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One thing I have learnt while doing this show is how constrained our vision can be.
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They say where you stand depends on where you sit.
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And we may need to watch out for that.
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We are products of our time and circumstance.
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So I may look around at the people around me, fall for selection bias and think this
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Or I may look further and see a bit more.
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I may be informed by books or movies.
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But to truly get a picture of the world where everything is now interconnected, I need to
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travel not only through geography and look outside of my own setting but also through
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The world as it is now has been shaped by everything that came before and everything
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Reality in a sense is everything everywhere all at once.
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So to understand the full sweep of any subject is impossible.
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Is the effort worth making?
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We understand because some brave soul took one for the team and made the effort of gathering
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Alice Evans, who teaches at the King's College in London, is a faculty
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associate at the Center for International Development at Harvard and is writing a grand
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book called The Great Gender Divergence.
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She looks across time and space to examine, in her words, quote, the origins and evolution
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of patriarchy, the drivers of gender equality and regional variations, stop quote.
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She tries to understand the local factors at play that are causing different parts of
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the world to move towards gender equality at a different pace, as well as the global
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currents that affect us all.
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She takes an interdisciplinary approach, brings prisms from many fields, and is unafraid to
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question conventions, or indeed to question her own priors.
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Her podcast is called Rocking Art Priors.
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She also uses Twitter in interesting and bold ways.
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She not only writes about her work, but she also thinks aloud, asks questions, engages
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And this conversation that you will hear now is eye-opening on its own.
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But it's also, in my view, part of a longer conversation that she has either had across
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various fora and part of a longer conversation that I have had across episodes with many
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I will link all those episodes from the show notes.
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That's why I get to learn so much over time by having conversations like this.
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Before we begin this one, though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing,
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an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs Rs. 10,000 plus GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Alice, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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You know, when I met you earlier, we were both at this conference in Udaipur and the
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first thought that struck me and I told you this was that you are the most energetic person
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You were just bouncing off the walls and I'm kind of the opposite.
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So I've often had this contrast with my guests where, you know, the contrast, very often
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the most common place for the contrast is that I tend to be pessimistic and my guests
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tend to be optimistic and so on and so forth.
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But here I think it's a high energy, low energy contrast, especially because I've just recovered
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from something which was just like COVID, but I kept testing negative, which was really
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irritating because I mean, I didn't want it to be COVID, but what the hell was it?
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You really want to know.
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And so the last few days I've been feeling a little low on energy, but it's really great.
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I think therefore that I'm starting my series of recordings in Delhi with you because hopefully
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you can inject some of your energy into me and we can, everything can start off well
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I want to start by asking about your enthusiasm for life, which is a sort of a separate thing
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from energy, but you are always rushing to talk to people, find out new things, even
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when you post things on Twitter, you're asking for criticism and you mean it.
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What I've noticed about you is that, earlier before we started recording, you were saying
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you don't feel things like jealousy and all those petty things.
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But what I noticed is that there's that absence of ego also, where you're perfectly happy
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for someone to tell you that you're wrong about something if they're doing it in good
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faith and you go out of your way to kind of solicit that.
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So tell me how you sort of came to this approach, like what were you as a kid, you know, when
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you were 11, were you also like bouncing off walls and you also mentioned you've never
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fallen sick in your life, you've traveled through India and never got the looseys.
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So tell me a little bit about the young Alice and as you're growing up and what made you,
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you know, not become an Olympic athlete, but instead come towards wherever you are.
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Okay, I think that I'm jolly and upbeat, maybe for three reasons, and let me summarize
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those before we go into my childhood.
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One is, age 17, after a number of adversities, I taught myself how to become happy.
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I thought, I need to identify and work out what makes me happy and to pursue it, regardless
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of what other people say, because yes, there'll always be criticism, but I need to pursue
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And then I also thought to myself, I need to celebrate every single victory, you know,
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so often we're on this ladder and we're always looking up, you know, we're climbing up the
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mountain and we're looking at how far we have to climb, and what I need to do is celebrate
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And so that's one aspect of teaching myself how to become happy, and I always see the
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Now it just comes naturally.
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A second aspect is that what enables me to be happy is that I've emancipated and liberated
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myself from people who might try to confine me, from gatekeepers who would support a very
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Now I do what I love, and I pursue it.
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You know, I love my project.
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I think the great gender divergence is the most fundamental fact about humanity that
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we cannot answer, and I've got this tremendous curiosity to find out the answer, and I jump
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out of bed every day excited to know the answer, and I will look through every single piece
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of evidence so I can work that out.
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So that's the second part, this curiosity about the world.
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And then I'd say the third part is some of the adversities that I have overcome, and
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I can share these with you now.
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So I was born to great economic privilege, right?
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My parents, you know, were professionals.
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We lived in a lovely house, big garden, went to a very nice school, very well-educated,
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but then age 10, my father decided he was bored of family life.
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He went off on motorbikes, holidays, sailing, and he basically abandoned us.
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We had no idea where he was for several years, really.
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But my mother, my mother Persevich, she was a lawyer, and one Christmas, he invited his
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We cooked, we cleaned, we waited on them hand and foot.
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We disappeared after the Christmas.
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He issued divorce proceedings, and I was delighted.
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I mean, he was this hot-tempered bully.
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He would just, you know, shout and bully and scold.
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He was even fired from one of his jobs because he was too aggressive.
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So when he announced these divorce proceedings, I thought this was the most fantastic thing
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And then they, you know, there's a Senyan Urdu, the major fights and struggles and problems
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in life over wealth, women, and property.
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And that was certainly the issue for my father.
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So when there were the court proceedings, my mother got a share of the house.
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My father resented that.
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He bitterly resented the amount of money she got over dividing the property.
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And then he was fuelled with venom.
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He never gave any money in financial support to my mother.
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And every time my brother went to visit my father, he would return that weekend with
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this poisonous venom and hatred against my mother that my father had instilled.
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And I didn't want anything to do with my father, to be honest, and I distanced myself
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And every time we went to pick up my brother, my father would be abusive to my mother.
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He would treat her with contempt.
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He would not allow her in.
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And yet my mother, she always wanted to be polite, to be, you know, to maintain the moral
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high ground, you know, to whatever they say to us, we'll be polite and we'll be courteous.
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And so she was saddled with two kids in this economically privileged environment.
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I went to the same school as Shahrukh Khan's son.
