Chen, Yuan; (2024) Comparative study of social organisation and work burden in China. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Theories of the sexual division of labour are not well developed, but gender biases in workloads are of wide interest to evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, economists, feminists, and others. This thesis bridges the gap by examining how different social organisations are shaped by kinship dynamics, marriage systems, population structures, and sex-biased workloads among agriculturalists and pastoralists in southwest China. To this end, I conducted population censuses, collected data on demographics, and obtained time budgets of six rural Sino-Tibetan groups within a single country. I also used a removable activity tracker to measure workload to examine the sexual division of labour under different dispersal patterns across these diverse ethnic groups. I present the ethnographical context of the six populations studied in the following analytical chapters, and the demographic statistics, and illustrated the effects of governmental policies on demography. I exploit the ecological diversity and different social structures found in southwest China to investigate whether sex-biased dispersal is associated with the division of labour. This work shows that being female and dispersing from your natal home are two characteristics that increase your workload, suggesting that bargaining and power asymmetries are playing a role. I also make clear how sex inequality can be driven by population structure; a female-biased sex ratio within a village, influenced by monastic celibacy, correlates with female-biased workloads. The thesis also delves into an examination of differences between matrilineal and patrilineal childrearing work patterns, shedding light on how sex-specific childcare interacts with social organisations. The thesis concludes with an event history analysis on testing mate-switching adaptations - akin to avian divorces, illuminating how bargaining structures and divorce threats influence sex-biased workloads, enhancing the comprehension of sex-biased labour efforts across diverse societies.

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