Egalitarianism to gender inequality: Cross-cultural exploration of gender relations, in economic systems

Abstract

Gender inequality has generated a lot of debates among scholars across disciplines. Much of these studies have not explored a robust scholarship on the historical development of gender inequality by comparing different human societies and their subsistence strategies. This review study is designed to fill this gap, thereby contributing to corpus of literature on gender inequality in economic relations. As a historical research, the study uses secondary materials. These materials are mainly ethnographies of the societies under comparison. The study compares the roles of each of the gender categories in subsistence activities, in economic systems, to trace the sources of gender inequality in economic relations. Data available suggest egalitarian gender and economic relations. However, as societies evolved, there became a gradual decline in egalitarianism, leading to marked inequality. The inequality is relative to the complexity of social structure peculiar to the societies under review.