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So a very nice school, very nice.
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That's my India connection early on.
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So we went to this very nice school and my mother was worried financially, but she worked
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I didn't realize at the time, but her field is very male dominated international financial
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She became a partner, incredibly successful, and she made sure we had absolutely everything.
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So she worked very long hours.
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She was economically independent.
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She was focused on work.
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And I think through that, I realized the importance of pursuing my studies.
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You know, marriage would be weak insurance for me.
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I was going to make sure I was totally fine.
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And she, and she, she was incredibly entrepreneurial.
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She bought this ramshackle house in a nice environment.
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She made it spectacular.
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She made it magnificent.
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We had absolutely everything we could ever want.
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And so, and I benefited from that great education, just as I'm sure Shahrukh Khan's son did.
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And so I went to debate clubs.
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I was, you know, discussing literature.
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I was really interested in philosophy and history.
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I was winning academic prizes.
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I was successful at school.
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I was chirpy at school.
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I mean, you ask about my cheerfulness.
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I was jolly and playful and voice, you know, was one of the popular kids.
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I had the parties were at my house, you know, I was fun and outgoing.
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That said, my brother always wanted to see my father and he was sort of treated as the
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golden boy and I never did.
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And yet I was always pushed to spend time with him.
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You know, my mother wanted to make things normal for my brother, wanted to, thought
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it was, felt that family mattered and we should spend time with our family.
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And so I, like, for example, I was pushed to go on holidays with him and the following
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year I would be so upset and cross about that because my father was a bully and horrific
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that the next year I wasn't good, but I was pushed, you know, for the sake of my brother,
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that my brother's welfare was prioritized.
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Anyway, so at school I did well.
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And then, but I was, you know, I was in a very, you know, to be critical of my childhood,
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I was in a very elitist, parochial environment, you know, I was surrounded by a bunch of rich
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I had no clue about the rest of the world.
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I was absolutely clueless, totally clueless.
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But anyway, so another important stage in my life was that age 16, I never had any periods.
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And so I went to the doctors to discuss this, to understand what was going on.
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They thought that everything externally was normal, but something wasn't happening.
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They thought, well, maybe she just hasn't fully developed, maybe she hasn't fully gone
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So they gave me more progesterone and estrogen, even though the levels were totally normal.
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So they put me on the pill.
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So age 16, they doubled the dose, which I'm sure is a great thing to give a teenage girl.
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And then that didn't work.
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So they thought, well, let's bypass the digestive system.
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They put me on the patch pill.
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So anyway, so then they did a number of ultrasounds and they discovered I had only one kidney,
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only one ovary, no uterus, no vagina.
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This is a syndrome called Rokitansky.
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It affects one in 5,000 women.
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And the nurse told me, okay, so this is what you need to do.
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She highlighted, she showed me a series of plastic dilators.
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One is the size of your little finger.
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One is the size of a much larger.
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She just basically told, so I had what was like a dimple.
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My vagina was like a dimple and you're basically supposed to ram these plastic dilators inside
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me to build my own vagina.
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And I think because of my childhood, having seen my mother being very pragmatic, just
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dealing with things, getting the job done, my mother never showed any weakness about
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I never saw her express despair.
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She's not a warm or jolly person.
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And so I had that same approach when I discovered I had no vagina.
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Here is the medical solution.
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This is what I need to do.
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So I do this therapy every night.
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It's incredibly painful, tearing a hole in yourself.
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And three months later, I go to the nurse, she was like, 2.2 centimetres, six months
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later, 4.4 centimetres.
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And then I went to some of the, there was a, the hospital where I was affiliated with
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in London, they organised an event for many women with the same condition.
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And we don't know the cause of this condition.
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So there were women in hijabs, women in hot pants, you know, all typically around like
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17, 18, recently diagnosed.
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And I then realised that my response to this diagnosis was totally unusual.
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I mean, the rest of the women were depressed, traumatised, anxious, upset.
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You know, they felt like they weren't proper women.
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They didn't have, you know, even though my, even though externally I'm totally normal,
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even though my chromosomes totally normal for females, they felt they weren't proper
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women, they were incredibly distressed.
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And so what I did is I got up and I said, Hey, I'm Alice Evans.
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And I made my own vagina and you can too.
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And that's probably one of the, my greatest, my greatest contributions to public welfare.
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Because after that women contacted me and they said, you've changed how I see myself,
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you know, for so long and, you know, so long.
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And this is a broader point that whenever there is a stigma, whenever there is a taboo,
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people stay silent and they stay ashamed and they don't speak to people.
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And that can create, that cultivates a negative feedback loop because people feel alone.
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They don't have the support.
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They feel bad in themselves.
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And that's just, it's a mental construction, a repeat of beliefs and behaviour.
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So what I saw is me speaking out was a public good.
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So when I was at school, I would tell anyone who was interested, Hey, I have no vagina,
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but I made it because I thought people should know because if I can reach just one person
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because it's one in 5,000 women, it's not that rare, but it doesn't get discussed.
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So I went on BBC news about that, et cetera, et cetera, around that same period.
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And this is just the week before I went to university.
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My father's ex-girlfriend contacted me and she said, how's your father?
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And I said, I don't know.
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She said, well, how's his wife?
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Well, I said, I don't know about that either.
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So anyway, so she, I asked my mother to drive me to the ex-girlfriend's house.
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I discovered that my father had taken a BMW tour to Morocco, met a young woman, a little
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bit older than me from a poor part of Marrakesh, living in a two room flat with her 10 brothers
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And he converted to Islam, paid for her with sugar, chickens and olive oil.
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And she was going to come to England.
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The ex-girlfriend also told me that while living with my father, my father had given
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her a black eye and ruptured her kidneys.
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Now, my father had never been physically violent to us, but I believe this.
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And I was given my father's history.
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I didn't think that was crazy.
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And the ex-girlfriend also told me that my father had stalked her.
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And I was really worried about this Moroccan woman, especially, you know, she didn't really
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speak English, but anyway, so they, my Moroccan wife came over, subsequently met her.
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Anyway, so that's one issue.
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And then my father, but then, oh yes, so I'll give you a brief story about that.
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So they moved to France because land is cheaper there, I'm part French.
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Then they had a child together, but they were so incompatible.
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They called the child separate names.
