites inscribed victory as proof of divine favour and masculine glory.

If cities expanded but struggled to monopolise the use of force, then criminal gangs tried to gain the upper hand - using blackmail, intimidation and protection rackets to extract advantage. Men rallied into coalitions, which projected collective toughness, asserted dominance, defended shared honour, or else were humiliated as vulnerable losers.

Several new studies track violence through the ages - using skulls, bones and court records. Eisner and Peng (2026) show that cranial trauma was pervasive in prehistory. Baten, Benati and Sołtysiak (2022) find that everyday interpersonal violence in the Middle East rose during early urban competition but declined once these polities developed more effective internal governance. In the Andes, Arkush (2022) similarly documents waves of escalation followed by pacification under Inca imperial consolidation. In medieval England, Eisner and colleagues (2025) use coroners’ inquests to compare homicides between cities and show that killings were highest in Oxford, where young unattached male students enjoyed clerical privilege and weak enforcement.

Tying the knot, these datasets suggest that violence flourished when organised armed groups competed for resources without restraint - neither constrained by overarching empire or credible rule of law. Brutality only declined when credibly constrained by effective institutions.

Cracked Skulls from Prehistory

Ancient burials often included skeletons with evidence of trauma - either unhealed lethal blows or healed damage, indicating recurrent warfare. Until recently, studies typically focused on individual sites, making it difficult to discern broader trends, but Eisner and Peng’s fantastic new paper aggregates the evidence across all time periods and regions. (If you’re in the Bay Area and heard a scream of delight, I can only apologise).

Across Europe, the Andes, the Levant, North China and pre-contact Mesoamerica, roughly 10–25% of adults show evidence of cranial trauma. In Neolithic Europe, 11% of skeletons bear violent head injuries, in the Southern Levant it’s over 25%. In pre-contact South America, rates cluster around 12–15%.

Caveat: all archaeological evidence must be viewed cautiously, since we only have access to that which survived. Any sample is of course a tiny fragment and partial.

Male Coalitions, Female Risk

Men were typically two to four times more likely to exhibit cranial injuries, suggesting they were the primary actors in organised combat.

Crucially, rates of female trauma rise and fall alongside male trauma. In societies with high overall violence, women also show elevated rates of injury. While this study doesn’t tell us whether women were being murdered in war or by their husbands, it’s certainly clear that violent ecologies have large spillovers, with more victimisation of women. This aligns with my earlier analysis of pre-industrial small-scale societies and contemporary patterns in Latin America.

State Formation and Competition in the Middle East

Baten, Benati and Sołtysiak analyse 3,539 individuals from across Turkey, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Iran, from 12,000 to 400 BCE, measuring interpersonal violence using cranial trauma and weapons-related injuries.

Trauma was relatively low during the Neolithic, when population density was sparse and groups could avoid each other. Violence peaked during the Chalcolithic period (c 4,500–3,300 BC), when early urbanisation and pro-state formation intensified resource competition.

Curiously, trauma seems to have declined during the Early and especially the Middle Bronze Age (c 3,300–1,500 BC). This was precisely when Mesopotamian polities developed consolidated territorial control, codified law, bureaucratic administration and expanding trade networks. The decline persists even after controlling for battle sites, military innovations and climate shocks. Baten and colleagues suggest that greater state capacity may have reduced everyday interpersonal violence.

However, violence rose again between the Late Bronze and Iron Ages (c 1,500–400 BC) - amid droughts, political fragmentation, mass migration, large-scale warfare, and imperial expansion.

Baten and colleagues suggest that early state formation coincided with greater violence, but once states achieved credible internal enforcement, then interpersonal violence declined within their territories. The implication is that stronger states can reduce violence, within their own walls. Though this is fragile.

When did Violence peak in the Andes?

Elizabeth Arkush synthesises Andean datasets, tracking cranial and facial trauma over time, distinguishing between healed injuries (repeated fights) and perimortem, unhealed wounds (likely lethal blows).

After 400 BC, trauma rose alongside the proliferation of fortified hilltop settlements. Small-scale societies fled to the hills and erected protections, suggesting constant fear of attack. Sites such as Chankillo, with massive stone walls, parapets and controlled access points, reflect escalating inter-group conflict. In some highland regions, between 1000-1450 CE, over 30% of skeletons show evidence of trauma.

From the mid-15th century, violence appears to have declined. The consolidation of Inca imperialism dampened local cycles of inter-community warfare.

When Men Fight, Women Suffer

28% of all men show head or face trauma, compared with only 19% of women. Men were also more likely to accrue multiple wounds, suggesting repeated attacks. Women’s cranial trauma was often at the back or side of the head - presumably as they were fleeing or crouched in fear.

Across large samples, there is a strong positive correlation between male and female trauma. This holds across time and between different societies.

Spectacles

Andean leaders also created spectacles to affirm their political dominance. As Arkush details, they publicly paraded prisoners of war, hoisting up trophy-heads, carving victories into temple walls, and lauding this as part of spiritual regeneration.

From the first millennium BC, monumental centres across the northern and central Andes were saturated with violent imagery. At Cerro Sechín, granite panels depict rows of warriors and their dismembered bodies: severed heads, detached limbs, exposed innards. Temples were designed to evoke predation, with visuals of fanged mouths, feline deities, and divine consumption.

The Nasca (of Peru’s south coast) carefully prepared trophy heads by removing brains, drilling holes through fontal bones, applying paint, then carrying them in public processions. Trophy heads sometimes sprouted plants, to convey the link between decapitation and regeneration.

Even when attacks lessened during the first centuries of the common era, the Nasca continued to elevate trophy heads as symbols of warriors, political authority and magical fertility. Dominance and brutality gave men prestige.

