Let Me Take the Risk so You Won’t Have To: An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis of Spontaneous Occurrence of Division of Labor Across 14 Countries

Abstract

The elimination of various forms of discrimination is often considered to be the way to achieve gender equality in terms of pay and the proportion of each sex in occupations. However, considering that men and women physically and psychologically differ in various ways, it is possible that the absence of gender equality is actually the result of voluntary preferences. The concept of Spontaneous Occurrence of Division of Labor (SODOL) is proposed in the current paper to examine how people voluntarily create a division of labor. A sample of 5279 people from 14 countries participated in an online scenario experiment to determine how willing they would be to perform riskier and more physically demanding tasks instead of their partner if they had to work with their partner to complete a variety of tasks. The results showed that men were more likely than women, and participants paired with the same sex partner were less likely than participants paired with the opposite sex partner to undertake tasks that were risky and more physically demanding. In addition, when paired with the opposite sex partner, the division of labor between men and women occurred to an extreme degree. Moreover, these patterns were consistent across 14 countries.