When individuals are seen as making a valuable contribution to their group, they are given greater respect and authority. But ‘value’ is culturally constructed. Historically, societies tended to revere men’s activities, like military might. Fertility, cooking, care and weaving were all expected, but seldom rewarded with commensurate status. Hyping up male-typed activities endowed all men with status.
Who gets status?
In “Status”, Cecilia Ridgeway suggests that status is conferred by:
Demonstrating competence in a shared goal;
Membership of groups presumed competent (gender/race);
Associations with high-status people;
Social policing ensures everyone kowtows.
What matters is perceived capacity to advance shared goals. Values are culturally constructed. Crucial workers are often overlooked.
Ridgeway further details 3 kinds of bias:
Status bias. High status people are given more respect and resources;
Legitimacy bias. High status actors’ attempts at authority are seen as appropriate.
Associational preference bias. High status individuals network with others like them, collectively monopolising resources.
Widespread reverence gives high-status individuals the legitimacy to build institutions that preserve their privileges. Since fellow group members are always represented as having high status, they may believe they really are superior, deserving of deference.
For Ridgeway, people comply with status inequalities because they think that they’re widely endorsed. Even if lower status groups are privately critical, they’re kept in line by social policing and anticipation of backlash.
(Personally, I’d emphasise additional mechanisms: rurality, precarity, kinship and religion).
But why were certain activities seen as valuable?
Throughout history, men and women have always been inter-dependent
Women performed crucial work:
Fertility and caring for children - ensuring they survived myriad health hazards;
Cooking - not poisoning everyone;
Weaving - making cloth for trade or tribute;
Spiritually, women might pray for their families and communities.
Although men and women were interdependent, this wasn’t always reflected in culture. Very few societies actually revered female-typed activities. Exceptions include ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Gulf of Guinea and Arctic. These societies are alike in one material respect: land had low value, they valued wealth in people.
Mesopotamian & Anatolian Figurines of Fertility
Figurines with wide, child-bearing hips have been found all over the world. Gimbutas claimed this is evidence of an ‘ancient matriarchy’. That seems unwarranted. There is no linguistic evidence of what these meant. But these do indicate respect for fertility.
Fertility figurines are also on display at Konya’s archaeological museum. They sharply contrast with 20th century Anatolian patrilineal cosmology, which regarded the woman as merely the field, while the man provides the crucial seed).
Fertility Rituals & Female Authorities in the Gulf of Guinea
For the Baga people of the swampy Guinean coast, this huge headdress (D’mba) reveres the fundamental role of women and motherhood.
In the Gulf of Guinea, families valued wealth in people. Rituals laud fertility. The matrilineal Bemba in Southern Africa recognise a girl’s first period with the icisungu initiation ceremony. Absent shame or stigma, she becomes a woman.
(This sharply contrasts with Shintoism and Hinduism, wherein menstruation is dirty and polluting. Women are made to feel spiritually unclean and unwelcome.

Now, you may interject, ‘But Catholics also praise the Virgin Mary!’.
Yes, Catholic women are expected to be perfect mothers, but this does not actually confer authority. In Sub Saharan Africa, by contrast, the Queen Mother was a kingmaker.
African women also exercised spiritual leadership - respected as priestesses, diviners, spirit mediums and oracles. Africans listened to women as religious authorities. Supernatural forces were powerful, and women could engage directly with the gods.
Inuit Rituals of Fertility and the Goddess Sedna
Inuits lived in the Arctic, hunted sea mammals, lacked valuable assets and equally valued both maternal and paternal relatives.
The Inuit Tivajuut Festival honours fertility. Both men and women wore masks to participate in this spiritual ritual.
According to Inuit legend, the goddess Sedna ruled the sea and held sway over all creatures. Only when satisfied by humans’ good behaviour did she release animals for their hunts. Their ultimate judge was a female goddess.
Military prowess is unimportant, since there were no turf wars. The Arctic is sparsely populated, territories have equally low value.

The above cases are globally exceptional. Most societies were far more patriarchal. Military might was given cultural pre-eminence. Let me share some examples, then explain this global historical variation.
First Nations Tribes in the Great Lakes, 19th Century
Bull Head (born in 1833) became the leading warrior of his tribe (Tsuu T’ina). During this period of intense inter-tribal warfare, warriors displayed their victories on “war record robes”. Two Guns painted Bull Head’s war deeds on this buffalo hide. It depicts the horses, weapons and scalps taken from their enemies.
This is like a portable equivalent of European military statues or paintings - all three aggrandise military might.
The 5 Iroquoian nations in the Great Lakes built a political alliance. This is represented by the Circle Wampum. 50 strings represent 50 male hereditary chiefs who sit in the council. Art like this naturalises men’s leadership.
Why were 19th century tribes in the Great Lakes more patriarchal than the Inuits in the Artic? My hypothesis is that the Inuits lacked heritable assets, patrilineal kinship, and coalitional conflicts over resources.
Patriarchal Folkore and Norse myths
Folklore is also hugely important to people’s sense of identity. In the 9th-11th centuries, many Norse people were farmers. But their folklore nevertheless gave precedence to military might and represented men as dominant.
Ragnarök is the most prominent myth, culminating in a battle between gods, demons and giants.
Emperors praised conquests and macho prowess
From Assyria to the Aztecs, war-making societies have tended to laud military conquest. This elevates all men - since they’re physically stronger. Obscuring women’s complementary roles as nurturers, such stories and iconography give men special status as protectors.
Macho strength is merely one, among many, ways in which men were venerated. Before the 20th century, in Europe and China alike, men monopolised all positions of prestige. Men were the ultimate arbiters - in the state and religion.