Medieval Murders, Oxford’s Impunity

Comparing cities across Medieval England, Eisner and colleagues reveal the importance of enforcement.

First up, they use coroners inquests to reconstruct recorded homicides in 14th century London, York and Oxford. Now, you’re probably imagining charming towns with participatory assemblies, guilds, courts, churches, and civic administration.

Um.

London and York’s estimated rates of homicide were 20-30 per 100,000 inhabitants - on par with contemporary Mexico. By contrast, Oxford’s was 90-100 per 100,000 inhabitants. Though for context, it was only a small town of 6,000 souls, so that worked out as 5 or 6 killings a year.

Over 90% of victims were male. Most killings were executed by groups. As was common across pre-modern Europe, attacks sometimes involves disfiguring someone’s face, so as to destroy their honour.

Why was Oxford so violent?

University towns were often dangerous. Large numbers of young males came alone and unaccompanied, then organised into student associations, divided by factional loyalties - ‘Northerners’ versus ‘Southerners’. 75% of all recorded victims and perpetrators were described as clericus/cleric - usually referring to individuals affiliated with the university, mostly students.

Legally classified as clerics, they were immune from prosecution under common law. Church courts were rather lenient, generally favouring penance, fines, or spiritual sanctions. In sum, a diverse motley of young men, high on testosterone, and getting off scott free.

Institutions really mattered (so my pal Acemoglu should be happy). Arrest rates were highest in London, lower in York, and lowest in Oxford. Credible governance and deterrence evidently proved pacifying, and that’s equally true today.

From Mobs to Magistrates

Smashed skulls remind us that organised violence was pervasive for most of human history. In such ecologies, men gained power by assembling mobs and militias, forging solidarity and glorifying domination. Bigger armies and sharper military innovations enabled ever greater extraction - of land, labour and tribute. Commanding force got you status.

When state enforcement was weak, private groups wrestled for advantage, battering rivals with stone axes, obsidian-edged macuahuitls, talwars and kris daggers.

As rulers monopolised force and courts gained authority, the returns to aggression began to fall. Only under these conditions could men (and much later women) pursue status in other domains - administration, commerce, innovation, and literature. (Or at least until AGI turfed us all out).

Anyone who tells you that there was some primordial feminist utopia where we all lived in harmony may be better suited to writing fiction.

Postscript

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts a pivotal moment in British history when it was conquered by Norman warlords. It includes 202 horses and 55 dogs; how many women?

To give another example of martial glory, let me share that my ex-army father decorated our home with spears, swords and paintings of battles. He then taught us how to fire guns, crossbows and slingshots. Though the only form of violence I pursued is savage trolling ;-)

When the UN compares countries’ progress towards gender equality, it usually focuses on women’s attainment in the public sphere: schooling, jobs and parliamentary seats. The World Values Survey similarly measures support for women’s paid work and leadership. This data is extremely useful, but omits a fundamental driver of patriarchy: violence.

For most of human history, power has been won by militarised coalitions who conquered new territories, raided for slaves, patronised patriarchal religions, while expanding their populations by glorifying maternity. Over the past century, progress has been real, but regionally uneven. In the most patriarchal societies, male status is safeguarded through female seclusion - confining them to the home, preventing any possibility of resistance. In another set, women move freely in markets and public spaces, but men exercise impunity for harassment, assault, trafficking, and gang violence. She is either secluded or vulnerable. Only in a third set have women escaped family control and also walk down the streets feeling safe.

In 2024, 98% of Singaporean women reported feeling safe walking alone at night. In South Africa it is just 24%. That gap captures something fundamental about women’s lives, and surely merits greater attention?

If the state fails to constrain criminal networks or predatory officials, then violent male coalitions can accumulate power. Opportunists gain advantage through brute force, sustaining a premium for male aggression. Yes, most victims of homicides are usually male, but that does not signify female empowerment. This loss of life reflects male competition within violent hierarchies. Criminal gangs run rampant, exploiting others for forced work and sex, publicising brutal punishments. Everyone lives in fear, most especially the poorest. Recognising danger, people may ally with known thugs or stay silent for fear of reprisals. Trapped by violence, they struggle to build institutions that enforce ‘the better angels of our nature’.

So while it’s important to track women’s progress in employment and politics, such metrics can be misleading. They omit pervasive harassment, homicides, conflicts and coercion. And here we see a marked class divide, with the poorest girls being most vulnerable to male aggression.

Let me illustrate several different forms of impunity: Guatemala’s religious conservatism, Haiti’s criminal gangs, Nigeria’s ritual intimidation, as contrast with Europe’s recent divergence. These examples are clearly much more severe than Letterman’s hair sucking, but they capture the same underlying principle: male impunity.

Impunity in Guatemala

Over a third of Guatemalan women experience sexual violence in their lifetime, yet the courts remain reluctant to impose punishment. From January 2018 to October 2023, prosecutors and judges dismissed 6,697 allegations of sexual violence against girls under 14. In that same period, there were just 102 rape convictions involving pregnant girls under 14.

Maria, age 12, was repeatedly abused by her grandfather and became pregnant. But instead of being supported by her family, they actually turned against her. “The whole family is against Maria because, as a good Christian, she should forgive,” shared a lawyer.

If you read Human Rights Watch’s report, you may feel puzzled. It rightly highlights prosecutory failures, fragmented data systems, lack of staffing and resources. But its recommendations are overwhelmingly technocratic - focusing on better laws, larger budgets and improved protocols. This omits religion, culture, and state weakness.

Guatemala is extremely socially conservative. Teenage fertility is high (68 per 1,000), while female labour force participation (40%) is well below the regional average. Only 74% of women make decisions concerning their own health care, while 80% of parliamentary seats are held by men. 81% of Guatemalans say religion is extremely important, 49% say religion is an important quality for children, while 60% emphasise children’s obedience.

As one female Guatemalan judge remarked,

“[In those regions] men still have the ingrained idea that they are in charge, not women.”

In societies that idealise obedience, hierarchy and the broader collective, then victims of assault are usually urged to reconcile, forgive and remain silent. Impunity isn’t just a function of administrative backlog, it reflects a social order that abets male abusers.

Criminal gangs in Haiti

After Haiti’s President was assassinated in 2021, armed groups have struggled for control, causing pervasive violence, intimidation and fear. The UN estimates that 90% of Port-au-Prince is now controlled by criminal groups, who use rape as a ‘weapon of terror’ to ‘punish’ girls and women from territories controlled by their rivals. A Haitian security expert explained, “Leaders, mid-level members, and rank-and-file members all rape girls and women just because they can, and nobody stops them. At MSF’s clinic, 58% of survivors experienced a group assault, with an average of three perpetrators.

“I was raped by four men while walking down a street” said a 25-year-old woman who had been looking for water for her children. “They were Gabriel’s men [from the G-Pèp criminal group]. They didn’t used to do this, but now they do whatever they want to all of us.”’

“It was near 10 a.m. More than 10 bandits arrived... Two grabbed me by my arms and dragged me to another house... [There], they took me to a room where there were six [other] girls. They tied me to a chair ... five men raped me that day. They hit me in the head with their fists several times... I spent five days in that house and every day I was raped by different men... The other girls were also raped and beaten.. I still have many nightmares about what those men did to me. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming in fear and sweating” (Bridget, 14).

Sorcery in Tracking Networks

Over the past 20 years, girls and women from Edo State, Nigeria, have increasingly been trafficked to Italy for sex work. To prevent their escape and instill compliance, criminal gangs routinely use ritual sorcery. Adeyinka and colleagues detail that girls may be taken to a juju doctor to swear a sacred oath, pledging never to reveal their trafficker’s identity, and repay the cost of their trip, or else the spirits will punish their families and subject them to madness. During this ritual, the juju doctor may take the women’s knickers, pubic hair or nails - as tools by which to control their bodies.

“I was scared and shaking… The man then told us not to cry, that anyone who cries in that place will die within 24 hours. She [the trafficker] then brought out the paper with my pubic hair and with that of the other girls, she had now written our names on each one. She gave it to the man [juju ritualist] and told him: “these are the girls,” and she wants him to make sure that we pay” (minor, quoted by Adeyinka et al).

As with all religions worldwide, fears of divine punishments can be used to enforce submission. Taken to Agadez in Niger and then Tripoli, women report being detained in warehouses, beaten, raped, sold between captors, and thereafter trapped in criminal networks in Italy. Victims have been reluctant to testify for fear of juju punishments.

Transnational trafficking, gang rule and religious hierarchy are clearly very different, but there is a common pattern: where the state does not constrain male violence, women are vulnerable to coercion.

Europe’s Divergence

Getting to Denmark isn’t just about state policing, but also public attitudes. Back in the 1970s, British police might turn a blind eye to men’s impropriety, dismissing it as ‘just a bit of fun’. Institutional disregard then enabled repeated attacks. An intrepid BBC reporter decided to turn the tables: pinching men’s bums, showing that this was actually weird and unwanted.

Europe has since made ginormous strides towards gender equality:

• 82% say it is unacceptable for men to ogle, catcall or whistle at women;

• 78% find it unacceptable for men to make suggestive comments about female colleagues appearances at work;

• 73% disagree that women often exaggerate claims of rape.

• 63% totally reject the proposition that if a woman suffers sexual violence while under the influence of alcohol or drugs then she is at least partly responsible.

• 79% say it’s unacceptable for a man to control his partner’s activities (e.g. mobile phone use or social media).

• 92% say a man occasionally slapping his wife or girlfriend is unacceptable.

• 72% totally disagree that domestic violence is a private matter.

Analysing both World Values Survey and Eurobarometer, I find that countries scoring highly on one dimension of sexism score highly on another. Compared to Western counterparts, Eastern Europeans tend to be more patriarchal. They are more likely to blame victims, dismiss the notion that ‘no means no’, and say that university is more important for boys.

In many former Soviet countries, feminism was suppressed and remains heavily stigmatised. Liberalism in Western Europe and North America was vitally important, enabling the spirit of ‘68 to spread like wild fire across college campuses, igniting the counter-cultural movement and feminist revolution.

Women’s movements can be catalytic - overthrowing taboos, galvanising public pressure, and demanding government reforms. Indeed, they are a major predictor of state action against gender-based violence. Whereas in Russia, where feminism is heavily stigmatised, the Dumas decriminalised wife battery.

But while Brits and Germans strongly condemn harassment and assault, they are now witnessing rising rapes, low convictions and institutional failures. Women’s safety in the public sphere is perennially vulnerable and requires constant activism.

Do Women Feel Safe Alone at Night?

For the past 300,000 years of human history, male coalitions have exercised dominance and often enjoyed impunity. When #MeToo went viral in 2017 it was nothing short of revolutionary: joining forces, women publicly supported each other, condemned abusers, and collectively signalled that victims would no longer be dismissed, disregarded, shamed or stigmatised.

Yet social scientists have been slow to catch on. Our analyses of progress towards gender equality still focus on economic activity and political representation, omitting a far more basic question: can women walk down the street alone at night and be at ease? Or, for yours truly, can she run into the woods and just enjoy nature?

Related Essays

• “Violent Intimacy” by Tiantian Zhen

• “Flowers of Fire” by Hawon Jung (review)

• Did Communism Smash the Patriarchy?

