A Gendered Division Of Emotional Labor - amazonia.fiocruz.br

For most of human history, the driving force for day-to-day wayfinding and movement across the landscape was a need for food.

And unlike other primates, our species has consistently divided this labor along gender lines. In new research published in Nature Human Behaviourscientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the increasingly gendered division of labor in human societies during the past 2. Underlying these conclusions is a huge and detailed trove of travel data revealing stark differences in the ways men and women among the nomadic Hadza people of Tanzania use space. A contemporary hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza provide a window into a highly mobile lifestyle, which was the norm for our species before the Lbaor adoption of agriculture.

Post navigation

A better understanding of this dynamic could yield clues about why men and women seem to think about space differently. Research in many human populations suggests men and women are better at different types of A Gendered Division Of Emotional Labor tasks. On average, women tend to excel on spatial memory tasks, while men tend to score higher on two basic measures of spatial cognition associated with movement: mental rotation of objects and accurately pointing to distant locations.

While previous efforts to substantiate the theory have relied heavily on verbal accounts, the researchers here tested it by examining more than 13, miles of travel logged on lightweight GPS trackers worn by Hadza foragers between and Around nightfall, when most people had returned to camp, Wood and assistants hired in the Hadza community removed the devices.

They ultimately used data from people, representing 15 camps and ranging in age from two to 84 years old. The authors also examined the degree of overlap in the lands visited by men and women. To analyze the movement data, the researchers adopted techniques from the field of movement ecology and also developed custom software. As expected, the results show men walked further per day, covered more land in less direct paths and were more likely to travel alone. Although some individual day journeys extended to 20 miles or more, Hadza men overall averaged eight miles per day and women — many of them accompanied by young children — averaged nearly five miles.

Gender differences emerged by the age of six. From the mid-forties, the gender difference declined, mostly due to decreasing travel by men while women sustained more of their daily mileage.

Detailed spatial data like those amassed in this study will aid future comparative research into human mobility, according to the authors. This holds particular resonance in light of a pandemic that has forced sudden revisions of normal movement patterns and heightened attention to the costs and benefits of different spatial habits.]