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Then my father tells us, and I don't know if this is true, the Moroccan wife violently
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He claims this is because she wanted a greater share of the divorce proceedings because she
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was trying to trigger violence in him.
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They had five custody battles because my father did not want to pay the maintenance to her.
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He did not want her to get the money, five custody battles over this child.
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And at one point, my father kidnapped the child.
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She moved back to England because she thought French people are racist and she wanted to
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She was in, I forget, somewhere in England.
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Then the police knocked on the door of my mother's house at 2 a.m. and asked to search
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the property just in case the child was there.
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My father was apprehended at Portsmouth in England, and my brother had to pay the bail
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Anyway, we can move on from that story, so that's just one adventure.
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So are we happy to continue?
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So then at university, oh no, I want to tell you another story that I think is an important
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When I was 16, we went on holiday to South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland.
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And that was my first encounter with extreme poverty.
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That was the first time that I'd seen slums and rural deprivation.
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And I remember we stopped the car at one point, and we got out, and my brother and I and these
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other kids we were with, and we played with some kids we liked just playing football.
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And that was the first time that I'd seen extreme deprivation.
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And after that, I just cried, and it really shocked me.
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What was extreme deprivation?
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Seeing slums, seeing sewage, seeing kids living in ramshackle houses, just dilapidated houses,
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having very, very little.
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We had friendship, we had humanity.
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We played together just as kids do.
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But I just had never encountered that level of deprivation before, and I cried.
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I just didn't know that kind of deprivation existed at all.
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So I think that was an important point.
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So then I went to university, and I studied philosophy.
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And that was incredibly important to my mental development.
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So I think philosophy, I studied free will.
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And through studying that, I realized that free will is impossible because it's luck
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what kind of personality we have.
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Whether you're the person who works hard, that's luck.
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Whether you're a person, if you're born in an environment in which hard work pays off,
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I also came to question personal identity, that I realized there is no constant thing.
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That's just a mental construction.
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I also became skeptical the external world existed.
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We studied the arguments about the brain and the vat, and I realized that I could be a
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There's no evidence that these aren't just mental stimulations.
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I studied meta-ethics and the idea that actually our claims about right and wrong and good
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and bad are just social constructs.
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There's nothing in the external world that is a moral fact.
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This is something that we've made up to, and that has enabled our societies to thrive.
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I also studied philosophy, and before I became a nihilist, I was very interested in utilitarianism,
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and I found that very persuasive.
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When I became a utilitarian, I became a vegan, and I gave away vast sums of money because
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I was concerned, you know, extreme poverty, etc.
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That philosophy, I was continually questioning everything, so it's that intense questioning
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that there were no sacred truths, there was nothing that would be taken for given.
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I would, from now on, I would be questioning absolutely everything.
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I should say I started philosophy in school, but it was exaggerated at university, and
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I was also madly in love with formal logic.
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I would spend my evenings studying formal logic.
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I found logical propositions, just sledgehammer logic.
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I mean, I should say, I did dabble in university life.
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So my first week of university, they have this thing called Freshers Week where people
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go, and I thought, right, I'm going to try this out.
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I will go out every single night and party until 5.30 a.m.
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I will try the student experience, and this is my sort of empirical experiment.
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At the end of the week, I reviewed it.
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I decided it did not make me happy, and I never went out in the entire university life
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I just loved philosophy and formal logic and this analytical rigor.
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I also did a couple of courses in the philosophy of sex, in feminist philosophy.
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So yeah, that was all important for my mental development, analytical rigor, questioning
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Also at university, I joined university debate clubs, so I would train twice a week in debate.
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Every weekend, we would go to debate tournaments, and I went to European debate championships,
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world debate tournaments.
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I became president of the Debates of Society.
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I did that for a year, but then I decided that actually debate was not good for my mental
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development because the goal is to destroy the other person.
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The goal is to demonstrate such oratory that you just destroy them, embarrass them so that
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people think you're right.
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It's not about working out the correct answer.
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It's not about you and I learning from each other, and just before this, you and I were
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discussing something controversial, and we had a nice discussion.
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It wasn't about working out the truth.
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It was just this artistry, and so I decided that no, this wasn't what I wanted to pursue.
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This wasn't good for me, so I was going to move on from it.
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That practice definitely strengthened my skills, and this is one thing I've come to learn
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that no one is born with any innate skills, but we develop them through practice, through
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good guidance, and also social recognition and reward, the more that those are appreciated.
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So I was in an environment where I was praised and rewarded through doing well in debate,
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But I would say one more thing that helped me become more confident, because I am confident,
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is also working in different environments.
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From age 15, I was a waitress, and that teaches you how to get along with different people,
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so I was quite confident about that.
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I also had a couple of characters in my own family.
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I talked about my abusive father.
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There were other characters who gave me other sources of inspiration.
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My uncle is an interesting character.
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Age 30 – so he was doing an office job.
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Age 30, he decided that didn't make him happy.
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What he really loved was skiing and hang gliding, so he quit his job.
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He went off to be a ski rep, because that way he could do as much skiing as possible.
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He lived in a caravan in the summer doing hang gliding, and I loved that.
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This is someone who thinks, I'm happy if I'm skiing and hang gliding, so whatever
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social convention, let me do that.
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Age 45, he then realized he needed a pension, so he started up a business, and they did
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Then we have my grandfather, who was this pioneering physicist.
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He was at Cambridge, then developed radar during the Second World War.
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My grandmother was a historian.
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She is probably the one person in my family who showed warmth and care.
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You would enter a room, and she would make you feel valued.
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She would make you feel cherished.
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Actually, when she died five years ago, I'll be interested in your thoughts on this.
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Often at funerals, at least in England, people mourn the dead and mourn their departure and
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that loss, and they also say nice things about them after they've died, and so people never
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get to hear those nice things.
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But I took a different approach to my grandmother's death.
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I thought, well, let me identify her virtues, and let me try to inculcate them in myself
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so that wonderful things that she did can live on through me.
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And so I try, in my interactions, albeit imperfectly, to make people feel valued.
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One thing I like to do is give credible compliments.
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I think so many people, they're trying their best, but might not feel appreciated or recognized,
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and I can give several.
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For example, earlier this year, I was in Morocco where I was doing research for my book, and
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this wonderful family invited me for ifta to break the Ramadan, and the mother made
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the most glorious spread.
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There were so many different dishes, and they were all delicious.