• “Putin vs. The People” by Greene and Robertson (review)

• Stopping Sexual Harassment

• Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?

• Male Violence and the Myth of Female Freedom

Last month I hiked through the Swiss mountains, paraglided into Davos, snuck through security, then gave a talk on the macroeconomic, social and political implications of falling fertility.

Feedback is always welcome. Summary below 👇

My Essays on Fertility

• How to boost birth rates

• Why is fertility collapsing, globally?

• How does Low Fertility Affect Economic Growth, Worldwide? Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

• Why don’t men want so many kids?

Relationship frictions

• The Global Rise of Singles

• Why are Marriage and Fertility Both Falling?

• Why are Childless Singles on the Rise in East Asia?

• What Prevents & What Drives Gendered Ideological Polarisation?

• Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity

• Why are Marriage & Fertility Plummeting in MENA?

• Cultural Leapfrogging - Turkish style

Intensive parenting and the educational arms race

• What caused East Asia’s rapid fall in fertility? (over the 1960s and 70s)

• The Danger of Single Country Case Studies

• Why has fertility plummeted across East Asia?

• Fertility is a collective action problem. Can it be tackled with taxation?

• Why has Fertility Plummeted? Insights from Hong Kong

Films and prestige

• Lights, Camera, Ovulation!

Religion

• How does Religion shape Education & Fertility in Africa?

• Why is African Teen Fertility So High?

Rejecting assumptions of universal male dominance, academics began asking when, where and why women became oppressed. Explanations ranged from plough-cultivation and patrilineal clans to private property, state-development and colonialism. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia’s small-scale matrilineal and bilateral societies were often presented as counter-examples - where women inherited land, lived near kin, ran markets, and exercised spiritual authority. ‘Warrior women’ of the Eurasian steppe are likewise esteemed for their military prowess.

But have these celebrations of female freedoms omitted a major constraint: extreme violence? By reading a wealth of historical ethnographies and analysing the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (a comparative dataset of pre-industrial societies), I have discovered that many cultures renowned for female prominence also experienced pervasive homicide, assault and warfare. Organised male coalitions amassed power through slave-raiding and labour coercion, sustaining ecologies of fear.

Inter-disciplinary Consensus

Across economics, anthropology and evolutionary theory, I notice a common assumption: where women inherit land, choose partners and move freely, the society is seen as more gender equal.

In A Natural History of Patriarchy, David-Barrett suggests that our ancestors once lived ‘gender harmony’, and draws on contemporary hunter-gatherers as exemplars of equality. Female dependence on male providers, he speculates, only arose with the transition to agriculture, which raised fertility while exacerbating food insecurity.

Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything similarly emphasise autonomy in pre-state societies. Drawing on Jesuit accounts of Wendat and Montagnais–Naskapi, they describe women as having “full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will”. Nuer women in the Horn of Africa are likewise portrayed as exercising freedom over their sexuality and reproduction.

Economists Sarah Carmichael and Auke Rijpma construct a composite index of “Family Constraints on Women’s Agency”, drawing on ethnographies recorded between 1860 and 1950 from nearly two hundred societies. They combine patriliny, patrilocality, polygamy, cousin marriage, marriage payments, inheritance, extended households and clan structures. Their framework implies that when women are free from patrilineal control, they exercise greater autonomy.

These accounts all assume that where women inherit property, choose partners and move freely, the society was relatively gender equal. Perhaps the past was not so bad?

Violence

Even if a woman is not subordinated to lineage elders, she may still be vulnerable to violent predation. Sexual permissiveness does not mean genuine choice if she can be abducted, enslaved and raped. When men can get what they want via coercion, they need not charm women with displays of devotion or companionship. Brute force wins.

Even if women can choose their husbands, in dangerous places they may strategically partner with aggressive men who can provide protection. Conflict societies also tend to glorify male aggression, raising boys to be tough, show readiness to retaliate, and intimidate potential foes. Male coalitions gain power through organised violence, then consolidate dominance through spectacular punishment.

Once we recognise how violence shapes culture, we may wish to revisit rosy narratives. Take pre-colonial Southeast Asia. “Men of prowess” gained power by militarism and labour coercion, while men could sell wives and children into debt-bondage. “Virtually every large trader was, simultaneously, a slave-raider. Every military campaign, every punitive expedition was a campaign for captives who could be bought, sold, or held”, writes James Scott.

In peripheral small-scale societies of Southeast Asia, Barbara Andaya details how young men went on head-hunting expeditions to mark their passage to adulthood, while young women celebrated men’s violence. In 1679, Governor Padtbrugge observed that men’s tattoos tracked the number of men they had killed, which their wife copied in pride. An 18th century Malay manuscript records young Abung women rejoicing at raiders’ return.

Northern Thai villagers recall that girls could be captured as “play wives” by passing militia, and folklore tells of village parents hiding daughters by smearing their faces with fish paste. In Palembang and Jambi, east Sumatra, rulers raided local stores of pepper and carried off their “prettiest daughters”.

Reflecting on this evidence, I began to suspect that cross-cultural research has radically understated historical patriarchy by ignoring pervasive violence.

Does ‘Female Agency’ track Safety?

Curious, I turned to the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) - a widely used anthropological dataset of 186 small-scale societies. Each society is coded on variables such as descent, marriage, gender norms, political organisation, homicide and warfare. This sample was designed to minimise regional clustering and shared historical ancestry, thereby strengthening cross-cultural comparisons.

Like all such datasets, this coding relies on observations recorded at particular time periods and reduces social complexity to discrete categories. It cannot capture internal variation (for example, elites versus marginalised sub-groups) nor long-term change. Nevertheless, it provides the most systematically comparative evidence currently available. Separate research teams coded different measures of violence, thereby reducing the risk that any single interpretive bias might drive the results.

Below, I explore whether conventional indicators of female freedom correlate with violence.

1) Violence was pervasive

In 80% of coded societies, male toughness was explicitly glorified.

In 80% of coded societies, wife beating was reported as common.

Institutional rape was present in 53% of the societies coded on that variable. Rape, or gang rape, was a socially legitimate tool of punishment, discipline, or warfare.

The Montagnais–Naskapi - caribou-hunting people of northeastern Canada described by Graeber and Wengrow as respecting female liberty - are coded as practising institutional rape.

2) Warfare is correlated with interpersonal violence

Not all pre-industrial societies were violent or warlike. But societies that frequently waged war also tended to exhibit more interpersonal violence - more assaults, coercion and homicides.

Ember and Ember (1994) suggest this pattern could be partly driven by warring societies socialising boys for aggression. Similarly, I find that societies with high homicides and assault tended to glorify toughness.

3) Over half of pre-industrial societies score highly on male aggression

Male aggression is coded on a cumulative Guttman scale, with the highest score assigned to societies that institutionalised rape and raided for wives. Over half of pre-industrial societies in the SCCS reach this maximum level.

The Yanomami, Chuckchi, Kazakh and Somali all score high on male aggression, warfare, interpersonal violence, glorified toughness and institutional rape. In the absence of a centralised monopoly of force or reliable guarantee of security, Somali patrilineal clans defended pastoral herds and lineage honour through threats of retaliation and feud.

Only 19% of coded societies did not glorify toughness. These were typically more peaceful, eeking out livelihoods in peripheral forests and rugged uplands - like India’s Garo and Adivasis.

4) Conventional indicators of female agency are statistically unrelated to violence

Standard measures of ‘female agency’ (including patrilineal descent, patrilocal residence, restrictive pre-marital sex norms, and arranged marriage) are statistically unrelated to measures of violence.

The graph below plots the Carmichael–Rijpma ‘Family Constraints on Women’s Agency’ index against violence. Two components account for most of the variation: patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence.

I also plot female property ownership against violence. As you see, there is no relationship. Even if women lived near their natal kin, owned property, or were free from arranged marriage, they might still be vulnerable to male predation.

The Bemba in Southern Africa were shifting cultivators, valuing not property but ‘wealth in people’. They practised matrilineal descent and matrilocality. A groom typically performed several years of labour for his in-laws to demonstrate readiness for marriage and then lived nearby. Women could divorce and return to their natal kin, often remarrying.

In the 19th century, this co-existed with warfare: Bemba chiefs expanded their territory by raiding neighbouring groups and taking captives. In 1832, Gamitto reported that ‘the Bemba.. are today powerful and feared by all for their fierceness’. In 1895, [Chief] ‘Ponde’s men captured Chitimbwa’s village, killed the chief and carried away rich spoils of cloth, salt and women’.

In the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, wife-beating is coded as common. Still today, in Luapula (the Bemba-heartland, where I used to live), over half of women say that wife beating can be justified.

The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria are often presented as evidence of a more egalitarian precolonial order. The language is largely gender neutral, political authority was decentralised and women organised powerful assemblies. In village-wide gatherings (mikiri), women shared grievances, regulated markets and coordinated sanctions. If a man abused his wife or violated market rules, women might gather at his compound, bang pestles against his walls, shame him publicly, and create a din until he submitted. This was called ‘sitting on a man’. During the Women’s War of 1929, the same networks mobilised against Warrant Chiefs (colonial appointees).

British colonial officers and missionaries can be rightly faulted for neglecting these significant institutions. Yet later correctives seem to have ignored the wider context. In the SCCS, the Igbo rank among the highest for homicides, with frequent inter-village warfare and retaliatory violence.

The Fon of Dahomey are coded with the maximum score for female power. By the 1840s, they had 6,000 female professional soldiers - recently popularised in the Hollywood film, “Woman King”. Women ran markets and the Queen Mother (Kpojito) was politically influential.

Yet the Dahomey also had interpersonal violence, institutional rape and wife-beating. This was a slave-raiding state, which gained strength from organised warfare. Elite female prominence co-existed with slave-raiding, coercion and enslavement.

Vast populations lived under insecurity and retaliatory violence. It follows that regimes which successfully monopolised force and pacified society, thereby reducing the returns to male aggression, created a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for greater gender equality

Violence Entrenches Patriarchy

Male violence isn’t just downplayed in the historical record, it’s often omitted from discussions about contemporary societies. For example, the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report tracks health, education, employment and political representation. All four are important, but omit a hugely important obstacle emphasised in so many of my interviews across the world: male aggression, coercion and brutality.

Economists may suggest that property ownership raises women’s bargaining power, but this surely breaks down if one can be captured and enslaved. Likewise, sexual permissiveness does not mean female agency when women may be abducted by male predators.

“In the 1990s, Russia was like a Wild West, many of my friends’ dads were killed by the mafia” - shared Julia from Vladivostok. In the shadow of organised crime, working class men learnt to project brutal dominance, uploading videos of their fights, impressing peers with physical aggression. Desperate for security, Russians favoured tough male leaders. Worldwide, militarism and geopolitical threats consistently boost demand for macho leaders.

Today, in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, there are reports of killings, abduction, torture, electric shocks, and gang rape. Victims of sexual abuse range in age from four to 82. This reflects a recurring pattern of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Over in Latin America, 52-58% of people say they live in the presence of criminal groups, while 12–16% report some form of criminal governance. Across the continent, high homicides strongly predict high femicides. Across Mexico, Costa Rica and Brazil, women often described older men as being intensely ‘machista’ - controlling and quick to anger. Some interviewees attributed their self-doubt and nervousness to early experiences of fear and intimidation.

