The Origins of Unfairness

Human groups across cultures and times have divided labor by gender. What explains this fact, along with related inequities in the division of resources? It may be tempting to assume that such divisions are to be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology—evolved differences in suitability or preferences for various tasks, innate sexist biases, and so on. But substantial cross-cultural diversity in the details of labor divisions points to a more complex and nuanced picture: a story of cultural evolution involving the emergence and use of social categories to solve recurring coordination problems.Cailin O’Connor illuminates this more complicated story using evolutionary game-theoretic modeling. This framework, she argues, shows how type-conditioning of behavior using categories such as gender can emerge spontaneously in response to certain coordination problems, even where those categories are inherently irrelevant to the behaviors in question; and it also shows that inequities will tend to emerge even in the absence of the psychological biases we tend to assume are driving them (95–96). This isn’t to deny that such biases also play an important role, but it does imply that interventions to reduce or eliminate biases will not be enough by themselves to address social inequities. We need to understand the broader dynamics of cultural evolution in order to fully understand the roles played by categories such as gender, race, and class, and the many forces that produce and sustain inequities along these lines even apart from biases. “Social justice,” she argues, “is an endless battle” (195).Focusing on the gendered division of labor, O’Connor takes the reader through a primer on evolutionary game theory to show first how solutions to social coordination problems can be greatly facilitated by the introduction and use of social categories such as gender. Importantly, these categories needn’t themselves have any inherent relevance to the coordination problems in question: instead, they facilitate arbitrary but efficient solutions simply by providing ways to “break symmetries” in cases where what is needed are complementary behaviors, as with division of labor in a society or within a household.O’Connor develops a helpful toy example to illustrate the idea of a complementary coordination problem and solution. Suppose a group needs to divide into pairs and dance the tango, each pair performing complementary actions (one stepping forward and the other back); they share a common interest in so coordinating their behaviors to avoid inapt combinations, but how are they to decide who does what? While each pair could work this out on their own each time through separate planning or just leave it to chance and accept frequent miscoordination, a more efficient solution is available if the category of gender is introduced: a single rule stipulating that partners be of opposite gender and that men begin by stepping back and women by stepping forward, for example, would guarantee complementary behaviors for everyone in one arbitrary but effective convention.The idea, then, is that social categories such as gender have plausibly been used in similar ways to solve complementary coordination problems, such as the need for efficient division of labor. Establishing such conventions, along with related norms and expectations, enhances group coordination and efficiency, increasing everyone’s expected payoffs. Importantly, however, there will be cases where, unlike in the tango example, there is inequity in the payoffs between the social categories or types.Suppose the payoff for everyone in the group is higher when labor is divided into household work and external work (rather than everyone’s doing some of everything), but the payoff for external work is nonetheless higher than for household work (perhaps external work yields greater control over important resources). When a type-based convention is introduced to secure this division—for example, women work in the home and men work externally—and people cannot change their type, then we can have a stable equilibrium that all prefer over lack of division but that also exhibits gender inequity. The models show that such situations can arise easily, even without psychological biases, and once they arise they tend to persist (53, 102–3).This is the focus of the first half of the book. The second half then takes up ways in which more pernicious inequities can emerge once social types are on the scene. These are deeper inequities where members of one type are not only disadvantaged relative to another, as above, but are instead worse off than they would have been without the type-conditioning. This exploitation could be illustrated with familiar hawk/dove games with types added, where not only does the dove strategy do worse than the hawk strategy when they meet but those slotted into the dove strategy by a type-based convention do worse than they would have done in a homogenous group with no such type-conditioning, where each could employ a mix of strategies (54).As before, the conditions under which such pernicious inequities arise are very minimal, making such inequity a predictable outcome of cultural evolution involving social types—even if those types originally emerged to solve coordination problems in ways that benefited all, and even without bias. Again, this doesn’t require any inherently relevant differences between types: these inequities can emerge (as illustrated using Nash demand games) even without any prior asymmetries between types, let alone any differences in ability (105, 114).Where there are initial asymmetries in the bargaining situations, such inequities are even more likely to arise. Such asymmetries include power differentials (even small, random ones)—for example, where one type has higher “disagreement points” than the other (will do better if bargaining breaks down, and so can be more demanding), perhaps due to superior “outside options” (alternatives to the current exchange); or