Why was military strength revered?
Rulers gained wealth, territories, slaves and power through conquest. How does one inspire valor among conscripted soldiers, who may well be afraid and exhausted?
War propaganda. Fighters were eulogised and elevated. ‘A man is strong and tough; he fights for God, King and Country’.
Back in the 1800s, life in the British navy was horrific, but vital for empire. Songs like “Rule Britannia!” may have helped encourage patriotism. The chorus goes:
“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never will be slaves”.
During WWII, the US government likewise launched an aggressive campaign of wartime propaganda. A central theme was masculine strength.
In Russia today, Putin has built up a “cult of war”, strummed up victory parades, and cultivated imperial ambitions. Most Russians say strong defence is very important. The State Duma remains 84% male.


Cultural celebrations of masculine power and prestige
Men and women have always been interdependent, performing valuable and complementary roles. But this hasn’t always been reflected in culture.
While some societies (like ancient Anatolia and Mesopotamia, Inuits, and Gulf of Guinea did pay homage to female powers of fertility), this seems to wane with imperial expansion or coalitional conflicts over valuable resources.
Emperors drummed up support for war by celebrating military might. Folklore, ballads and art lavished praise on macho prowess. This endowed all men with status - as powerful protectors.
Patriarchal societies reserved all positions of power and prestige for men - not just military, but religion, education and government. Only male priests could engage with the divine, while women were deemed unclean, condemned to silence. Rebellious women were publicly punished. Since men were always represented as having status, they came to expect (and demand) deference.
I think there is another deep thing in human psychology that leads to the devaluation of "women's work," which is that we notice events that are relatively rare, but everyday things are like the air we breathe, and virtually unnoticed.
War is "men's work," and it's celebrated. Also it's rare, and a response to an acute event: the invaders are here (or we're invading this land), we fight and die and territory is gained or lost, and then it's over. It is very easy to observe war, simply because war only happens occasionally.
Preparing food and clothing, cleaning the dishes and the house, changing the baby are all things that happen all the time. Because they happen all the time, it's easy for them to fade into features of the universe that are just there, and easy to not notice at all (if you're not doing those jobs). Women's work is then only noticed when it is absent: a lack of supper is a problem to be solved, but supper on the table is just how the world is.
I think this is analogous to how gold was discovered and understood as an element from the very dawn of civilization, but oxygen's existence was controversial until the 18th century. Or to use another example, why surgeons are paid more than public health doctors: Surgeons fix an acute problem that is clearly noticeable, whereas if public health is doing a great job, there are just a lot of problems that never happen in the first place (babies *not* dying of diarrhea, women *not* dying of cervical cancer.) It is very hard to notice a problem that never happened, just like it's very hard to notice the air you breathe. And by the same token, I think, it was harder for "women's work" to be recognized than "men's work" was--paradoxically, because there was more of it, and it was always there.
I haven’t read this piece yet, and I must go to bed; however, skimming it inspired me to promote my pet theory (which accompanies my restack), so I’d better put it here too.
If you think I’m way off base, or if I missed a critical bit in your article...I guess I’ll be embarrassed when I wake up tomorrow.
Here ‘tis:
From the beginning, the early stages of parenting made demands exclusively of women; so obviously so, that it was entirely unremarkable - or at least went unremarked.
The typically male realm of early activities necessitated providing for the family, then tribe, while many of the women would be substantially occupied with childcare.
So the following male dynamic evolved:
Plan
Execute Plan
Reap Reward or Survive Failure
Abandon fallout (unintended consequences)
Go for a beer &/or consensual or non consensual sex
Rest
Repeat
This M-O is a gross simplification, but the point is: this dynamic presumes the role of the female is baked in and includes addressing the fallout (starting with, as suggested already, pregnancy), since the men are busy with the important stuff…the stuff that requires planning.
So there are two groups: the planners, and the cleanup crew. Plans are tautological, they require…planning; whereas the fallout dictates the nature of its resolution.
Plans come from within, they are created and imposed on the world; fallout is created byproduct, it is external to and imposes itself on the cleanup crew.
The planning is misinterpreted as conferring a special status, and the proof is in the drudgery of work that self evidently needs none of that ‘higher level’ (male) thinking.
[I wonder if that outmoded expression ‘woman’s intuition’ ties in here; plans need articulation while comprehension does not]
Applying this recursively over centuries, most states, institutions, and enterprises were forged in this dynamic and never reconsidered from the ground up; rather, we’ve had a lot of patches, but it’s still humanity OS 1.x.
Look at the world.
Time for a new OS. I’ll bet it would prioritize children. Applied wholeheartedly over just one entire generation, that would fix everything.
:)