Amid climate stress and state fragility, the African Sahel has seen a surge in Islamist militancy and armed conflict. The region now accounts for 51% of global terrorism-related deaths.

Protection from Male Predators

In their eagerness to challenge myths of universal male dominance, scholars scoured historical records for evidence of women’s prominence. But across 186 pre-industrial societies, I find that standard indicators of female agency (like matriliny, sexual permissiveness and female political participation) can co-exist alongside homicides, warfare, and institutional rape. Although scholars were right to highlight women’s political participation, this obscures a much harsher reality.

Violence was endemic across many non-state societies. Celebratory narratives of ‘kick-ass’ women often obscure head-hunting, slave-raiding and intimidation.

Going forwards, I suggest that measures of gender equality should incorporate indicators of generalised violence, as a major threat and brutalising force.

‘Getting to Denmark’ doesn’t simply mean gender quotas for political elites, but building states that enforce rule of law and protect vulnerable girls from predators. I would love to see more research on how this can be achieved, worldwide.

Related Essays

• An Intellectual History of the Patriarchy

• “Gendered Species: A Natural History of Patriarchy” by Tamas David-Barrett (Review)

• Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

• Against Rose-Tinted Patriarchy

• Why are So Many Latin American Women Beaten & Murdered?

• Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?

• Wartime Patriarchs

Notes

1. This is a nice example of a useful null finding. These are under-reported in academia, as shown in a new paper by Ryan Briggs.

2. Male toughness and institutional rape are coded on a cumulative Guttman scale. On this metric, you can have societies glorifying toughness without institutionalising rape, but societies institutionalising rape will glorify toughness. Since this creates a mechanical correlation between these two variables, I also incorporate other, independently coded indicators of violence, such as homicide and assault.

3. My violence index is a min–max normalized row mean of three standard indicators: homicide, assault, and interpersonal violence. All substantive conclusions are identical when I expand the index to include wife beating and institutional rape, and when I restrict the three-item index to societies with at least two coded components. I also replicate the null results using homicide and assault separately, confirming that the results are not driven by index composition.

4. I do find a correlation between restrictive premarital sex norms and homicide, but this relationship is driven by 21 societies that are both extremely restrictive and extremely violent. If these cases are removed, the correlation disappears. Looking more closely, this cluster of societies tend to be pastoral economies with organised violence, waging wars for resources, and socialising boys to be aggressive. Otherwise, there is no relationship between pre-marital sex norms and violence.

5. In “Better Angels of Our Nature”, Stephen Pinker suggests that small-scale societies had extremely high rates of war deaths and homicides.

But this pattern is far from universal. Why has cultural leapfrogging been so rapid in Turkey, why do young men often remain more conservative, and what does this mean for coupling?

Turkey’s Cultural Fist-Fights

For over two centuries, Westernising reformers have clashed with social conservatives over authority, women’s visibility, and autonomy. Still today, male honour remains tethered to female seclusion. Even online, Turkish men have very few female friends. Ideals of gender segregation help explain why - despite economic growth, soaring education and falling fertility - only 36% of women participate in the labour market. Men continue to dominate state power, comprising 80% of parliamentarians.

After the 2001 economic crisis discredited secular elites, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power - blending market reform with Sunni revivalism. Yet Turkey continues to struggle with weak business dynamism and high inflation. The AKP maintains its grip partly by favouring cronies and punishing dissent: jailing opponents, curtailing competition, weakening judicial independence, and replacing university rectors with loyalists.

But while the AKP maintains support among older voters, younger cohorts appear to be experimenting with alternatives.

4 Drivers of Cultural Liberalisation

Turkish liberals benefit from four forces:

First, when a governing regime fails to deliver, its ideology often takes a battering. Acemoglu and colleagues find that unsuccessful democracies lose support, and I suggest this holds for governing ideologies more broadly. Citizens don’t just lose faith in the ruling party, they also lose faith in its underlying mantra - whether that’s communism, progressivism etc. Since Turkey’s AKP has been in government since 2002, and is widely blamed for economic mismanagement, Sunni orthodoxy is also losing favour.

Second, compared to neighbouring Muslim countries, Turkey always had a stronger support base for secularism. Today, only 41% of Turkish parents cite ‘religious faith’ as an important quality for their children. Whereas in Egypt, 82% underscore this priority and are much more insistent on ‘obedience’. The Egyptian school system also provides many more hours of religious education.

Third, Turkey has seen skyrocketing university enrolment - from 1.7 million students in 2008 to over 4.1 million by 2020. Away from home, young people are socialising more freely, carving their own spaces. Female graduates are also more likely to be employed.

Fourth, female graduates in big cities are increasingly engaging with progressive Western values. Smart phones and cheap data mean they can circumvent parental surveillance and national broadcasters, then gravitate to channels that validate their aspirations. On Instagram, TikTok and Spotify, liberal women can speak and be heard. I call this ‘culturally leapfrogging’.

Just as artists once flocked to Paris - the epicentre of prestige in the 19th century - and repackaged prestigious styles for domestic audiences, Turkey’s feminist entrepreneurs are re-imagining female status, happiness and autonomy. They are asserting their own prerogatives, reassessing intimacy and prioritising their own happiness - to large online audiences. For the first time in Turkish history, liberal women can really engage in large-scale ideological persuasion. Their weapons of choice? Comedy, music, and glamour - fun, aspirational, online social-bonding.

Digital Footprints

Google Trends data helps us triangulate surveys, which are often irregular, marred by non-responses and social desirability bias. For example, some may report daily prayer, but nonetheless skip a few.

Searches for ‘prayer times’ suggest the extent to which Muslims incorporate religiosity into their daily life, by dutifully checking the appropriate times for Fajr (dawn), Dhuhr (midday), Asr (afternoon), Maghrib (sunset), and Isha (night).