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And I sat there with her family, and I noticed that not her husband or either of her sons
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They didn't say how delicious the food was.
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They didn't praise it, and that's common the world over, that women's care workers
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not recognized is not valued.
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And I wanted to tell her how much I enjoy the food, and this is delicious, and not just
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to say it's delicious, but to explain why.
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And afterwards, when we were washing up in the kitchen, I said to her, I noticed that
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other people didn't comment on the food, and she said, yeah, they treat me like a maid.
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And I think that's not a uniquely gendered issue, but there are so many people, whatever
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they do, they're trying, but people might not say what we appreciate and what we recognize.
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And I like to compliment people, and I don't do it in an insincere, it's not just a fake
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claim, but I like to identify and highlight and explain what I see in the other person
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that's brilliant and fascinating, because everyone has these unique draws, and that
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very much comes from my grandmother.
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And so that's something that I try to inculcate, and I want everyone to leave an interaction
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with me feeling better about themselves, and feeling happy about that interaction.
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So that's important for me.
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So even though I'm a nihilist, I do try to spread joy in a sense.
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So now we come to, okay, so let's say we've done the undergraduate degree in philosophy,
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then I did a three month internship with an NGO working on poverty reduction, because
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I'm now interested in that.
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I initially wanted to be a human rights lawyer, but through this experience, I realized actually,
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I wanted to understand the causes of underdevelopment.
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So I was going to the LSE, and I switched to masters to study international development.
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They would allow me to come, but I had to wait a year.
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In that intervening time, I had a year to kill, what was I going to do?
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So in walks the country director of Achenade, the Gambia.
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I entered, she walks in, and I introduce myself to her, I say, hi, I'm Alice Evans, and I'd
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like to come and work for you.
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And so off I go to the Gambia.
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And while I go to the Gambia, I do a search of all the professors at the LSE, is there
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anyone who's studying the Gambia?
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And I find a professor who is, I volunteer to be her research assistant, we do a research
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project on gender, and I realize the importance of social esteem.
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So even before my masters, I was doing the six month qualitative research project, then
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I went to the LSE, and I was so excited.
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I thought, now I'm going to find some brilliant minds who I'll be able to discuss these topics
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as we talk, you know, I'm very curious, I'm eager to discuss.
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So I went in and I had read everything, you know, I had studied everything and I was eager
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And I was so disappointed, you know, people could regurgitate the two basic readings.
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So that was disappointing.
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I think throughout my life, I've always wanted to find people who might want to share and
#
discuss these ideas, but you know, that wasn't at the LSE.
#
So then, after my masters, I decided I want to pursue a PhD.
#
Now, because I would, and I chose to continue with Professor Sylvia Chant, because I knew
#
her, we had a nice relationship.
#
So I was interested in gender, merely because of, she was interested in gender, it wasn't
#
like I had this strong feminist zeal.
#
Many of the studies on gender at the time were often short-termist studies, you know,
#
microfinance, does it change gender relations in six months?
#
So I thought, well, actually, you know, gender relations take a long time to change, generations.
#
And so what we need to study is the lingerie.
#
So I thought, where is a good place for me to study a hundred years of how gender relations
#
And I picked Zambia, because from the 1930s, there have been ethnographic anthropological
#
So 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, so that was a great place for me to go to.
#
One hitch is that people will be speaking Bemba.
#
So obviously, I need to teach myself Bemba.
#
How am I going to do this?
#
Well, I contacted a professor of languages at SOAS, but we couldn't find, we really couldn't
#
So I found on eBay, a colonial missionary's drama book, and I also found a sort of dictionary
#
from the 1960s, and I studied this.
#
And then I went to Zambia, I just went to some event, I met a school girl, and she was
#
16, her name's Esther, and I said, can I come and stay with you?
#
So I lived with that family, and every morning I woke up at 4am, I studied my grammar book,
#
I soon realized that the dictionary I was using was totally antiquated.
#
I mean, these were like deep rural Bemba that missionaries were using, so no one was using
#
So what I did is I wrote my own dictionary.
#
Every time I heard a word, I drew a picture of it, because that's a form of active learning,
#
that the more we creatively engage with a concept, the more it aids our learning.
#
So I wrote this dictionary, I wrote my own dictionary, I became fluent in Bemba, and
#
I also lived with, I also, in that period, one day I was interviewed.
#
I mean, it's my intense curiosity that pushes me to be bold and take risks, because all
#
I want to do is learn, and so nothing else matters.
#
So I wanted to interview a local government counsellor, and she's living in a slum.
#
So the day I meet her, I say, you know, we have a nice chat, we have a fantastic interview
#
with Yetta Long, I say, well, can I come and live with you?
#
So then after that, I lived in the slum for six months.
#
Another time I went to interview an MP in the same area, and she invited me to stay
#
with her, and then I went to live with MPs, and so in Zambia, all the MPs lived together
#
in a sort of BNB type event, type affair, and so while I was staying there, I was invited
#
to go on national TV and was interviewed about my research in Bemba, so I was on state TV.
#
And then here's this young white woman, I was, what, 24 at the time, who was fluent
#
in Bemba, and so I became famous across the country, so I would, anywhere I would walk,
#
I would get on a bus, I would get in a taxi, I would be in a supermarket 200 miles away,
#
and people would know who I was.
#
One time I was even deep, deep in the bush, and I was giving all my official papers to
#
this person, you know, showing her I had approvals, and she was like, I know who you are, I've
#
seen you on TV, so that was all very helpful, that people felt that they knew me.
#
So that study in Zambia was really important, so what I learnt is in Zambia, there's now
#
a saying you can hear in markets, in schools, in homes, they say, and what that means is
#
women can do what men can do, and this has emerged as a result of economic behavior and
#
cultural changes, in that from the 1980s there was worsening economic insecurity as a result
#
of the plummeting price of copper, state cutbacks, HIV-AIDS, and men could no longer provide
#
for their families single-handedly, and so women surged into the labor force to provide
#
for their children, to make ends meet, and initially this was just adding to their drudgery,
#
they weren't being recognized, they weren't being valued, but through prolonged exposure,
#
as people saw women fighting to provide for their children, to pay the electricity, as
#
widows were demonstrating equal competence alongside men, and through public discussions,
#
people talking in the marketplaces, sharing stories about these women pioneers, sharing
#
stories about women mechanics, women professors, women doing all these great things, people
#
came to recognize and revere women, and that encouraged social change.
