Photo: IRRI ImagesFrom a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below; full version here) that tests the hypothesis that current gender role differences can be traced to shifting methods of agriculture, particularly the introduction of the plow, which required significant upper body strength, grip strength, and burst of power that favored men over women.
This paper seeks to better understand the historical origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and persistence of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality. We identify the causal impact of traditional plough use by exploiting variation in the historical geo-climatic suitability of the environment for growing crops that differentially benefited from the adoption of the plough. Our IV estimates, based on this variation, support the findings from OLS. To isolate the importance of cultural transmission as a mechanism, we examine female labor force participation of second-generation immigrants living within the US.
A couple highlights:
- We find a strong and robust negative relationship between historical plough-use and unequal gender roles today. Traditional plough-use is positively correlated with attitudes reflecting gender inequality and negatively correlated with female labor force participation, female firm ownership, and female participation in politics.
- We find that women from cultures that historically used the plough have lower rates of labor force participation in the US. This provides evidence that part of the importance of the plough arises through its impact on internal beliefs and values.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Hunter Gatherer societies separate men and women into separate rolls, with men usually hunting and women usually gathering.
Agriculture is more mixed, with some very separate rolls, and some very mixed.
Interesting.
While I accept that agriculture probably increased gender role differentiation, such roles predate agriculture being nearly universal in hunter-gather societies. See http://social-shadow.tripod.com/family.html They have a causation problem if they are trying to claim that agriculture is the main cause of gender role differentiation.
I wanted to balance out the gender inequality in my relationship with my future wife and told her to plow the backyard! She said “no!” saying she would rather I bankroll her and that the plow would make her ass look big. I told her I would get a waterbuffalo instead of an ass and she still wouldn’t do it! Now she won’t even talk to me! Wasn;t it soemthing I said?;);)
An interesting statement in this paper is that whether a woman’s mother or mother in law came from a plow-culture, matters more than the fathers or fathers in law. In other words, women are more responsible for transmitting (traditional) gender roles than men.