Analysing Google Trends, I can visualise Turkey’s regional heterogeneity. In Istanbul, locals are 2.4 times more likely to search for ‘Tinder’ relative to ‘prayer times’ (namaz vakitleri).

Below, each province’s bar shows the ratio of its Google Trends search index for Tinder relative to its index for Prayer Times (’Namaz Vakitleri’), with both terms independently scored by Google based on search concentration rather than raw volume. For more details see footnotes.

Reflecting growing embrace of US norms, searches for ‘ADHD’ and ‘lip filler’ have spiked - in both Istanbul and Konya. As we spend more time online, our feeds and algorithms, rather than neighbourhoods, play a growing role in shaping cultural expectations. And this is entirely consistent with my qualitative research…

As Turkish users increasingly adopt US-terms and searches, this may be imported as an entire package, including ‘ADHD’ and ‘lip filler’.

Konya

In Konya, I was introduced to a young hijabi, yet within five seconds of meeting, I instantly knew she was plugged into Western social media. Her gestures gave the game away - fingers clicking like the supremely confident Nicki Minaj. Sassy, astute and assertive, Ece became a great friend, generously helped me interview a range of people across Konya.

Ece’s friends - fluent in English - have formed a bookclub, stacking their shelves with Sally Rooney, Dolly Alderton, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Kuang, Gabrielle Zevin, and Kazuo Ishiguro. These novels portray lives that are so radically different from that of their mothers and grandmothers. Instead of enduring abuse, hierarchy and domesticity, they are continually choosing protagonists who contest claims to power, while re-evaluating intimacy. Love, friendship, and even family ties are constantly open to scrutiny: “Is this actually good for me?”. Women’s desires for recognition and pleasure are cast as entirely legitimate. That may sound mundane to Western readers, but in central Anatolia it is absolutely radical.

With three universities, young people come from all over Turkey, mixing without parental supervision. Cafes - once male preserves - now host young women in crop tops. As Ece explained,

“If you go to cafes, everyone is young, no one will care. My friend [from Istanbul] was really shocked about the situation, like “omg it’s crazy”…

“Today, one of my friends sent me a photo, it’s ‘celebrating winter’ [She laughed at this coded description of Western Christmas decorations].

Male Comics

When I study world history, I realise that cultural liberalisation has usually been spearheaded by men - contesting strictures, legitimising dissent. This isn’t to diminish women’s contributions: it merely reflects the reality of patriarchy: men exercise greater authority and act as gatekeepers.

Comedy is a powerful solvent. Laughter triggers endogenous opioid release, forging social bonds. We relax, connect and feel that we’re all in on the joke. In that moment, it becomes easier for relatable and charismatic figures to broach taboos and persuade their peers.

When orthodoxy is mocked, it loses gravitas. Sacred tenets are pulled off their pedestals and deviance becomes more acceptable.

On Netflix, Cem Yılmaz and Hasan Can Kaya mock the absurdities of tradition - family authority, sexual hypocrisy, and macho posturing. While they never target Islam itself, satire is nevertheless a powerful weapon of subversion.

Mocking the Patriarchy

Marshalling this same weapon - irreverent comedy - women have been sharing their own ideas. Yasemin Sakallıoğlu, 37, with over seven million Instagram followers, pokes fun at women’s never-ending drudgery, cooking and cleaning for religious festivals. As a middle-aged mum, she’s extremely relatable - never aggressive or polemical. Much like U.S. women’s magazines in the 1970s, she brings feminist ideas to a mass audience through irreverent, self-effacing humour.

While some economists maintain that women’s low employment in the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia and South Asia is due to care work, Yasemin Sakallıoğlu is rocking our priors. Patriarchal societies that idealise female domesticity are highly effective in ensuring women perform more housework.

Over on Instagram, femininity is being redefined, with glamorous Turkish influencers chronicling their exotic adventures. Spotify’s top streaming artists include Melike Şahin and Gülşen, who champion women’s independent desire, autonomy and pursuit of happiness. Popular anthems are widely remixed on TikTok and Instagram, signalling wider acceptance.

Beyond beats, banter and lip filler, many Turkish women also look up to articulate, knowledgeable journalists, like Nevşin Mengü. As Ece remarks from Konya, this connectivity shows a whole new world of possibilities:

“Before, you only knew your family, or your sister’s husband. Now, you can see EVERYTHING!”.

In a country where a third of women have experienced domestic violence, viral terms like ‘gaslighting’ name harms and help legitimise exit.

Bodies and Backlash

In societies where women’s bodies are a dangerous source of ‘fitna’ (moral corruption), they are encouraged to hide their bodies and cover up:

“I was constantly ashamed of my body. I felt like my body was not my own. When I was going through puberty, I was constantly told to cover up, to wear bigger clothes, to shut my legs. My father made me feel so disgusting. And this affected my sexual relationships, because I felt like my body was not my own” - Yildiz, Istanbul.

Staying in Istanbul, I joined a local gym, yet rarely saw any women. Asking more broadly, many expressed extreme discomfort. Here, the Turkish Women’s Volleyball team has been catalytic! In 2023, they won the Women’s European Volleyball Championship, becoming a major source of national pride (and attention). Sportswomen demonstrate their strength and agility, casually wearing shorts. But this has stirred backlash. After photographs circulated of Ebrar Karakurt embracing another woman, online bullies came out in droves, with one Islamist newspaper calling her “a national shame.”

In 2021, when the team was competing in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, a prominent preacher sharply criticized the team for not adhering to his conception of how a Muslim woman should behave. Preacher Ihsan Senocak, with 1 million followers on Instagram, blasted condemnation:

“Girl of Islam! You are not the sultan of the courts; you are the sultan of faith, virtue, chastity and decency”.

Cultural fist-fights continue. A spokesperson for Turkey’s volleyball federation spoke out in her defence, praising her “spirit of a fighter to represent her country”, adding “Everyone’s private life concerns them only. All the rest is hokum.”

Ghosting the Patriarchy

Social media is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has enabled Turkey’s female graduates to leapfrog towards egalitarianism. But persuading their male peers remains hard, because many young men appear to be gravitating towards icons that affirm their own status. In 2022, searches for Andrew Tate surged in both Istanbul and Konya. Interest in Menzil - a conservative Naqshbandi Sufi community - is often even higher.

Smartphones may deepen separation - especially in societies where men and women already keep their distance. As attention shifts to hyper-engaging apps, face-to-face connectivity may decline. Over time, this makes it harder to build new friendships, networks and personal charm. Yet if society liberalises such that young people can choose their own partners, selecting for companionship, then weak interpersonal skills create a real barrier to coupling.

Since the early 2000s, Turkey’s marriage rates have fallen, divorce has more than doubled, and fertility has dropped to 1.5. Last week, Ece went on a first date but was distinctly unimpressed:

“He was very kind, but not funny. I wasn’t mesmerised. And he said, ‘you’re in business, “that’s so great for a woman”’. I thought “What the hell?”.

While he was trying to be supportive, Ece found his approach antiquated and patronising. “Thank u, next”, I joked in reply (rightly anticipating one of her favourite songs). Thus even if Turkey’s young female graduates struggle to shift electoral outcomes, they are increasingly saying ‘no’ in their personal lives.

Will Cultural Leapfrogging Go Global?

So will TikTok catalyse worldwide secularisation? Not necessarily. Cultural prestige often tracks perceived political competence. When religious regimes falter, the pews tend to empty - as in Spain after Franco or Chile amid Catholic sex scandals. But where secular elites are blamed for corruption and economic stagnation, religious movements can harness grievance and present themselves as purer, more just alternatives - as in Egypt in the 1970s and 2010s, or Bangladesh’s Jamaat today.

Social media does not determine the direction of cultural change; it amplifies a raft of anti-establishment voices, who then battle to present a more alluring alternative.

Related Essays

• Culture isn’t a Fossil, it’s a Fist-Fight

• Can Men and Women Be Friends? Evidence from 1.3 Trillion Facebook Connections

• Why are Marriage & Fertility Plummeting in MENA?

• Cultural Leapfrogging: Swiping Past Tradition

Footnotes

• To explain the Methodology, Usama Polani used Google Trends to compare the prominence of “Tinder” and “Namaz Vakitleri” in each Turkish province’s search activity.

• When you query the Google trends API in R, it does not give you raw search counts, it gives you a 0-100 index where 100 is assigned to the province where that term is most prominent relative to all searches, and other provinces are scaled proportionally.

• Usama fetched each term separately across 81 Turkish provinces for 2023 and then computed the ratio of the indexes. A ratio above 1 means Tinder is more prominent in that province’s search activity; below 1 means that prayer times dominate. Istanbul’s ratio of 2.4 means that Istanbul scores 2.4 times higher on the Tinder index than on the prayer-times index, so it ranks much closer to the top on Tinder prominence than it does on prayer-times prominence.

• Clearly, there are many other differences between provinces. For example, larger cities might have more prayer apps, Tinder swiping or audible azan calls to prayer. Therefore Usama ran 6 additional tests to gauge whether this within-Turkey difference in search habits was picking up an underlying pattern. The same gradient in relative search intensity Usama found using the Tinder/prayer times index ratio across provinces also occurs even as you change the religious terms, so modest dress (tesettür), umrah pilgrimage, Diyanet or Quran. There is a consistent pattern. The correlation in province rankings for the ratio across terms was often above 0.8.

• Usama then ran tests to identify whether a Ramadan religiosity effect existed and varied across provinces. He confirmed that during Ramadan the spread of Tinder/prayer times ratios across provinces compresses but the provincial ranking persists.

• Analysis over time also confirms the findings. Looking at search activity from 2016-2023, Konya sits relatively flat on the ratio while Istanbul and Izmir show significant increases.

• When looking directly at cities above 1 million, İzmir (4.5m population) has a Tinder/prayer ratio of 3.41 while Konya (2.3m population) has a ratio of 0.46. So even with both being major cities, Tinder is over 7 times more prominent relative to prayer times in İzmir’s searching behaviour than that of Konya.

• Usama also regressed each province’s Tinder/prayer times ratio on log(population). Without implying causality, this accounts for 24% of the variation.

• When a direct religiosity measure is added, each province’s Google trends index for tesettür, the explained variance becomes 42% with both population and the term for modest dress independently being significant.

• There are multicolinearity issues in this approach: the index for the religious term is correlated with the prayer times index, both are capturing religiosity. So the regression is partly picking up the relationship between the regression and the denominator the ratio. This is both mechanical and also the main thrust of the analysis: religiosity terms covary strongly across provinces. Even removing these mechanical correlation issues, the results hold.

• Usama also investigated how AKP voting share may be related to the Tinder/prayer ratio if the former also proxies in part for religiosity. In the full sample there is no clear role for AKP voting share to explain variation in the ratio but that may be because Kurdish provinces are deeply religious and vote for HDP/DEM, not AKP. If Usama excludes those provinces then AKP vote share becomes one of the strongest predictors of the variation in Tinder/prayer times ratio although of course many other factors are influencing both political choices and attitudes. Usama also ran cross-country analysis and finds similar results: Egypt is much more uniformly religious on my Google trend metrics than Turkey which is consistent with other surveys on religious attitudes.