#
So that was my PhD, broadly, and then I realized another conundrum, why is this social change
#
being faster in cities than in rural areas, and that's a global phenomenon, that in cities
#
people are generally much more liberal, much more gender equal, etc.
#
So I thought, right, I want to test, I want to understand this, so let me do a comparative
#
rural-urban ethnography.
#
So I returned to Zambia, I interviewed some rural-urban traders, and they invite me to
#
go back to their village, so we were talking about, and so to get there, I was going to
#
board a coach, take a shortcut through the Democratic Republic of Congo, and on the way,
#
these Congolese border officials stop me and tell me to disembark the coach.
#
These eight soldiers take me into a room and they shout at me in the local language, and
#
you can understand this, they haven't been paid in a long time, they want to intimidate
#
the white person, I totally understand that.
#
As luck would have it, colonial borders were arbitrarily imposed.
#
I already knew their language.
#
So I reply in my polite and fluent Bamba, and I explain myself, I explain my purpose,
#
So they took me to another room where they shouted and detected me in French.
#
As luck would have it, I'm part French.
#
So they eventually released me, off I go, back on the coach, through this 10-hour drive
#
through the muddy parts of Congo, I arrive in the village, and that was wonderful.
#
This is a place of no electricity, no running water, no phone signal, but I talked to people,
#
I tried to understand why many of these traditions had persisted in the village, and I learned
#
that this is a place that's, this was a swamp, so it's much more socially isolated.
#
Many of the vast majority of the women there were wives and mothers, and that's how people
#
grew up anticipating that.
#
So even if, and also there's this, and I realized how negative feedback loops can persist.
#
So even because of fear of social condemnation.
#
So for example, one woman, Mavis, she was a trader in town, and through trading in town,
#
she heard that in town, women kept their own money, and she wanted that.
#
She definitely wanted that, but she couldn't push for that at home, and that frustrated
#
And I asked her, why is it?
#
Because people in her community wouldn't support that, and she didn't want to fight
#
And similarly, I was talking to a man in town who, through coming to town, he realized that
#
gender-based violence was wrong, that it was wrong to be your wife, he was definitely opposed
#
But back in the village, he would not intervene in such cases because he anticipated social
#
And I think that's an important point about what I call our norm perception.
#
So even if we are privately critical of something, if we anticipate social disapproval, we often
#
choose not to rock the boat.
#
And that can create what I call a despondency trap, because if we never see successful resistance,
#
people may not push back.
#
And so then they never see successful resistance, and so these places remain caught in a negative
#
feedback loop, and that impedes social change.
#
So it's the isolation, the death of economic opportunities, at least their cultural persistence.
#
So that rural study, that's really important.
#
And then I had another conundrum.
#
Wow, I wanted to test my hypothesis, because what I'm ultimately saying is that it's cities
#
catalyzing social change.
#
It's the diversity, the heterogeneity of people.
#
That myriad exposure in the Zambian copper belt, you're bored of bus, and you'll see
#
a woman going off to her office.
#
You'll see a woman driving a truck to the mines.
#
All those myriad exposures, those associations, seeing the different things going on, talking
#
about them, debating things.
#
Just yesterday, I was at JNU chatting with female students about their same experience,
#
that they're sharing ideas.
#
And I was thinking that cities themselves are catalysts of social change.
#
But maybe I got it wrong.
#
Maybe it was just about women having economic opportunities.
#
So I thought, well, let me test this hypothesis.
#
What I need to do is look for a rural labor demand shock.
#
I need to find a village where there's suddenly been female employment in a rural environment
#
that's isolated, that doesn't have those diverse experiences and exposure.
#
Could female employment catalyze a change of its own accord?
#
So I think where in the world is a rural labor demand shock?
#
Because of rising labor costs and land costs in China, many factories have relocated to
#
So off I go to Cambodia, and I start learning Khmer.
#
I contact a family, and I do rural-urban comparative ethnographic research in Cambodia.
#
And that was enormously fascinating.
#
So every morning at 5.30 a.m., I'm chatting with the factory workers.
#
And through this, again, the rural factory workers were saying how they feel pride that
#
they're able to support their families, just like sons.
#
They feel pride that they're able to support their parents.
#
But it's not like they have their own incredible autonomy.
#
They're not like they're challenging gender barriers.
#
They're gaining status, they're gaining pride, they're gaining esteem.
#
But there's far more radical disruption in cities.
#
I talked to garment workers, and one told me how in the apartment next to her, the husband
#
was sharing the care work.
#
And she realized that, hey, hey, yeah, if I'm working, my husband's working, my husband
#
can also be doing the washing up.
#
So she pushed for that too.
#
Her husband refused, and so she divorced him.
#
And I talked to students too, and they said, well, you know, the other day I saw a woman
#
driving a tuk-tuk, which is their equivalent of an auto rickshaw.
#
And they were like, women can do what men can do.
#
And I talked to male students, and they'd say, yeah, I came from the village, getting
#
a scholarship or bursary, subsidies for education, and I saw these women administrators.
#
I saw these women managers, and I realized that women can do stuff too.
#
So again, I see the same theme, that cities enable this diversity, this exposure, these
#
So that helped me realize something about the broader process of structural transformation.
#
That cities, combined with relatively high rates of female employment and public spaces
#
of open discussion, can enable cultural change that's in this process.
#
So what I've told you, it's basically like Alice having a dialogue with Alice, right?
#
All these things have been like me testing my own hypotheses.
#
There's very little engagement with the outside world.
#
I mean, all these articles that I published, they always publish well.
#
I never felt that there was a strong appetite or interest in my research.
#
Whenever I went to conferences, people were doing radically different things.
#
There might be an RCT, or there might be something.
#
I never found that there was an audience that was interested in what I was doing.
#
It was just me by myself, interested in it, interested in it for my own sake.
#
And I think there, Twitter in part has helped me because I'm able to reach out to a broader
#
I do find some people who are interested in these bigger questions.
#
And so I think that has been liberating in itself.
#
But I think also, so often you hear academics complain that there are disciplinary gatekeepers.
#
And in economics, for example, they might say, you know, journals want to publish these
#
kinds of research, or this is popular.
#
And I think of that as a little bit like an abusive marriage, that if people try to please
#
one person, then they're beholden to that narrow gatekeeper, whether it's journal gatekeepers
#
or whether it's the abusive husband.
