Including running marathons, attending schooling designed for men, driving cars, boot camp, and riding on trains. All of which risk a woman's womb being dislodged and just yeeting itself around...
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task and that attempting to do so could harm their precious reproductive capacities.
Including running marathons, attending schooling designed for men, driving cars, boot camp, and riding on trains. All of which risk a woman's womb being dislodged and just yeeting itself around her body, or damaging her "complex anatomy". Fun fact the boot camp one was less than 20 years ago.
It also bears mentioning that much of the research into exercise physiology, paleoanthropology, archaeology and ethnography has historically been conducted by men and focused on males.
That's what I've been saying! Particularly white males. Particularly upper class white males. Treating female atheletes as "small men" is just part of that problem.
Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
ಠ_ʖಠ
Observations of recent and contemporary foraging societies provide direct evidence of women participating in hunting. The most cited examples come from the Agta people of the Philippines. Agta women hunt while menstruating, pregnant and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as Agta men.
Women have always had to work when menstruating. And without birth control, many women were almost always pregnant or breastfeeding. I wish it didn't take centuries for someone else to figure this out.
This is just a misunderstanding of how competitive running actually works. Having a pace setter break the air resistance is a significant advantage. But there are rules for how this is done in...
Exemplary
Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
ಠ_ʖಠ
This is just a misunderstanding of how competitive running actually works. Having a pace setter break the air resistance is a significant advantage. But there are rules for how this is done in competition. The first man to run a marathon under 2 hours, Eliud Kipchoge, didn't get the time recognized as an official world record, despite "running himself", because the pace setters were rotating in and out of the race, which isn't permitted. You can look at the recent men's 1500m Olympic final to see the guy running in front the whole race - who had by far the best PB in the race - completely fading in the last 200m while three guys ran past him to set new personal bests. Those guys were running on their own but would never have been able to run that fast without someone faster than them front running.
In many events, there's literally hundreds, possibly thousands of male athletes who could pace a female WR run to the finish line. This is clearly not comparable to a race with women only.
Just like Kipchoge ran "artificially faster" due to rotating pacemakers, so could women with male pacemakers. It's just a very strange framing. Women's and men's athletics are separate for a reason. Sports have rules to ensure that results are fair and records set in different competitions are comparable, which is also why only a 2m/s tailwind is allowed in sprints. lt's not sexism to suggest that a women's world record should be performed in a women's race.
It also has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not women hunted during Neolithic times. It doesn't mean that women aren't capable runners. Top female athletes would absolutely smoke the average dude. You don't just show up and run a 2:16 marathon ("women only" marathon world record), even if the women's record in a mixed-sex race of 2:11 (both are recognized by World Athletics as separate records) is faster.
It's not about disparaging women athletes, it's about fairness and consistency across different competitions. You can't run with whatever shoes you want either, even if it's your own feet doing the running; there are rules for that too, because some shoes are deemed so energy efficient as to be equivalent to "mechanical doping" and therefore banned. Athletics isn't just "run a certain distance as fast as possible", like all sports it also has various ancilliary rules and regulations. This particular rule has nothing to do with the point of the article and bringing it up in this context sounds like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about.
I appreciate that they mention exercise physiology, as historically speaking, it almost exclusively studies white men who go to college. This is, to some extent, an artifact of capitalism and how...
I appreciate that they mention exercise physiology, as historically speaking, it almost exclusively studies white men who go to college. This is, to some extent, an artifact of capitalism and how we have decided to structure research in our country (most researchers are employed by colleges), but also because white men who go to college are easily financially influenced. That is to say, if you place an open call for study participants and tell them you'll compensate them a pittance for their time and effort, you almost exclusively end up selecting for people who are in close proximity and who have little income.
In general across scientific (and especially medical-related) fields we've seen an expansion of the inclusion of female and minority participants on the heels of requirements set by bodies which hand out funding and calls to action by researchers in these fields focused on ethics and a general increase in the quality of meta-analyses. With that being said, however, we are still many years out from truly understanding the repercussions of this particularly college white male problem. I hope that this kind of thinking expands more generally across more fields (I'm looking intently at you, technology) but also into the social consciousness. As we become a society which is more global my hope is that we spend more time focusing on what our knowledge actually represents and break down more of these taken-for-granted ideas about what is 'factually' correct and challenge more assumptions we've collectively made about the world based on the thoughts of a few biased individuals.
I wouldn't hold my breath, especially as the narrative sold to gen Alpha becomes more and more "college isn't worth the money anymore, pick up trades" . Which has some point: college prices are...
I hope that this kind of thinking expands more generally across more fields (I'm looking intently at you, technology)
I wouldn't hold my breath, especially as the narrative sold to gen Alpha becomes more and more "college isn't worth the money anymore, pick up trades" . Which has some point: college prices are out of control and attempts to stop this is blocked by the courts.
And who can statistically still afford to college when it becomes a premium? Yup, white males. Women too, but all the DEI initiatives cooling down or outright shutting down doesn't give me confidence in the long term.
It’s men who have disproportionately not been going to college recently. The facts about men being more likely to attend university than women are outdated.
It’s men who have disproportionately not been going to college recently. The facts about men being more likely to attend university than women are outdated.
Specifically they're historical and relevant to when many of the core theories and much of the research that underlies the mentioned academic fields were being developed. But they're not current...
Specifically they're historical and relevant to when many of the core theories and much of the research that underlies the mentioned academic fields were being developed. But they're not current as women do make up the majority of incoming college classes and of college graduates.
Yeah, college overall skewed female. the proportions shift dramatically based on major. My main focus was on the financial burdens rather than the gender divide. I don't think more women will take...
Yeah, college overall skewed female. the proportions shift dramatically based on major.
My main focus was on the financial burdens rather than the gender divide. I don't think more women will take up tech just because more men are dropping out (which lines up with the "trades" narrative as of late). Those kinds of decisions needs to be influneced in the middle/high school level.
Women would probably more be willing and interested into getting into tech if so many of them didn't get chased out of it due to the people and corporate cultures. And what they encounter in college.
Women would probably more be willing and interested into getting into tech if so many of them didn't get chased out of it due to the people and corporate cultures. And what they encounter in college.
It's definately no single factor. There have been big strides to address the "people issue", though. At the very least, if it occurs, people of all levels aren't safe like it may have been for big...
It's definately no single factor. There have been big strides to address the "people issue", though. At the very least, if it occurs, people of all levels aren't safe like it may have been for big execs decades ago. However, Justice can be slow.
I can assure you that corporate cultures only disciminate by class, not necessarily race or gender (or at least not as overtly as class). This economic squeeze and need to make number go up is hitting all working class
There's another thread recently posted that suggests that it's probably not addressed, and bad behavior is absolutely not limited to the C suite. I see it in college students, I've heard it from...
There's another thread recently posted that suggests that it's probably not addressed, and bad behavior is absolutely not limited to the C suite. I see it in college students, I've heard it from women who work in those tech jobs. I saw it in the corporation I worked for, albeit it was in Corrections.
Corporations absolutely discriminate based on race and gender, not just class. Generally people will feel the discrimination they experience the most is the most severe. Plenty of things intersect with class. Having to afford (and know how to style) business or business casual clothes may be a class issue. But the things that are considered appropriate to wear differ based on gender, and women are generally expected to wear makeup, shave their body hair, etc on top of this attire and are judged more harshly when they don't conform to it. But what is considered business/casual attire is also confirming to white norms leading natural Black hair to be considered unprofessional or messy, other cultural attire or equal quality and class will be rejected as inappropriate, etc. And body size - fat people will be perceived as slovenly. Gender identity - pronouns won't be respected if attire is business appropriate because it's confusing, but then if someone is perceived to be in the attire of the "wrong" gender thats also inappropriate. I could go on.
It's intersectional, not one directional. Discounting the experiences of people experiencing those things or minimizing the impact of racism and sexism in favor of classism isn't class solidarity or allyship.
We need to agree on "proper" first. I'm not saying racism/sexism is over, but I do argue that the last decade or 2 has decreased it. Is it enough? I'm not the judge of that. There will always be...
There's another thread recently posted that suggests that it's probably not addressed, and bad behavior is absolutely not limited to the C suite. I
We need to agree on "proper" first. I'm not saying racism/sexism is over, but I do argue that the last decade or 2 has decreased it.
Is it enough? I'm not the judge of that. There will always be some bad actors and bad intentions, so the ideal in my mind isn't to reduce the number to 0%. It's to make sure as many (ideally, all) bad actors are properly punished as possible. That people aren't afraid to report a superior and are properly protected from retaliation.
Workers are already on a thread so any HR violation will already get them canned. I only mentioned executives because even 15 years ago they would in fact get away with basically murder (Hello, Bobby Kotick). Having more of them face consequences and know that they are not above the rules is a big step. But I know many more are still out there. So we're far from done.
I also realize this is regional. My region is pretty diverse and accepting, and isn't really stuffy suit culture for work. so I may be in a better position than, say, the Bible belt.
I can assure you that Tech is neither monolithic nor has it been cured of sexism. It is absolutely still present *whether you have seen it or not. Edit: typo
I can assure you that Tech is neither monolithic nor has it been cured of sexism. It is absolutely still present *whether you have seen it or not.
I addressed this in another reply, so I'll paste a part of it here:
I addressed this in another reply, so I'll paste a part of it here:
We need to agree on "proper" first. I'm not saying racism/sexism is over, but I do argue that the last decade or 2 has decreased it.
Is it enough? I'm not the judge of that. There will always be some bad actors and bad intentions, so the ideal in my mind isn't to reduce the number to 0%. It's to make sure as many (ideally, all) bad actors are properly punished as possible. That people aren't afraid to report a superior and are properly protected from retaliation.
I work for a college, my kid gets to go to college for free (pro tip for anybody worried about college prices there). And I have already told them from a young age that going to college is not...
I work for a college, my kid gets to go to college for free (pro tip for anybody worried about college prices there). And I have already told them from a young age that going to college is not necessarily a better proposition than becoming well-versed in a trade.
Having talked to tradespeople, there is a dire lack of people in that middle ground between 30 and 50 right now. Several people I know who went to college got burned out on doing the job they trained for in college, and ended up going back and entering trades later. I'm now firmly in the camp of "learn a trade first, get an established career under your belt, then take night classes or go back to school once you have some experience under your belt, some savings, and you have a better understanding of what you really want to do in life." I'm the only one out of 4 siblings that worked in a career related to my undergrad degree, and my sister didn't until she went to school to be a therapist a decade after not using the first one.
I still think even tradespeople benefit from advanced degrees, there's plenty of practical applications even if you're wielding a screwdriver more than a computer, but I think that's going to be on colleges to help incorporate proper trades programs into a broader education enhancement, especially as public funds (hopefully) start flowing in to eliminate costs to students.
I agree in spirit. As someone trying to do more schoolwork while working full time (well, tried a few years back), I know it's a much more harrowing journey and you basically suck up all your free...
I agree in spirit. As someone trying to do more schoolwork while working full time (well, tried a few years back), I know it's a much more harrowing journey and you basically suck up all your free time between work, schoolwork, and any other duties in the house.
We just get so little time to ourselves as is. Adding more learning on top of that really drains you.
but I think that's going to be on colleges to help incorporate proper trades programs into a broader education enhancement, especially as public funds (hopefully) start flowing in to eliminate costs to students.
I'm ambivalent. It's no secret that college has basically shifted to being a job training mill for most students, but it does make me bemoan the shift away to the original spirit of where college was a place of enrichment and advancement. being able to research to push society forward. an environment where you can focus on what's right or how to improve upon something instead of pushing pencils
It also just has negative effect on the job market. Training programs have plummeted and part of that is that they expect a college student to know exactly how to navigate that offices' proprietary pipeline. Naturally, they don't because you need to work there to know what that company needs and values. 4 years of general training won't make up for that compared to even a decent 6 month internship.
Oh yes, the specifics are definitely something that needs worked out. But since colleges have become de-facto vocational schools for large swaths of industries anyway, expanding that to cover the...
Oh yes, the specifics are definitely something that needs worked out. But since colleges have become de-facto vocational schools for large swaths of industries anyway, expanding that to cover the blue collar as well has the added benefits of bringing those non-vocational advantages to the working class that otherwise gets told to fuck off (in essence).
That's a weird narrative to push when white males are currently one of the most underrepresented groups in colleges right now. 18.03% of graduate students were white males in Fall 2022 (21.18% of...
That's a weird narrative to push when white males are currently one of the most underrepresented groups in colleges right now. 18.03% of graduate students were white males in Fall 2022 (21.18% of postsecondary students). They make up 31% of the population. In fact, just looking roughly at the statistics shows that white males are by far the most underrepresented group of people in colleges (in the US). These numbers have been dropping consistently 1-2% every 4 years, so since these are 2022 figures, the real number is probably closer to 16%.
That by far does a bit of lifting. They are underrepresented compared to most female groups, but not men: Percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college (2022) Race/ethnicity Male Female...
by far the most underrepresented group of people in colleges (in the US)
That by far does a bit of lifting. They are underrepresented compared to most female groups, but not men:
Percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college (2022)
It might also be worth pointing out that this statistic only shows the enrollment rate, and not the graduation rate. The percentage of white men of ages 25-29 with a degree has paradoxically increased, despite what the decreasing enrollment rate would imply. More of them also seem to have degrees compared to some female groups. Though not compared to white females, of whom a higher percentage do indeed seem to obtain higher levels of education.
Percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with Bachelor's or higher
degree (2023)
I may have misinterpreted the stats on the site I linked, I'm not very competent in statistics. It said that only 52% of people who participated in college enrollment identified as white, with...
I may have misinterpreted the stats on the site I linked, I'm not very competent in statistics. It said that only 52% of people who participated in college enrollment identified as white, with close to a 60/40 split on female vs male attendance. That would put the numbers for white male attendance down at just 20%~ of all college enrollments which is the lowest it's ever been by far, especially compared to population demographics of which they make up 31% of the population.
The other percentages where much closer to the population demographic numbers with black students making up 13.2% of enrollment numbers and 14.4% of the population; and Hispanics making up 21.5% of enrollment numbers and only 19.5% of the population. (This number is likely off due to undocumented individuals, but it's still representative)
Maybe these sites are pulling data from different sources?
I used one of their sources, though I'm having trouble finding the exact documents they used. One difference is that they show the enrollment rate of all US residents, whereas my source shows it...
I used one of their sources, though I'm having trouble finding the exact documents they used. One difference is that they show the enrollment rate of all US residents, whereas my source shows it only for 18-24 year olds. According to the 2020 US Census (Excel document) white people represented 58% of the total population, and 50% of the 18-24 year olds. 52% is somewhere in the middle of that, and presumably there should be a bias towards the lower number, so the enrollment rate doesn't immediately strike me as being majorly off.
I agree with you. The biggest benefactor of student loans have been from Africans and Asians IIRC. Asians were dominating to a point where they became targets of "reverse discimination". But I...
I agree with you. The biggest benefactor of student loans have been from Africans and Asians IIRC. Asians were dominating to a point where they became targets of "reverse discimination".
But I don't think the money up top has changed as dramatically. So my statement was hinging more on:
And who can statistically still afford to college when it becomes a premium? Yup, white males
Than an implication that mostly white people currently go to college.
I suspect that the main reason we as a society tend to assume that women gathered while men hunted is because most of our understanding of human behavior is based on recent historical data, which...
Exemplary
I suspect that the main reason we as a society tend to assume that women gathered while men hunted is because most of our understanding of human behavior is based on recent historical data, which is overwhelmingly based on agricultural economies.
In agricultural settings, we tend to see very large families, which means mothers spend a significant portion of their lives pregnant, nursing, and tending to very small children. This makes intense multi-day journeys a lot more difficult to arrange, so it made sense for families to distribute travel-based tasks to fathers and home-based tasks to mothers. And so travel-based tasks (working distant fields, managing distant flocks, sailing, mining, hunting for supplementary meat, etc.) were more male-coded, while home-based tasks (cooking, washing, growing vegetables, producing textiles, managing poultry, etc.) were more female-coded. These gendered activities were adopted across many different cultures for practical reasons — just like wearing pants (useful for certain kinds of physical labor that men mostly did) versus skirts (useful for people who must squat to pee) were widely adopted for practical reasons. We see a similar pattern play out in complex modern economies, where mothers are more likely than fathers to take time off work; it makes sense when only one of the two partners can give birth and breastfeed.
However, hunter-gatherers were not so limited. Birth rates were much lower before the adoption of agriculture and studies of modern hunter-gatherers indicate that they have bigger gaps between births. This difference may in part be due to environmental reasons (agricultural societies needed more people to sustain the diversity of agricultural activities necessary for our complex nutritional needs, and they also had higher mortality rates and therefore needed to have more children just to sustain their populations) and in part due to physiological reasons (hunter-gatherer women seem to naturally have fewer children without making any particular effort to control their fertility, possibly due to lower body fat levels and to having longer breastfeeding periods as a consequence of to needing to physically carry their babies into their toddler years).
Whatever the cause, having fewer children and longer gaps between children would have made it a lot easier for women to travel and to partake in the same activities as men.
I think this is one of those examples of finding evolutionary reasons for behaviors based on more modern behavior, instead of social ones. The first pants we know about were probably for...
just like wearing pants (useful for certain kinds of physical labor that men mostly did) versus skirts (useful for people who must squat to pee) were widely adopted for practical reasons
I think this is one of those examples of finding evolutionary reasons for behaviors based on more modern behavior, instead of social ones.
The first pants we know about were probably for horse-riding in what is now China, somewhere between 1200-900 BCE. And it seems to be fully gender neutral.
The Greeks didn't wear pants, and thought the Persians were strange for doing so. Men and women both wore pants in Persia at the time though. And Rome thought pants were barbaric until they invaded colder spaces. Both genders work them among Germanic people
When pants showed up in Korea, they seem to have been worn equally, though skirts were sometimes worn over them for women.
In Western Europe and the US women weren't allowed to wear pants whether socially or, sometimes, legally. One vagrancy law in the US treated women who wore pants as wearing a disguise and thus arrestable. Women weren't allowed to wear pants on the US Senate floor until 1993. But we're far past the timeline here. Clothing today is mostly socially driven with protective wear for certain jobs being an exception.
But there's zero evidence that skirts were women's clothes due to the ease of squatting and peeing in them vs men needing pants for work. The genders were much more often socially bound and legally bound to perform the "correct" attire. But in early agricultural days, only the steppe riders were wearing pants.
Anecdotally, I find pants much easier to pee in than long skirts. Yes, you need to pull them down before you squat, but you have a lot of control over where the fabric goes and what it does while...
Anecdotally, I find pants much easier to pee in than long skirts. Yes, you need to pull them down before you squat, but you have a lot of control over where the fabric goes and what it does while you're peeing. A long skirt goes straight to the ground, sure, but it doesn't take much of a breeze to come through and make you pee all over it.
Short skirts are the easiest, but whether those are considered an alternative to pants depends on when and where you're talking about.
Long skirts, especially A-line or other flared styles, are amazingly easy to pee in. Hike it up, give it a twist and throw it over a shoulder. Completely out of the way. I do this in all bathrooms...
Long skirts, especially A-line or other flared styles, are amazingly easy to pee in. Hike it up, give it a twist and throw it over a shoulder. Completely out of the way. I do this in all bathrooms when I'm wearing a skirt just to keep it clean.
If you wear a skirt without underwear, and it's a long, loose skirt made out of a reasonably dense fabric similar to the homespun cloth of our ancestors, it makes squatting in the woods a lot...
If you wear a skirt without underwear, and it's a long, loose skirt made out of a reasonably dense fabric similar to the homespun cloth of our ancestors, it makes squatting in the woods a lot nicer than pants — particularly if you want to make certain you don't accidentally expose your bum to someone. The skirts makes a kind of tent around you that gives you total privacy while you do the deed.
For a woman living on a medieval farm, this was likely pretty handy. You didn't need to find some secret place to go pee; you could probably just go behind an outbuilding or in a ditch, even if there were other farm workers around.
Toilets and underwear change that equation, so it's no surprise that skirts have fallen enormously in popularity.
I'm not sure that your comment really contradicts mine. Horseback riding is the prime example of a kind of physical labor that pants are very useful for, and it is work that was mostly performed...
I'm not sure that your comment really contradicts mine. Horseback riding is the prime example of a kind of physical labor that pants are very useful for, and it is work that was mostly performed by men. Even though there are exceptions in certain cultures, regions, and historical periods, it is nonetheless the case that pants were developed for utilitarian purposes (even though they gained cultural/legal baggage later on), that they were more beneficial to certain kinds of labor that tended to performed by men more often than women (e.g., pants are more useful for plowing than they are for brewing), and that men broadly adopted them more widely than women.
As for the usefulness of skirts, this is just anecdotal, but full-length skirts (if worn without underpants, which is how they were worn historically) are very useful when you need to squat to pee because you need not uncover any part of your body during the process. When I go camping, I strongly prefer to bring a skirt for when I'm around the campsite because it makes squatting behind a tree trivial, particularly if there are potentially other people around who might spot me. We have to remember that indoor toilets are a recent invention.
I disagree; you've made a lot of assertions about how and why pants developed, even though in ancient times, the use of pants was pretty gender-neutral when they developed. Either the entire...
I disagree; you've made a lot of assertions about how and why pants developed, even though in ancient times, the use of pants was pretty gender-neutral when they developed. Either the entire culture did or didn't consider pants an option. For example, the people of the steppes all rode horses, and as I said, the evidence is that the pants were gender-neutral. The Greeks didn't wear pants, despite doing agriculture and all those manly activities.
This isn't "exceptions" these are the major cultures we know of during the times. Do you have evidence that pants developed that way? Because you're sort of doing the exact same thing that anthropologists of the past were doing - looking at a our modern status quo of pants being default male attire and making a lot of assumptions about why it must have obviously been the case throughout history. Whether pants were adopted wasn't gendered, but was based on the culture and needs of the people. The labor wasn't particularly gendered, that is again the stereotype that this article was addressing.
We have to remember that indoor toilets are a recent invention.
"We" have to remember that because private toilets are a recent invention, indoor or otherwise, that modesty is different in different cultures. Hence the privacy-free mass toilets (with handy reusable sponge wipes) of Rome. Trousers and breeches and wrap pants all had pros and cons with toilet habits, as did the various togas/wraps/tunics/kilts/etc.
Just to be clear, are you saying that in non-nomadic agricultural communities that had highly gendered divisions of labor, and in particular where men did the bulk of labor where pants are much...
Just to be clear, are you saying that in non-nomadic agricultural communities that had highly gendered divisions of labor, and in particular where men did the bulk of labor where pants are much more practical (such as riding horses), men and women wore pants and skirts at the same rate? Because those are the cultures I was talking about. I was not talking about nomadic populations, populations without gender divisions, or populations that did not adopt pants at all.
Here is the comment I made:
These gendered activities were adopted across many different cultures for practical reasons — just like wearing pants (useful for certain kinds of physical labor that men mostly did) versus skirts (useful for people who must squat to pee) were widely adopted for practical reasons.
Note that I made no claims that these clothes were gendered universally — just that they were gendered widely. In different many cultures, skirts became female-coded and pants became male-coded. (I personally don't know of any cultures that went the opposite way — where skirts became male-coded and pants became female-coded — but maybe you do. I'm sure it must have happened here and there, but it would surely be uncommon for settled agrarian societies based on the way such societies usually divvy up labor.)
The reason I brought it up at all was to argue that men and women exhibiting these gendered differences (wearing different clothes and doing different jobs) is a reflection of the social and economic environment that they live in, and should not be assumed to be a reflection of innate differences. Nobody thinks women inherently wear skirts and men inherently wear pants, yet people do assume that women inherently do "safe, easy" tasks like gathering and men inherently do "hard, dangerous" tasks like hunting, even though that's just as unfounded. In the agricultural communities and history that the western world is most familiar with, many gender divisions arose for practical reasons and took on cultural meaning that reinforced them — but something being practiced in one context (such as these sedentary agricultural societies) does not mean it is practiced in other contexts (such as nomadic hunting-gathering societies discussed in the OP's article).
I'm saying you've provided no evidence to your theory, not even examples of earlier agricultural societies that gendered their pants based on labor. Instead while clothing was gendered in style,...
I'm saying you've provided no evidence to your theory, not even examples of earlier agricultural societies that gendered their pants based on labor. Instead while clothing was gendered in style, that style doesn't seem to reflect pants or not. Greece, Rome, Persia, Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Pre-Columbian America, Ancient Judea, etc. I don't even know.which cultures you're now referring to with your narrowed criteria. What era? What continent?
I am not an expert in this, I'm basing it off of Wikipedia and some really basic entry level information, but those cultures all did agricultural, and were primarily settled* and the ones that wore pant like things wore them universally due to weather or cultural style.
Obviously gendered divisions in pants vs no pants became more prominent later but I've not come up with one that happened earlier. That I can find, they all happen after contact with Christianity. But even early Christians matched the attire or their surrounding culture. I found one suggestion of the Iron Age Celts wearing gendered clothing in that manner but the other references said we really don't know what they wore consistently. Likely they influenced the Romans to wear pants because snow was cold.
Pants being useful for certain types of work? Sure, though again many cultures did that work without pants quite well. Similarly many men wore the equivalent of long skirts for farm labor and herding alike. It seems far more likely to me, based on this history that it was a cultural shift facilitated by a technological one as clothing became easier to make in cities. But what I can show is that early through agricultural societies' gendered clothing has no consistent split with pants vs no pants. By the Byzantines, leggings and hose were around, though still associated with barbarians (aka Europeans and Persians) and laborers wore tunics, not pants. (Western Romans eventually adopted them when in northern Europe because of the cold but not "at home" as far as I can tell) So that's when you start to see them appear in these large civilizations with any regularity. And it seems like by this point gendered clothing already had aspects of modesty deeply built into women's attire in particular. So where did the pants develop without those other cultural rules already in place?
I can find no evidence of women's clothes being such "out of convenience" or of pants being dominant for only men purely out of a rational necessity. Gendering of pants seems to be much later, and not done by the people working the farm, but by the people running the countries and/or the churches. By this point there are social and religious expectations about the existing gendered clothing and often both genders are restricted though women in particular in what they can wear.