due to the effects of being in a minority or majority group on the frequency of out-group interactions and thus on the rate at which strategies are updated, which can also affect bargaining outcomes (“Red Queen” and “Red King” effects), as can differential access to institutional memory or to networking opportunities. And these affects will tend to compound over time and across bargaining arenas, exacerbating inequities (128).Thus, “when we see persistent inequity between groups, the explanation need not always appeal to anything in particular about those groups [such as inherent differences due to sexual dimorphism]. Random chance can advantage one group over another, and the dynamics of bargaining conventions can sustain that advantage indefinitely” (130).This is really the central message of the book: the culturally ubiquitous introduction of social categories to solve complementary coordination problems will predictably generate and sustain both sorts of inequity described above; and this means that many social inequities are likely due simply to the dynamics of bargaining conventions rather than to inherent differences in ability or preferences among the types (95, 131). This provides clear grounds for skepticism about efforts to justify or even explain differences in social positions across types by appeal to allegedly innate differences in ability or preferences.Such skepticism isn’t new, of course, but O’Connor’s use of evolutionary game theory employing social categories provides an explanation for where the inequities plausibly do come from, at least in part, and how they might persist even after eliminating biases. One important service of the book, in addition to making her case to specialists, is to make this idea accessible to general readers. This is particularly true for the first half of the book, though nonspecialists may find much of the second half more tough going in its technical details. Still, it’s helpful to get a sense of how familiar and intuitive explanations for gender-based inequities in academia, for example, can be illuminated by the evolutionary game-theoretic framework.One challenge faced by a project like this is to bring together highly abstract discussion of models of bargaining dynamics with an exploration of real social categories and issues. For the latter, O’Connor focuses on gender, making a clear and plausible case for its role in division of labor and impacts on inequities. The central thesis of the book, however, concerns the emergence and use of social categories more generally to solve complementary coordination problems, and it’s much less clear how exactly this is supposed to have happened in connection with social categories involving race, caste, or age, for example. As compelling as the thesis may be for gender, one would like to hear more about how other categories emerged in connection with solving complementary coordination problems, as gender did for division of labor.Another area in which further discussion would be helpful concerns the interaction between the dynamics of cultural evolution on which the book focuses and the biological evolutionary background that ‘players’ bring to the table. As O’Connor notes, it’s important to her framework that “type-conditioning comes naturally to humans” (197): her explanations “depend on the psychological tendencies of humans to form and use social categories” (106). Presumably these psychological facts about us have Darwinian explanations, but how exactly are they supposed to go? It’s puzzling how they could appeal to the coordination benefits of social categories like gender if gender itself is a later social construction and depends for its efficacy (in solving coordination problems) on the very psychological tendency in question. Or is gender being assumed to have existed as a social construct on a biological evolutionary timescale, thus influencing Darwinian evolution of human psychology in prehistory? If so, it would be helpful to hear more about that.There is a related worry about O’Connor’s strong conclusion that “types emerge spontaneously to solve coordination problems” (194)—as opposed to the weaker conclusion that type-based conventions emerge for this purpose. She has made a strong case for the latter—the recruitment of social types to solve coordination problems. But it’s less clear that the types themselves emerged for that purpose (97, 103, 194). As she herself notes, there is a chicken-and-egg puzzle here (67): types such as gender work to solve coordination problems only if actors are already sufficiently keyed into them to structure their social learning around them; so how can the benefits of solving coordination problems explain the very emergence of the types in the first place? And how does this model explain deep-rooted human psychological dispositions for gender conformity and policing, beginning even in early childhood (66–67)? Even if the details of gender are socially constructed and contingent, the powerful psychological tendencies associated with gender—on display, for example, in the panic induced in social conservatives by gender ambiguity or nonconformity—call for explanation. It’s unclear whether the game-theoretic benefits of type-conditioning can explain this degree of salience of gender and concern with conformity—as opposed to presupposing it. This again raises questions about whether types such as gender emerged to solve coordination problems, or were instead just recruited for such purposes, being already on the scene and salient for other reasons.These questions for further inquiry do not, however, affect the main theses of the book, which are both theoretically interesting and practically important for combatting social inequities. If O’Connor is right, the challenges are even more complicated than one might have thought and will need to be addressed along multiple fronts

Appeal · Diversity (politics) · Division of labour · Epistemology · Political science · Positive economics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology