Reject gender stereotypes for better economic outcomes

The paradigm of man the hunter and woman the gatherer, suggesting a gendered pattern of subsistence roles in pre-historic times, is a long-standing hypothesis. However, recent archaeological discoveries and meta-analyses of ethnographic data have revealed evidence of considerable subsistence flexibility, challenging that gender stereotype of labour.

- ARCHANA DATTA

In 2013, when an adult individual was exhumed alongside a hunting toolkit from a 9,000-year-old burial site in the Andean highlands of Peru, many researchers presumed it to be the remains of a "high-status hunter, a big man." After a protein analysis of teeth confirmed that this hunter was female, some dismissed it as a one-off case. But then, a 2020 study evaluating reports of 107 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies across the Americas, of which 27 showed evidence of big-game hunting, revealed that of all the skeletons found with such hunting tools, about 41% were of women. The study concluded that females made up a "non-trivial" number of big-game hunters, and that the "practice was gender neutral, as against the common perception that men exclusively hunted."

Further, a global project that scrutinized the ethnographic data of 391 foraging societies from across the world-from the 1800s to the present day, with a focus on 63 of them with explicit data on hunting-highlighted the fact that even in more recent times, "regardless of maternal status, instances of women hunting were found in 50 of such societies (about 79 percent), and more than 70 percent of such female hunting appeared to be intentional, rather than opportunistic killing of animals."