I'm happy to be educated otherwise should you have evidence. But nothing I can find suggests it's any sort of natural development out of rationality rather than culturally spread along with some particularly gendered moral (such as dressing as the other gender being immoral) and societal expectations.
*"Pre-Columbian as a term is lumping a bunch of cultures together and not all were as settled but alas the article lumped them together.
ETA: Ask Historians answer on when pants became popular, mostly about when clothing got easier to make fitting. Peasants wore tunics and nobles and tradesmen wore gowns as often as not.
It was a throwaway comment within a larger comment on a small forum, not an academic article, but I would be positively flabbergasted if the adoption of pants by agricultural laborers was...
It was a throwaway comment within a larger comment on a small forum, not an academic article, but I would be positively flabbergasted if the adoption of pants by agricultural laborers was arbitrary — that, if we could go back in time and reroll the dice, agricultural laborers could just as easily not have adopted pants as they became available in their societies. For the upper classes, sure, I can buy that — but I just don't see it with the general subsistence farmers who made up the bulk of the population.
I have lived on an 80-acre farm for the last 12 years, and I also worked on a commercial farm for 8 years. I cannot emphasize enough how much clothing choice matters when you are doing hard labor on a farm.
When you work outside all days in conditions where weather exposure or sunburn are a concern, you need a full-length covering over your legs as a general rule. For this, your options are either going to be a long skirt (or, if we are being pedantic, something functionally equivalent such as a dress or a robe) or long pants (or, to be pedantic, something functionally equivalent such as overalls or high stockings).
For many farming tasks, such as hoeing a vegetable garden, collecting apples, or scattering feed to livestock, skirts (or skirt equivalents) are absolutely fine. They can even be preferable in some circumstances, as they can be used like aprons to carry small items like grain.
But for most hard labor tasks, you really do not want to be wearing a long skirt. You want pants (or pants equivalents) when you trudge through a muddy plowed field, clamber over fences, climb up ladders, etc. You can do these tasks in a long skirt, but you would probably have to hike your skirt up, leaving your legs exposed. Mind you, wearing a short skirt (such as a tunic) over your pants would be completely fine — that's not so different to the long coats farm workers commonly wear today in bad weather — but pants are still the main garment protecting the legs in such an outfit.
I know we can't go back in time and survey the first pants-wearing subsistence farmers to see why they chose pants instead of skirts, but I would be extremely surprised if utilitarianism wasn't the primary factor. For farmers who didn't adopt pants, maybe pants were not available yet or were not socially acceptable in their society, or maybe pants were simply prohibitively expensive, but I would be stunned if it was an arbitrary decision.
I'm saying agricultural workers existed for a long time without pants. But I never said long skirts were the attire of farmers. Kilts and tunics, seem to be the common attire of farm workers....
I'm saying agricultural workers existed for a long time without pants. But I never said long skirts were the attire of farmers. Kilts and tunics, seem to be the common attire of farm workers. Since pants/leggings developed primarily for two reasons - riding horses and cold weather attire. So most early subsistence farmers were wearing short skirts or the equivalent. But farming would have looked a lot different, I don't know the history of fencing your land but I bet it wasn't the same for centuries across all these cultures. And labor wasn't always gendered the way we assume either. Women worked on farms too. In some cultures today, women do most of the substence farming vs men doing the cash crop farming. Many of them wear shift dresses and skirts.
Here's an example of drawings of European working clothes from the 1000s, we've got long and short tunics and what looks like a wrap pant (or possibly a longer skirt tucked up like pants), and a pair of braies, some with hose, some without. So some pant like options were available but not everyone was wearing them.
Yes some cultures hadn't invented pants yet or had them spread via trade or war but that's the point. They didn't develop because of agriculture. And while agricultural workers may have adopted them as they were socially acceptable, they weren't inherently needed since that work was being done. Women's long skirts weren't naturally better suited for them either considering men were wearing robes and tunics during much of the same time.
Women have worn pants throughout history too - whether bloomers or sliding on a pair of work pants under a skirt in European history or because everyone is wearing them elsewhere. Because long skirts, outside of winter/robes when everyone was wearing them, were more about cultural modesty.
My criticism of your comment is the presentism of it. You're essentially doing the same thing that evopsych does (which the other commentator made me think of)- look at the status quo today and assume that this is the obvious and natural outcome and look for the explanations that lead you there. Yes I'm sure as pants became culturally available, those people that were allowed to wear them did, if they wanted to. Which not all farmers did at those times. But not everyone was allowed to or wanted to because pants were not inherently the ideal to them. But every bit of evidence I can find suggests that the gendering of this clothing is about societal rules, not common sense. This is the same mistake those anthropologists made about how obviously men hunted and the women stayed at "home" or how obviously women did all the childcare, etc. because that was the society they were used to.
And yes this is a forum, but it's Tildes, and you made an authoritative comment that as far as I can tell, is incorrect. I am very open to learning more and being wrong, but personal pants experience says absolutely nothing about the history of clothing across all cultures
Attributing this myth to differences in birth rates and time between pregnancies seems to ignore quite a lot of the evidence that the article goes into at length: The idea that women not hunting...
Attributing this myth to differences in birth rates and time between pregnancies seems to ignore quite a lot of the evidence that the article goes into at length:
For those practicing a foraging subsistence strategy in small family groups, flexibility and adaptability are much more important than rigid roles, gendered or otherwise. Individuals get injured or die, and the availability of animal and plant foods changes with the seasons. All group members need to be able to step into any role depending on the situation, whether that role is hunter or breeding partner.
Observations of recent and contemporary foraging societies provide direct evidence of women participating in hunting. The most cited examples come from the Agta people of the Philippines. Agta women hunt while menstruating, pregnant and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as Agta men.
They are hardly alone. A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years—much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters. The women participate in hunting regardless of their childbearing status. These findings directly challenge the Man the Hunter assumption that women's bodies and childcare responsibilities limit their efforts to gathering foods that cannot run away.
The idea that women not hunting is strictly a practical concern due to the realities of pregnancy and childcare is clearly contradicted by the fact that the women in these societies hunt while pregnant and breastfeeding, which does not clearly indicate that being pregnant more often or having more children to care for necessarily entails not participating in tasks like hunting. While it very well may be true that agricultural settings encourage division of labor and large families in ways that foraging societies do not, purely attributing sex-based division of labor to practical reasons doesn't hold up, in my opinion.
It is far too easy to retroactively explain behaviors that are heavily influenced if not fully explained by cultural factors as being rooted in some practical division naturally evolving if you want to do so (as you've done here with the whole pants/skirts thing, which @DefinitelyNotAFae has already pointed out the historical context as a highly cultural distinction rather than a practical one in most cases).
I want to reiterate that I was not talking about hunting specifically, but about going on travel-intensive journeys. Some hunting (as well as fishing, etc.) could be done close to home, and there...
I want to reiterate that I was not talking about hunting specifically, but about going on travel-intensive journeys. Some hunting (as well as fishing, etc.) could be done close to home, and there is absolutely no reason why pregnant women, nursing women, or women managing toddlers couldn't have done these tasks. After all, my own great aunt was hunting deer when she was 8 months pregnant with her 8th child — but, importantly, she was hunting deer in her yard, not going on hunting trips
Going on an intensive hunting trip is going to be a lot trickier for a mother of young children (not because the mother is incapable of journeying that hard, but because the children are) or for a woman in the later stages of pregnancy.
But for nomadic women, this would not have been much of a barrier. They spent a smaller portion of their lives managing children who couldn't handle intense travel. But, importantly, much more hunting could be done close to home; that's kind of the point of being nomadic, after all.
Mind you, there are hunting-gathering cultures today where we do see major labor division between men and women. For example, amongst the San people, gathering is largely performed by women and hunting is largely performed by men. However, the San people are not very nomadic; they tend to live in larger groups and remain in the same settlements for long periods of time (e.g., several years). For this reason, their hunting generally cannot be done close to home; when the men go out to hunt, they are gone for several days at a time and have to range very long distances to find prey. As the San people get hemmed in more and more by encroaching civilizations (which hampers their migration) and as wild animal populations continue to collapse (which requires longer and longer hunting trips), I suspect their lifestyles will become increasingly gendered and agriculture-like.
I’m only partway through, but I recommend The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 It describes pretty strong gender roles among Native Americans at that time,...
It describes pretty strong gender roles among Native Americans at that time, though not exclusively so.
The connection between hunting and war is that warriors were able to travel long distances without much in the way of a supply chain (though they used canoes where feasible), partly relying on hunting.
The evidence is largely from European historical accounts, sometimes from people who were captured, so close reading is needed to understand how it might have looked from the Native American point of view. Still, it’s better than the guesswork needed when interpreting archaeological evidence alone.
I may poke at that, I read a few reviews. I'd love to know how those histories went fully pre-European contact. The 1500s were when small pox ravaged Mexico and Central America and the 1600s is...
I may poke at that, I read a few reviews. I'd love to know how those histories went fully pre-European contact. The 1500s were when small pox ravaged Mexico and Central America and the 1600s is the Great Dying. What the Europeans saw of culture, in so much as they could even understand it correctly, had to have been so altered. The reviews look good at least!
Reminds me of this article from the National Museum of Denmark which also shows how physiological differences are not set in stone: The article lists no source though, and even today, the skull is...
Reminds me of this article from the National Museum of Denmark which also shows how physiological differences are not set in stone:
The faces of men and women in the Viking Age were more alike than they are today. The women’s faces were more masculine than women’s today, with prominent brow ridges. On the other hand, the Viking man’s appearance was more feminine than that of men today, with a less prominent jaw and brow ridges.
These ambiguous facial features mean that it is difficult to decide upon a Viking skeleton’s sex based on the skull alone. Therefore, other traits need to be studied in order to identify the sex of skeletons. Pelvis width can be very useful in this respect.
The article lists no source though, and even today, the skull is the least accurate in determining biological sex (and the pelvis the most accurate) I think, but I still found it interesting.
This reminds me. Findings from disciplines like archaeology are one major reason why a lot of evolutionary psychology studies are built on an extremely shaky assumption: that behavior in current...
This reminds me. Findings from disciplines like archaeology are one major reason why a lot of evolutionary psychology studies are built on an extremely shaky assumption: that behavior in current age necessarily predicts behavior in other ages, which then evo psychs attribute to "human nature" (a.k.a. lingering modernist doodoo in social sciences).
Disclaimer: effect of differential genetics is not in question. I have a genetics background. What is in question is jumping the gun about genetics, essentially being an essentialist, when there are strong confounding factors (e.g. culture).
This bad science also is often used to legitimize the conservative essentialist beliefs about people, especially in terms of gender, making the whole thing much worse. Every single scientist inevitably makes many mistakes, due to personal, structural, temporal, historical, etc. limitations. However, when handling topics this ideologically important, I think the researchers should be doubly cautious, when in reality many of evo psychs are not even singly cautious.
Oh gosh, don't get me started on evolutionary psychology. I think the thing that frustrates me most about evolutionary psychologists is that they seemingly make no attempt to test their...
Oh gosh, don't get me started on evolutionary psychology.
I think the thing that frustrates me most about evolutionary psychologists is that they seemingly make no attempt to test their hypotheses. Granted, this is not a field I pay any real attention to because everything I've seen come out of it so far has been pseudoscience — but I would genuinely be interested to see if there are any evolutionary psychologists making predictions based on their ideas and then doing well-designed studies to see if their predictions hold.
For example, if someone hypothesizes that men perform better* on spatial tests because men hunt, then let's look for some kind of evidence. We can't turn back time and do studies on our ancestors, but there are tons of other animal species we can look at: species where males do more hunting that females (e.g., certain songbirds), species where females do more hunting than males (e.g., lions), and species where both hunt the same amount. We even have species where males and females hunt different kinds of prey (e.g., certain birds of prey). Surely it is worth checking whether gendered hunting behavior correlates with gendered spatial ability before we start writing books and articles?
* It is worth noting that there is a lot of overlap, and there is some evidence that the difference weakens or disappears when subjects play video games before the spatial test, which suggests it could be more a matter of practice rather than innate ability.
Evolutionary psychology as a field seems almost entirely devoted to making unfounded bioessentialist (and usually sexist and/or racist) statements that are either entirely unfalsifiable or that...
Evolutionary psychology as a field seems almost entirely devoted to making unfounded bioessentialist (and usually sexist and/or racist) statements that are either entirely unfalsifiable or that they have no interest in testing in any remotely scientific fashion. I have absolutely zero respect for it as a field and don't consider it a scientific discipline. It's the academic equivalent of following J.K. Rowling on Twitter.
Thought I'd pull out the archeological evidence cited: ... ... ...
Thought I'd pull out the archeological evidence cited:
Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same thing [...]
...
Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. [...]
...
What is more, females and males were buried in the same way in the Upper Paleolithic. Their bodies were interred with the same kinds of artifacts, or grave goods, suggesting that the groups they lived in did not have social hierarchies based on sex.
...
Thanks to analyses of DNA extracted from fossils, we now know of three Neandertal groups that engaged in patrilocality—wherein males were more likely to stay in the group they were born into and females moved to other groups—although we do not know how widespread this practice was.
I find it interesting that it took until I started typing this comment for me to realize the difference betweenar'n't and aren't (arr-ent). I've never pronounced it the latter way before so I...
I find it interesting that it took until I started typing this comment for me to realize the difference betweenar'n't and aren't (arr-ent). I've never pronounced it the latter way before so I legitimately didn't understand how the former could be considered slave dialect.
Including running marathons, attending schooling designed for men, driving cars, boot camp, and riding on trains. All of which risk a woman's womb being dislodged and just yeeting itself around her body, or damaging her "complex anatomy". Fun fact the boot camp one was less than 20 years ago.
That's what I've been saying! Particularly white males. Particularly upper class white males. Treating female atheletes as "small men" is just part of that problem.
ಠ_ʖಠ
Women have always had to work when menstruating. And without birth control, many women were almost always pregnant or breastfeeding. I wish it didn't take centuries for someone else to figure this out.
This is just a misunderstanding of how competitive running actually works. Having a pace setter break the air resistance is a significant advantage. But there are rules for how this is done in competition. The first man to run a marathon under 2 hours, Eliud Kipchoge, didn't get the time recognized as an official world record, despite "running himself", because the pace setters were rotating in and out of the race, which isn't permitted. You can look at the recent men's 1500m Olympic final to see the guy running in front the whole race - who had by far the best PB in the race - completely fading in the last 200m while three guys ran past him to set new personal bests. Those guys were running on their own but would never have been able to run that fast without someone faster than them front running.
In many events, there's literally hundreds, possibly thousands of male athletes who could pace a female WR run to the finish line. This is clearly not comparable to a race with women only.
Just like Kipchoge ran "artificially faster" due to rotating pacemakers, so could women with male pacemakers. It's just a very strange framing. Women's and men's athletics are separate for a reason. Sports have rules to ensure that results are fair and records set in different competitions are comparable, which is also why only a 2m/s tailwind is allowed in sprints. lt's not sexism to suggest that a women's world record should be performed in a women's race.
It also has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not women hunted during Neolithic times. It doesn't mean that women aren't capable runners. Top female athletes would absolutely smoke the average dude. You don't just show up and run a 2:16 marathon ("women only" marathon world record), even if the women's record in a mixed-sex race of 2:11 (both are recognized by World Athletics as separate records) is faster.
It's not about disparaging women athletes, it's about fairness and consistency across different competitions. You can't run with whatever shoes you want either, even if it's your own feet doing the running; there are rules for that too, because some shoes are deemed so energy efficient as to be equivalent to "mechanical doping" and therefore banned. Athletics isn't just "run a certain distance as fast as possible", like all sports it also has various ancilliary rules and regulations. This particular rule has nothing to do with the point of the article and bringing it up in this context sounds like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about.
I appreciate that they mention exercise physiology, as historically speaking, it almost exclusively studies white men who go to college. This is, to some extent, an artifact of capitalism and how we have decided to structure research in our country (most researchers are employed by colleges), but also because white men who go to college are easily financially influenced. That is to say, if you place an open call for study participants and tell them you'll compensate them a pittance for their time and effort, you almost exclusively end up selecting for people who are in close proximity and who have little income.
In general across scientific (and especially medical-related) fields we've seen an expansion of the inclusion of female and minority participants on the heels of requirements set by bodies which hand out funding and calls to action by researchers in these fields focused on ethics and a general increase in the quality of meta-analyses. With that being said, however, we are still many years out from truly understanding the repercussions of this particularly college white male problem. I hope that this kind of thinking expands more generally across more fields (I'm looking intently at you, technology) but also into the social consciousness. As we become a society which is more global my hope is that we spend more time focusing on what our knowledge actually represents and break down more of these taken-for-granted ideas about what is 'factually' correct and challenge more assumptions we've collectively made about the world based on the thoughts of a few biased individuals.
I wouldn't hold my breath, especially as the narrative sold to gen Alpha becomes more and more "college isn't worth the money anymore, pick up trades" . Which has some point: college prices are out of control and attempts to stop this is blocked by the courts.
And who can statistically still afford to college when it becomes a premium? Yup, white males. Women too, but all the DEI initiatives cooling down or outright shutting down doesn't give me confidence in the long term.
It’s men who have disproportionately not been going to college recently. The facts about men being more likely to attend university than women are outdated.
Specifically they're historical and relevant to when many of the core theories and much of the research that underlies the mentioned academic fields were being developed. But they're not current as women do make up the majority of incoming college classes and of college graduates.
Yeah, college overall skewed female. the proportions shift dramatically based on major.
My main focus was on the financial burdens rather than the gender divide. I don't think more women will take up tech just because more men are dropping out (which lines up with the "trades" narrative as of late). Those kinds of decisions needs to be influneced in the middle/high school level.
Women would probably more be willing and interested into getting into tech if so many of them didn't get chased out of it due to the people and corporate cultures. And what they encounter in college.
It's definately no single factor. There have been big strides to address the "people issue", though. At the very least, if it occurs, people of all levels aren't safe like it may have been for big execs decades ago. However, Justice can be slow.
I can assure you that corporate cultures only disciminate by class, not necessarily race or gender (or at least not as overtly as class). This economic squeeze and need to make number go up is hitting all working class
There's another thread recently posted that suggests that it's probably not addressed, and bad behavior is absolutely not limited to the C suite. I see it in college students, I've heard it from women who work in those tech jobs. I saw it in the corporation I worked for, albeit it was in Corrections.
Corporations absolutely discriminate based on race and gender, not just class. Generally people will feel the discrimination they experience the most is the most severe. Plenty of things intersect with class. Having to afford (and know how to style) business or business casual clothes may be a class issue. But the things that are considered appropriate to wear differ based on gender, and women are generally expected to wear makeup, shave their body hair, etc on top of this attire and are judged more harshly when they don't conform to it. But what is considered business/casual attire is also confirming to white norms leading natural Black hair to be considered unprofessional or messy, other cultural attire or equal quality and class will be rejected as inappropriate, etc. And body size - fat people will be perceived as slovenly. Gender identity - pronouns won't be respected if attire is business appropriate because it's confusing, but then if someone is perceived to be in the attire of the "wrong" gender thats also inappropriate. I could go on.
It's intersectional, not one directional. Discounting the experiences of people experiencing those things or minimizing the impact of racism and sexism in favor of classism isn't class solidarity or allyship.
We need to agree on "proper" first. I'm not saying racism/sexism is over, but I do argue that the last decade or 2 has decreased it.
Is it enough? I'm not the judge of that. There will always be some bad actors and bad intentions, so the ideal in my mind isn't to reduce the number to 0%. It's to make sure as many (ideally, all) bad actors are properly punished as possible. That people aren't afraid to report a superior and are properly protected from retaliation.
Workers are already on a thread so any HR violation will already get them canned. I only mentioned executives because even 15 years ago they would in fact get away with basically murder (Hello, Bobby Kotick). Having more of them face consequences and know that they are not above the rules is a big step. But I know many more are still out there. So we're far from done.
I also realize this is regional. My region is pretty diverse and accepting, and isn't really stuffy suit culture for work. so I may be in a better position than, say, the Bible belt.
I can assure you that Tech is neither monolithic nor has it been cured of sexism. It is absolutely still present *whether you have seen it or not.
Edit: typo
I addressed this in another reply, so I'll paste a part of it here:
I work for a college, my kid gets to go to college for free (pro tip for anybody worried about college prices there). And I have already told them from a young age that going to college is not necessarily a better proposition than becoming well-versed in a trade.
Having talked to tradespeople, there is a dire lack of people in that middle ground between 30 and 50 right now. Several people I know who went to college got burned out on doing the job they trained for in college, and ended up going back and entering trades later. I'm now firmly in the camp of "learn a trade first, get an established career under your belt, then take night classes or go back to school once you have some experience under your belt, some savings, and you have a better understanding of what you really want to do in life." I'm the only one out of 4 siblings that worked in a career related to my undergrad degree, and my sister didn't until she went to school to be a therapist a decade after not using the first one.
I still think even tradespeople benefit from advanced degrees, there's plenty of practical applications even if you're wielding a screwdriver more than a computer, but I think that's going to be on colleges to help incorporate proper trades programs into a broader education enhancement, especially as public funds (hopefully) start flowing in to eliminate costs to students.
I agree in spirit. As someone trying to do more schoolwork while working full time (well, tried a few years back), I know it's a much more harrowing journey and you basically suck up all your free time between work, schoolwork, and any other duties in the house.
We just get so little time to ourselves as is. Adding more learning on top of that really drains you.
I'm ambivalent. It's no secret that college has basically shifted to being a job training mill for most students, but it does make me bemoan the shift away to the original spirit of where college was a place of enrichment and advancement. being able to research to push society forward. an environment where you can focus on what's right or how to improve upon something instead of pushing pencils
It also just has negative effect on the job market. Training programs have plummeted and part of that is that they expect a college student to know exactly how to navigate that offices' proprietary pipeline. Naturally, they don't because you need to work there to know what that company needs and values. 4 years of general training won't make up for that compared to even a decent 6 month internship.
Oh yes, the specifics are definitely something that needs worked out. But since colleges have become de-facto vocational schools for large swaths of industries anyway, expanding that to cover the blue collar as well has the added benefits of bringing those non-vocational advantages to the working class that otherwise gets told to fuck off (in essence).
That's a weird narrative to push when white males are currently one of the most underrepresented groups in colleges right now. 18.03% of graduate students were white males in Fall 2022 (21.18% of postsecondary students). They make up 31% of the population. In fact, just looking roughly at the statistics shows that white males are by far the most underrepresented group of people in colleges (in the US). These numbers have been dropping consistently 1-2% every 4 years, so since these are 2022 figures, the real number is probably closer to 16%.
That by far does a bit of lifting. They are underrepresented compared to most female groups, but not men:
Percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college (2022)
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_302.62.asp
It might also be worth pointing out that this statistic only shows the enrollment rate, and not the graduation rate. The percentage of white men of ages 25-29 with a degree has paradoxically increased, despite what the decreasing enrollment rate would imply. More of them also seem to have degrees compared to some female groups. Though not compared to white females, of whom a higher percentage do indeed seem to obtain higher levels of education.
Percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with Bachelor's or higher degree (2023)
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_104.20.asp
I may have misinterpreted the stats on the site I linked, I'm not very competent in statistics. It said that only 52% of people who participated in college enrollment identified as white, with close to a 60/40 split on female vs male attendance. That would put the numbers for white male attendance down at just 20%~ of all college enrollments which is the lowest it's ever been by far, especially compared to population demographics of which they make up 31% of the population.
The other percentages where much closer to the population demographic numbers with black students making up 13.2% of enrollment numbers and 14.4% of the population; and Hispanics making up 21.5% of enrollment numbers and only 19.5% of the population. (This number is likely off due to undocumented individuals, but it's still representative)
Maybe these sites are pulling data from different sources?
I used one of their sources, though I'm having trouble finding the exact documents they used. One difference is that they show the enrollment rate of all US residents, whereas my source shows it only for 18-24 year olds. According to the 2020 US Census (Excel document) white people represented 58% of the total population, and 50% of the 18-24 year olds. 52% is somewhere in the middle of that, and presumably there should be a bias towards the lower number, so the enrollment rate doesn't immediately strike me as being majorly off.
I agree with you. The biggest benefactor of student loans have been from Africans and Asians IIRC. Asians were dominating to a point where they became targets of "reverse discimination".
But I don't think the money up top has changed as dramatically. So my statement was hinging more on:
Than an implication that mostly white people currently go to college.
I suspect that the main reason we as a society tend to assume that women gathered while men hunted is because most of our understanding of human behavior is based on recent historical data, which is overwhelmingly based on agricultural economies.
In agricultural settings, we tend to see very large families, which means mothers spend a significant portion of their lives pregnant, nursing, and tending to very small children. This makes intense multi-day journeys a lot more difficult to arrange, so it made sense for families to distribute travel-based tasks to fathers and home-based tasks to mothers. And so travel-based tasks (working distant fields, managing distant flocks, sailing, mining, hunting for supplementary meat, etc.) were more male-coded, while home-based tasks (cooking, washing, growing vegetables, producing textiles, managing poultry, etc.) were more female-coded. These gendered activities were adopted across many different cultures for practical reasons — just like wearing pants (useful for certain kinds of physical labor that men mostly did) versus skirts (useful for people who must squat to pee) were widely adopted for practical reasons. We see a similar pattern play out in complex modern economies, where mothers are more likely than fathers to take time off work; it makes sense when only one of the two partners can give birth and breastfeed.
However, hunter-gatherers were not so limited. Birth rates were much lower before the adoption of agriculture and studies of modern hunter-gatherers indicate that they have bigger gaps between births. This difference may in part be due to environmental reasons (agricultural societies needed more people to sustain the diversity of agricultural activities necessary for our complex nutritional needs, and they also had higher mortality rates and therefore needed to have more children just to sustain their populations) and in part due to physiological reasons (hunter-gatherer women seem to naturally have fewer children without making any particular effort to control their fertility, possibly due to lower body fat levels and to having longer breastfeeding periods as a consequence of to needing to physically carry their babies into their toddler years).
Whatever the cause, having fewer children and longer gaps between children would have made it a lot easier for women to travel and to partake in the same activities as men.
I think this is one of those examples of finding evolutionary reasons for behaviors based on more modern behavior, instead of social ones.
The first pants we know about were probably for horse-riding in what is now China, somewhere between 1200-900 BCE. And it seems to be fully gender neutral.
The Greeks didn't wear pants, and thought the Persians were strange for doing so. Men and women both wore pants in Persia at the time though. And Rome thought pants were barbaric until they invaded colder spaces. Both genders work them among Germanic people
When pants showed up in Korea, they seem to have been worn equally, though skirts were sometimes worn over them for women.
In Western Europe and the US women weren't allowed to wear pants whether socially or, sometimes, legally. One vagrancy law in the US treated women who wore pants as wearing a disguise and thus arrestable. Women weren't allowed to wear pants on the US Senate floor until 1993. But we're far past the timeline here. Clothing today is mostly socially driven with protective wear for certain jobs being an exception.
But there's zero evidence that skirts were women's clothes due to the ease of squatting and peeing in them vs men needing pants for work. The genders were much more often socially bound and legally bound to perform the "correct" attire. But in early agricultural days, only the steppe riders were wearing pants.
Anecdotally, I find pants much easier to pee in than long skirts. Yes, you need to pull them down before you squat, but you have a lot of control over where the fabric goes and what it does while you're peeing. A long skirt goes straight to the ground, sure, but it doesn't take much of a breeze to come through and make you pee all over it.
Short skirts are the easiest, but whether those are considered an alternative to pants depends on when and where you're talking about.
Long skirts, especially A-line or other flared styles, are amazingly easy to pee in. Hike it up, give it a twist and throw it over a shoulder. Completely out of the way. I do this in all bathrooms when I'm wearing a skirt just to keep it clean.
If you wear a skirt without underwear, and it's a long, loose skirt made out of a reasonably dense fabric similar to the homespun cloth of our ancestors, it makes squatting in the woods a lot nicer than pants — particularly if you want to make certain you don't accidentally expose your bum to someone. The skirts makes a kind of tent around you that gives you total privacy while you do the deed.
For a woman living on a medieval farm, this was likely pretty handy. You didn't need to find some secret place to go pee; you could probably just go behind an outbuilding or in a ditch, even if there were other farm workers around.
Toilets and underwear change that equation, so it's no surprise that skirts have fallen enormously in popularity.
I'm not sure that your comment really contradicts mine. Horseback riding is the prime example of a kind of physical labor that pants are very useful for, and it is work that was mostly performed by men. Even though there are exceptions in certain cultures, regions, and historical periods, it is nonetheless the case that pants were developed for utilitarian purposes (even though they gained cultural/legal baggage later on), that they were more beneficial to certain kinds of labor that tended to performed by men more often than women (e.g., pants are more useful for plowing than they are for brewing), and that men broadly adopted them more widely than women.
As for the usefulness of skirts, this is just anecdotal, but full-length skirts (if worn without underpants, which is how they were worn historically) are very useful when you need to squat to pee because you need not uncover any part of your body during the process. When I go camping, I strongly prefer to bring a skirt for when I'm around the campsite because it makes squatting behind a tree trivial, particularly if there are potentially other people around who might spot me. We have to remember that indoor toilets are a recent invention.
I disagree; you've made a lot of assertions about how and why pants developed, even though in ancient times, the use of pants was pretty gender-neutral when they developed. Either the entire culture did or didn't consider pants an option. For example, the people of the steppes all rode horses, and as I said, the evidence is that the pants were gender-neutral. The Greeks didn't wear pants, despite doing agriculture and all those manly activities.
This isn't "exceptions" these are the major cultures we know of during the times. Do you have evidence that pants developed that way? Because you're sort of doing the exact same thing that anthropologists of the past were doing - looking at a our modern status quo of pants being default male attire and making a lot of assumptions about why it must have obviously been the case throughout history. Whether pants were adopted wasn't gendered, but was based on the culture and needs of the people. The labor wasn't particularly gendered, that is again the stereotype that this article was addressing.
Just to be clear, are you saying that in non-nomadic agricultural communities that had highly gendered divisions of labor, and in particular where men did the bulk of labor where pants are much more practical (such as riding horses), men and women wore pants and skirts at the same rate? Because those are the cultures I was talking about. I was not talking about nomadic populations, populations without gender divisions, or populations that did not adopt pants at all.
Here is the comment I made:
Note that I made no claims that these clothes were gendered universally — just that they were gendered widely. In different many cultures, skirts became female-coded and pants became male-coded. (I personally don't know of any cultures that went the opposite way — where skirts became male-coded and pants became female-coded — but maybe you do. I'm sure it must have happened here and there, but it would surely be uncommon for settled agrarian societies based on the way such societies usually divvy up labor.)
The reason I brought it up at all was to argue that men and women exhibiting these gendered differences (wearing different clothes and doing different jobs) is a reflection of the social and economic environment that they live in, and should not be assumed to be a reflection of innate differences. Nobody thinks women inherently wear skirts and men inherently wear pants, yet people do assume that women inherently do "safe, easy" tasks like gathering and men inherently do "hard, dangerous" tasks like hunting, even though that's just as unfounded. In the agricultural communities and history that the western world is most familiar with, many gender divisions arose for practical reasons and took on cultural meaning that reinforced them — but something being practiced in one context (such as these sedentary agricultural societies) does not mean it is practiced in other contexts (such as nomadic hunting-gathering societies discussed in the OP's article).
I'm saying you've provided no evidence to your theory, not even examples of earlier agricultural societies that gendered their pants based on labor. Instead while clothing was gendered in style, that style doesn't seem to reflect pants or not. Greece, Rome, Persia, Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Pre-Columbian America, Ancient Judea, etc. I don't even know.which cultures you're now referring to with your narrowed criteria. What era? What continent?
I am not an expert in this, I'm basing it off of Wikipedia and some really basic entry level information, but those cultures all did agricultural, and were primarily settled* and the ones that wore pant like things wore them universally due to weather or cultural style.
Obviously gendered divisions in pants vs no pants became more prominent later but I've not come up with one that happened earlier. That I can find, they all happen after contact with Christianity. But even early Christians matched the attire or their surrounding culture. I found one suggestion of the Iron Age Celts wearing gendered clothing in that manner but the other references said we really don't know what they wore consistently. Likely they influenced the Romans to wear pants because snow was cold.
Pants being useful for certain types of work? Sure, though again many cultures did that work without pants quite well. Similarly many men wore the equivalent of long skirts for farm labor and herding alike. It seems far more likely to me, based on this history that it was a cultural shift facilitated by a technological one as clothing became easier to make in cities. But what I can show is that early through agricultural societies' gendered clothing has no consistent split with pants vs no pants. By the Byzantines, leggings and hose were around, though still associated with barbarians (aka Europeans and Persians) and laborers wore tunics, not pants. (Western Romans eventually adopted them when in northern Europe because of the cold but not "at home" as far as I can tell) So that's when you start to see them appear in these large civilizations with any regularity. And it seems like by this point gendered clothing already had aspects of modesty deeply built into women's attire in particular. So where did the pants develop without those other cultural rules already in place?
I can find no evidence of women's clothes being such "out of convenience" or of pants being dominant for only men purely out of a rational necessity. Gendering of pants seems to be much later, and not done by the people working the farm, but by the people running the countries and/or the churches. By this point there are social and religious expectations about the existing gendered clothing and often both genders are restricted though women in particular in what they can wear.
I'm happy to be educated otherwise should you have evidence. But nothing I can find suggests it's any sort of natural development out of rationality rather than culturally spread along with some particularly gendered moral (such as dressing as the other gender being immoral) and societal expectations.
*"Pre-Columbian as a term is lumping a bunch of cultures together and not all were as settled but alas the article lumped them together.
ETA: Ask Historians answer on when pants became popular, mostly about when clothing got easier to make fitting. Peasants wore tunics and nobles and tradesmen wore gowns as often as not.
It was a throwaway comment within a larger comment on a small forum, not an academic article, but I would be positively flabbergasted if the adoption of pants by agricultural laborers was arbitrary — that, if we could go back in time and reroll the dice, agricultural laborers could just as easily not have adopted pants as they became available in their societies. For the upper classes, sure, I can buy that — but I just don't see it with the general subsistence farmers who made up the bulk of the population.
I have lived on an 80-acre farm for the last 12 years, and I also worked on a commercial farm for 8 years. I cannot emphasize enough how much clothing choice matters when you are doing hard labor on a farm.
When you work outside all days in conditions where weather exposure or sunburn are a concern, you need a full-length covering over your legs as a general rule. For this, your options are either going to be a long skirt (or, if we are being pedantic, something functionally equivalent such as a dress or a robe) or long pants (or, to be pedantic, something functionally equivalent such as overalls or high stockings).
For many farming tasks, such as hoeing a vegetable garden, collecting apples, or scattering feed to livestock, skirts (or skirt equivalents) are absolutely fine. They can even be preferable in some circumstances, as they can be used like aprons to carry small items like grain.
But for most hard labor tasks, you really do not want to be wearing a long skirt. You want pants (or pants equivalents) when you trudge through a muddy plowed field, clamber over fences, climb up ladders, etc. You can do these tasks in a long skirt, but you would probably have to hike your skirt up, leaving your legs exposed. Mind you, wearing a short skirt (such as a tunic) over your pants would be completely fine — that's not so different to the long coats farm workers commonly wear today in bad weather — but pants are still the main garment protecting the legs in such an outfit.
I know we can't go back in time and survey the first pants-wearing subsistence farmers to see why they chose pants instead of skirts, but I would be extremely surprised if utilitarianism wasn't the primary factor. For farmers who didn't adopt pants, maybe pants were not available yet or were not socially acceptable in their society, or maybe pants were simply prohibitively expensive, but I would be stunned if it was an arbitrary decision.
I'm saying agricultural workers existed for a long time without pants. But I never said long skirts were the attire of farmers. Kilts and tunics, seem to be the common attire of farm workers. Since pants/leggings developed primarily for two reasons - riding horses and cold weather attire. So most early subsistence farmers were wearing short skirts or the equivalent. But farming would have looked a lot different, I don't know the history of fencing your land but I bet it wasn't the same for centuries across all these cultures. And labor wasn't always gendered the way we assume either. Women worked on farms too. In some cultures today, women do most of the substence farming vs men doing the cash crop farming. Many of them wear shift dresses and skirts.
Here's an example of drawings of European working clothes from the 1000s, we've got long and short tunics and what looks like a wrap pant (or possibly a longer skirt tucked up like pants), and a pair of braies, some with hose, some without. So some pant like options were available but not everyone was wearing them.
Yes some cultures hadn't invented pants yet or had them spread via trade or war but that's the point. They didn't develop because of agriculture. And while agricultural workers may have adopted them as they were socially acceptable, they weren't inherently needed since that work was being done. Women's long skirts weren't naturally better suited for them either considering men were wearing robes and tunics during much of the same time.
Women have worn pants throughout history too - whether bloomers or sliding on a pair of work pants under a skirt in European history or because everyone is wearing them elsewhere. Because long skirts, outside of winter/robes when everyone was wearing them, were more about cultural modesty.
My criticism of your comment is the presentism of it. You're essentially doing the same thing that evopsych does (which the other commentator made me think of)- look at the status quo today and assume that this is the obvious and natural outcome and look for the explanations that lead you there. Yes I'm sure as pants became culturally available, those people that were allowed to wear them did, if they wanted to. Which not all farmers did at those times. But not everyone was allowed to or wanted to because pants were not inherently the ideal to them. But every bit of evidence I can find suggests that the gendering of this clothing is about societal rules, not common sense. This is the same mistake those anthropologists made about how obviously men hunted and the women stayed at "home" or how obviously women did all the childcare, etc. because that was the society they were used to.
And yes this is a forum, but it's Tildes, and you made an authoritative comment that as far as I can tell, is incorrect. I am very open to learning more and being wrong, but personal pants experience says absolutely nothing about the history of clothing across all cultures
Attributing this myth to differences in birth rates and time between pregnancies seems to ignore quite a lot of the evidence that the article goes into at length:
The idea that women not hunting is strictly a practical concern due to the realities of pregnancy and childcare is clearly contradicted by the fact that the women in these societies hunt while pregnant and breastfeeding, which does not clearly indicate that being pregnant more often or having more children to care for necessarily entails not participating in tasks like hunting. While it very well may be true that agricultural settings encourage division of labor and large families in ways that foraging societies do not, purely attributing sex-based division of labor to practical reasons doesn't hold up, in my opinion.
It is far too easy to retroactively explain behaviors that are heavily influenced if not fully explained by cultural factors as being rooted in some practical division naturally evolving if you want to do so (as you've done here with the whole pants/skirts thing, which @DefinitelyNotAFae has already pointed out the historical context as a highly cultural distinction rather than a practical one in most cases).
I want to reiterate that I was not talking about hunting specifically, but about going on travel-intensive journeys. Some hunting (as well as fishing, etc.) could be done close to home, and there is absolutely no reason why pregnant women, nursing women, or women managing toddlers couldn't have done these tasks. After all, my own great aunt was hunting deer when she was 8 months pregnant with her 8th child — but, importantly, she was hunting deer in her yard, not going on hunting trips
Going on an intensive hunting trip is going to be a lot trickier for a mother of young children (not because the mother is incapable of journeying that hard, but because the children are) or for a woman in the later stages of pregnancy.
But for nomadic women, this would not have been much of a barrier. They spent a smaller portion of their lives managing children who couldn't handle intense travel. But, importantly, much more hunting could be done close to home; that's kind of the point of being nomadic, after all.
Mind you, there are hunting-gathering cultures today where we do see major labor division between men and women. For example, amongst the San people, gathering is largely performed by women and hunting is largely performed by men. However, the San people are not very nomadic; they tend to live in larger groups and remain in the same settlements for long periods of time (e.g., several years). For this reason, their hunting generally cannot be done close to home; when the men go out to hunt, they are gone for several days at a time and have to range very long distances to find prey. As the San people get hemmed in more and more by encroaching civilizations (which hampers their migration) and as wild animal populations continue to collapse (which requires longer and longer hunting trips), I suspect their lifestyles will become increasingly gendered and agriculture-like.
I’m only partway through, but I recommend The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800
It describes pretty strong gender roles among Native Americans at that time, though not exclusively so.
The connection between hunting and war is that warriors were able to travel long distances without much in the way of a supply chain (though they used canoes where feasible), partly relying on hunting.
The evidence is largely from European historical accounts, sometimes from people who were captured, so close reading is needed to understand how it might have looked from the Native American point of view. Still, it’s better than the guesswork needed when interpreting archaeological evidence alone.
I may poke at that, I read a few reviews. I'd love to know how those histories went fully pre-European contact. The 1500s were when small pox ravaged Mexico and Central America and the 1600s is the Great Dying. What the Europeans saw of culture, in so much as they could even understand it correctly, had to have been so altered. The reviews look good at least!
Reminds me of this article from the National Museum of Denmark which also shows how physiological differences are not set in stone:
The article lists no source though, and even today, the skull is the least accurate in determining biological sex (and the pelvis the most accurate) I think, but I still found it interesting.
This reminds me. Findings from disciplines like archaeology are one major reason why a lot of evolutionary psychology studies are built on an extremely shaky assumption: that behavior in current age necessarily predicts behavior in other ages, which then evo psychs attribute to "human nature" (a.k.a. lingering modernist doodoo in social sciences).
Disclaimer: effect of differential genetics is not in question. I have a genetics background. What is in question is jumping the gun about genetics, essentially being an essentialist, when there are strong confounding factors (e.g. culture).
This bad science also is often used to legitimize the conservative essentialist beliefs about people, especially in terms of gender, making the whole thing much worse. Every single scientist inevitably makes many mistakes, due to personal, structural, temporal, historical, etc. limitations. However, when handling topics this ideologically important, I think the researchers should be doubly cautious, when in reality many of evo psychs are not even singly cautious.
Oh gosh, don't get me started on evolutionary psychology.
I think the thing that frustrates me most about evolutionary psychologists is that they seemingly make no attempt to test their hypotheses. Granted, this is not a field I pay any real attention to because everything I've seen come out of it so far has been pseudoscience — but I would genuinely be interested to see if there are any evolutionary psychologists making predictions based on their ideas and then doing well-designed studies to see if their predictions hold.
For example, if someone hypothesizes that men perform better* on spatial tests because men hunt, then let's look for some kind of evidence. We can't turn back time and do studies on our ancestors, but there are tons of other animal species we can look at: species where males do more hunting that females (e.g., certain songbirds), species where females do more hunting than males (e.g., lions), and species where both hunt the same amount. We even have species where males and females hunt different kinds of prey (e.g., certain birds of prey). Surely it is worth checking whether gendered hunting behavior correlates with gendered spatial ability before we start writing books and articles?
* It is worth noting that there is a lot of overlap, and there is some evidence that the difference weakens or disappears when subjects play video games before the spatial test, which suggests it could be more a matter of practice rather than innate ability.
Evolutionary psychology as a field seems almost entirely devoted to making unfounded bioessentialist (and usually sexist and/or racist) statements that are either entirely unfalsifiable or that they have no interest in testing in any remotely scientific fashion. I have absolutely zero respect for it as a field and don't consider it a scientific discipline. It's the academic equivalent of following J.K. Rowling on Twitter.
Thought I'd pull out the archeological evidence cited:
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Fun (?) fact, she said something different than that
Compare the Speeches
But the spirit is the same.
I find it interesting that it took until I started typing this comment for me to realize the difference betweenar'n't and aren't (arr-ent). I've never pronounced it the latter way before so I legitimately didn't understand how the former could be considered slave dialect.
It's at least attempting to represent that dialect!
I wish the previous poster hadn't deleted.
Mirror: https://archive.is/4M587