#
But that's contingent on your desire to please that one narrow group.
#
We can, we each have the opportunity to step back and liberate ourselves and say, actually,
#
That isn't the audience that I want to please.
#
So my PhD happened to be in geography because I'd followed Sylvia Chant.
#
I didn't like what the geography journals were pushing me to do.
#
They let me to theorize space.
#
I thought that was pointless.
#
So I stopped publishing geography.
#
So I think I've always had this, I've cultivated over time incrementally this sense of what
#
What do I think is important intrinsically?
#
I'm not going to be beholden to whatever kind of social policing or social convention.
#
I'm going to do what I think is important.
#
So I think that's a consequence of gaining knowledge.
#
But I think then another, in terms of continuing this theme about my research, 2019 was a major
#
step change because that's when I really engaged deeply with a debate around what's called
#
So this is the rise of the West, the economic divergence, how some nations became rich and
#
democratic and others didn't.
#
And I found this fascinating.
#
I liked these big comparative questions.
#
I was totally engrossed.
#
And through maybe three months of reading this literature, reading absolutely everything,
#
I was struck by something.
#
I realized there was also what I call the Great Gender Divergence in that all countries
#
are patriarchal, but we also see, if we look at objective nationally representative indicators
#
that in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, it is men who grow out of their
#
homes primarily to run family businesses, organize politically and make the laws of
#
In post-communist countries, Russia and China, women do work, but they're excluded from
#
Russian government and Chinese politburo are almost exclusively male.
#
Whereas in Latin America, there's been this radical feminist transformation, soaring rates
#
of female employment, massive feminist rallies against gender-based violence, 11 legislatures
#
now have gender parity.
#
So it's converging with Europe, even though it was much more patriarchal.
#
And now today, Scandinavia is one of the most gender equal places in the world.
#
But for much of human history, it was far more patriarchal than bilateral and matrilineal
#
Southeast Asia, the Andes, the Gulf of Guinea and Southern Africa.
#
And so this is what I call the great gender divergence, this cultural heterogeneity across
#
the world, notwithstanding.
#
And so I started to study why exactly that had happened.
#
And so broadly, my argument is that the great gender divergence occurred primarily in the
#
20th century as a result of the enormous economic and political divergence, because with technological
#
change and job-creating economic growth, women seize those economic opportunities.
#
So you see soaring rates of female employment and advancement in both Europe, North America
#
And by going out to factories, to jobs, women form friendships and they start to challenge
#
and criticize many of these patriarchal ideas and traditions.
#
They develop a politics of solidarity and these female friendships are the foundations
#
Women also seize political opportunities to where there's democratization.
#
In South Korea, for example, women organize for Me Too.
#
They organize in Latin America.
#
They challenge their stigma and shame around rape, but the rate at which women seize those
#
political economic opportunities is mediated by their culture.
#
And so then I wanted to understand the enormous divergence and causes of why in some cultures
#
female labor supply rises weekly with economic jobs and opportunities.
#
And so I can talk about that if you'd like.
#
And so then I wrote to Princeton and I had this big book proposal and I said, listen,
#
here is the most fundamental fact about humanity that we cannot answer.
#
This is what I propose.
#
I propose to study a history of every single country in the world.
#
This has not been done before, but I believe I can do it.
#
And at that time, people did not believe that was possible.
#
But, you know, I'm someone who's made my own vagina, who's taught myself to become
#
fluent in Bember, and I pretty much believe I can do anything I want to, anything I put
#
I have learned that with practice and perseverance, I can do it.
#
And I thought this was an important project and I wanted to give it a try.
#
And so that's what I've been doing for almost three years now.
#
And so I've come to India as part of that study to, you know, try to learn to listen
#
to different people traveling across India.
#
So while I've, you know, read much of the literature and understanding, you know, different
#
academic perspectives now, I want to talk to people to hear their stories.
#
So let me come back to your question, what makes me so upbeat and optimistic?
#
I think it's, I have pursued what's made me happy.
#
I have liberated myself from forces and organizations that would try to restrict me, constrain me.
#
I do what I enjoy, but I'm also enabled by incredible generosity, incredible kindness.
#
Like I was saying earlier, when I was stuck in Jaipur, the father offered to, you know,
#
When I was stuck in Jaipur, the guy offered to drive me all the way to Udaipur.
#
So it's people's support and kindness and encouragement.
#
You know, I am not, I do not exist in a vacuum.
#
And going back to Twitter, you know, I have received incredible support, encouragement,
#
and that social reward, that social recognition has really helped me continue.
#
You know, it's a lot of encouragement, a lot of support.
#
So I'm happy in that respect.
#
There's so much to double click on, but I'm just wondering if this gentleman in Jaipur
#
who offered to drive you, you should have told him, yeah, okay, drive me.
#
He'd probably have driven you to the bus stop and said, there, there's a bus, take that
#
Lots to double click on here.
#
And I'll, you know, before we get to your work and the great gender divergence and all
#
of that, which we'll come to, before we get to that, you know, some more questions about
#
And one of the things that I'm sort of struck by is how you bookended your wonderful answer
#
by talking about happiness and the sort of notion that you looked at it in an intentional
#
You started by saying, I decided to be happy, right?
#
As an act of intentionality later on, when you speak about college, you spoke about how
#
you realized that any skill can be learned.
#
So you could almost shape yourself by learning the stuff that you were learning, you know,
#
then you go to Zambia and you learn Bimba.
#
Though I have to tell you that if I try to teach myself a language by drawing something
#
for every word, I would just be babbling because I'm really bad at drawing.
#
So I guess you're good at drawing as well, which is again, in the time that you learned
#
philosophy, one of the, and I'll ask you about each of them.
#
I won't ask you about free will, I'll ask you about metaethics.
#
But one thing that you mentioned was how you sort of realized that identity isn't a fixed
#
Who you are isn't a fixed thing, you know, which is a theme I keep going back to on how
#
it's contingent, not just on perhaps on circumstance, but also on little things like the chemical
#
composition of your brain or what did you have to eat that particular morning?
#
If something is off a little bit, you're a different person entirely.
#
And that speaks to also this effort you're talking about of sort of building yourself,
#
deciding to be happy, deciding to be good at X, deciding to be good at Y, deciding to
#
follow all of these different things.
#
So tell me a little bit about that because sometimes when I think in my extremely negative
#
pessimistic way about identity and so on, I sometimes wonder if somebody says something
#
good about me, that does this person know that I'm really winging it, that all this
#
And then of course, the question at the back of that is that what is real if everything
#
is kind of constructed either consciously or otherwise by you.
#
In most people, they are who they are kind of by default.
#
They don't think too hard about this stuff.
#
They think happiness is something that happens, not something that you can cause yourself
#
So what are sort of your thoughts on becoming who you are, you know, especially when you
#
realize through your study of philosophy that it's all fragile, you know, that you could
#
just grow older and get dementia and forget everything.
#
And if you forget everything, who are you?
#
You know, you're back to nothing except you no longer have the tools to build it back.
#
So what's your sense of how your identity evolved when you look back at yourself?
#
What do you not like when you think of who you are?
#
You know, sort of what are your feelings?
#
What did you want to be?
#
How did you see that, you know, perception of yourself sort of changing with time?
#
What did I not like about my past?
#
You know, what aspects of Alice Evans were less good in the past?
#
I think perhaps in the past, I might have allowed myself to be shy, to be nervous, to
#
And I've overcome that in the way through encouragement from others.
#
So I remember after my PhD and postdoc at the LSE, I went to Cambridge and I was very
#
I was very intimidated.
#
But I had a wonderful colleague, Emma Maudsley, and she said, listen, there's just this Cambridge
#
These are just normal people.
#
And that support and encouragement made me feel okay.
#
And so I could engage with them.
#
So I mean, you know, right now I may strike you as this confident, bubbly person, but
#
this has been an incremental journey.
#
It's about trying something, taking a risk, being supported by others and realizing I
#
can do it and then thriving.
#
So I think, you know, so I was not always this confident.
#
I mean, there was a period when I think I was about 13.
#
And this was a result of my father's bullying that I barely spoke.
#
All I did really was just apologize, I just say, I'm sorry.
#
You know, that's what happens when you live with a bully, right?
#
So it's not like I've always been this, you know, go-getting feisty, feisty, feisty independent
#
Here's another example, so I run my own podcast, not as successful as yours, but I started
#
it when I was in Cambridge because even then I was relatively confident, but I knew that
#
there were a number of other amazingly brilliant minds who might be shyer and more worried
#
They, you know, reluctant to put themselves out there.
#
And I thought that's a net loss for the world because we're not hearing their brilliant
#
So let me set up a podcast and let me interview them.
#
So I was doing all these interviews with academics and I wanted to highlight their research.
#
And this is also part of my love and excitement for learning.
#
So the other day I did a very, I met at their conference in Eau des Pours, I met Soumya
#
Dhanarange and Vidya Mahambri.
#
They told me about this research they've just done and so that very day I say, hey, let's
#
And they were a little bit nervous.
#
You know, they were worried.
#
They hadn't done a podcast before, but I was encouraged, I said, listen, your work is fascinating.
#
I want people to hear about this.
#
And so that's why I started the podcast, to share brilliant ideas.
#
But even when I was doing that podcast, I was often deferential to my guests.
#
I was, even if I was privately critical, I was reluctant to say, I don't think that's
#
I don't think that's persuasive.
#
I didn't want to embarrass them in that spot.
#
I didn't want to be too aggressive.
#
I've always been, and this is possibly a consequence of my father, I've been incredibly uncomfortable
#
I don't like personal conflict.
#
If someone is abusive or horrible to me, I'm just silent.
#
And in my podcast previously, in my earlier episodes of my podcast, I did not challenge
#
my guests because I didn't want to be too conflictual, I was worried they wouldn't like
#
And actually, some male guests did react, and so then a kind friend said to me, listen,
#
I was listening to your podcast and I think sometimes you disagree with them, but you
#
And I think that's common for many people, especially women, that we're reluctant to
#
They said to me, and they were really encouraging and supportive, and they were like, listen,
#
you've read this material, you know your stuff, you can express yourself and push them.
#
People like a feisty podcast.
#
And I did that increasingly, but it really depends on the guest.
#
So for example, one of my very close, my best friends, he's very kind and he's very supportive.
#
And whatever I say to him, he never is aggressive or hostile, but other male guests have been.
#
So I once interviewed a professor who I won't name, and I challenged him on this podcast.
#
And afterwards, he sent me this hostile email.
#
He was like, well, I didn't know about your views and why were you taking me to task?
#
And I was like, well, you could have read about my research.
#
Anyway, he was upset and there was a backlash about me challenging him, but anyway.
#
So my point is, my rambling point is that I was initially, even despite all those debate
#
clubs, despite all that independent travel, I was previously much more cautious, much
#
shyer, much less, more reluctant to rock the boat and challenge things more, you know,
#
It's something that I've learned that many people may try to, you know, assert themselves.
#
And part of, you know, developing an open dialogue and a more egalitarian relationship
#
And so I can draw a brilliant example from the Gulf of Guinea.
#
So in the Gulf of Guinea, there were women always had in Yoruba and Ibo, Asante and Cameroon
#
as well, women had their own independent networks and they used that female solidarity to challenge
#
men that would try to transgress or try to challenge their autonomy and authority.
#
In Cameroon, they would even say, you know, a man dare not even steal an egg from his
#
Because these women, you know, gender relations aren't set in stone.
#
It depends on women mobilizing, protecting their entitlements.
#
And that's something that I've learned to do.
#
It's a skill I've developed.
#
So to answer your question, what do I not like about the old Alice Evans, is that not
#
so much a dislike, but I've learned how to be more confident and more assertive in myself.
#
And I've learned also to be more diplomatic and to learn the ways in which it's possible.
#
And I've learned how to get along or cultivate, you know, get along with a diverse group of
#
And that's come through, you know, traveling the world, meeting lots of different people.
#
So I've learned diplomacy and I've learned assertion, I'd say.
#
Early on, you know, in your first answer, you spoke about how when your dad filed for
#
divorce, he was just so delighted that this shit is over.
#
Later, you spoke about Cambodia and about how these women would go to factories and
#
that, you know, they'd be, you know, staying with next to other women like them and that
#
here another woman say that, oh, my husband shares his housework and you spoke about this
#
young lady who demanded the same of her husband and divorced him, you know, which is again
#
a cause for celebration.
#
I once, I think 13 years ago, I wrote a column about how the best metric we can use in India
#
to show whether women are progressing or not is rising divorce rates, which I felt was
#
The higher they go, the better they are because it shows that women are getting more empowered.
#
But a larger question I have for you, and we'll of course talk about all your research
#
and all your work in detail, but the larger question that I have is that isn't marriage
#
Isn't marriage fundamentally toxic, especially for women, it's convenient for men, but isn't
#
it toxic and therefore when you look at the larger arc of history, like what you've done
#
so beautifully through all your writings and your essays is talk about how all our norms,
#
all the ways that we behave, the structures in society are shaped by things like geography
#
and economics and different kinds of circumstance.
#
And so the change that we see through the decades and centuries seems agonizingly slow,
#
But I'm going to ask you to take a leap now and imagine maybe two, 300 years later.
#
And it seems to me that marriage in many ways, especially in the ways that we think of it
#
And there is an acceptance of it, which is a lagging acceptance and it'll take a long
#
time to play out, but it simply doesn't make sense, especially for women, especially in
#
the shape that it is now.
#
Let me answer that with three points.
#
Point number one, no, I do not believe that marriage is toxic.
#
I've met many people in wonderfully happy, supportive love and relationships.
#
The experience of love can be fantastic.
#
I don't mean every marriage is toxic.
#
I mean the notion, the concept of marriage, the way people look at it, both men and women.
#
But marriage can cultivate hierarchies and inequalities if several conditions are met.
#
One is if, one, the cultural valorization of marriage as the most important end point
#
for a woman means that women can be constantly striving and desperate for that marriage.
#
So Shrayana has a wonderful book, Desperately Seeking Shahrukh, and she highlights how,
#
and also there's a fantastic book on India called Chupp, when it's about women being
#
socialized for marriage and believing that marriage is the most important thing.
#
If women who fail to achieve that are somehow defunct and flawed, and that can trigger,
#
that social policing means that women might opt for someone who doesn't make them happy
#
and remain in an abusive relationship.
#
So it's one, the cultural valorization of marriage, two, it's the dearth of economic
#
opportunities that might make women reluctant to leave that abusive marriage, and three,
#
if divorce rates are very low, and if there's strong social policing, women may believe
#
that they can't exist alone.
#
So Biju has a great paper on terrorism and dowry deaths, and his argument, as I recall,
#
it's from Karnataka, he talks about women getting married, then their husband's family
#
exploiting her and beating her up to leverage more dowry, and her not leaving because of
#
fear of social policing, the failure, the condemnation of a divorced woman.
#
So it's the condemnation of divorce and the dearth of economic options, and also women's
#
fear that they cannot manage alone means that women continue in many of those abusive and
#
So those conditions can cultivate high rates, the unquestioned inequalities and the lack
#
And let me add a third point, that even in societies where marriage rates are low and
#
where women do divorce, that doesn't get you to gender equality.
#
So let me give you the example of the Soviet Union, where as a result of the communist
#
model of extensive growth, there's very high female employment, there continues to be very
#
high female employment, there continues to be a high number of female-headed households.
#
So many women have chosen to exist independently, and they can because they're economically
#
autonomous, but still, because totalitarian communism suffocated feminist activism, there
#
is very weak feminist activism, and women are not represented in the corridors of power,
#
and the Russian government continues to discriminate against women, so there are weak protections
#
against gender-based violence.
#
So a couple of years ago, the Russian parliament actually decriminalized domestic battery.
#
So even if a woman is living, it's not about you yourself, whether you choose to get married
#
or not, it's about the social and political environment that enables gender equality.
#
So I will come out and say, marriage can be totally fine and loving and wonderful and
#
There is a range of other social and political conditions that are also important.
#
Yeah, I'm kind of thinking, looking ahead, that assuming that the arc of human history
#
goes towards progress and goes towards a nicer place.
#
Let's come back to your 300 years question, and I need to play the pessimist here.
#
Okay, so I think that the reason I call my book The Great Gender Divergence is that some
#
countries have become much more gender equal, whereas in others, we see far slower transitions
#
So despite rising growth in much of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, we still
#
see very low rates of female employment, for example, so that is what they call the divergence.
#
And there are reasons to think that that divergence might persist.
#
And let me highlight three things that pose a risk.
#
One is rising authoritarianism.
#
So gender equality is partly a matter of challenging patriarchal ideals, challenging ideas that
#
women should fast for their husbands, challenging ideas that women should perform subservience
#
by doing everything for their husband, doing the housework for their husbands, etc.
#
And that happens through debate, what Amartya Sen calls the argumentative Indian.
#
And that flourishes in conditions where there is open debate, where there is free thought.
#
And so rising authoritarianism, which we now see across much of the world, can stifle that
#
public debate because people become more reluctant to speak out.
#
And so even suppression of civil debate more broadly has a silencing effect on feminist
#
activism because it mutes that culture of resistance, which is hugely important.
#
So where we see rising authoritarianism, we should expect to slow any kind of cultural
#
And second point, and so for example, in China, even though there are very high rates of female
#
employment, even though women are enormously successful in business, crackdowns on MeToo,
#
media blackouts, media blackouts on Weibo and WeChat mean that many people regard sexual
#
harassment and abuse as inevitable and it is very difficult.
#
So debate is absolutely critical, open debate is hugely important.
#
Second issue is a primary driver of rising female employment is job creating economic
#
But there are two obstacles to that.
#
One is climate breakdown.
#
Climate breakdown absolutely, as you know, and I don't even need to argue this point,
#
is going to suppress job creation, right?
#
It's going to suppress economic growth through one, environmental disasters, destruction
#
of physical infrastructure and also high temperatures, which make it impossible to learn to acquire
#
human capital to be productive.
#
And so that will make it so much harder.
#
Third issue is automation, especially if our institutions continue to allow job killing
#
Automation doesn't necessarily need to kill jobs, it could augment labor.
#
But if our institution, so for example, in India, female labor force participation in
#
rural areas has declined as a result of mechanization of agriculture.
#
So if you have mechanization in ways that reduce demand for labor in Bangladeshi families,
#
we've seen in factories rather, since 2013 Bangladeshi factories have hired fewer laborers.
#
They've hired fewer low skilled laborers because they've increasingly mechanized.
#
So if we have authoritarianism or job killing automation, and also climate breakdown, then
#
that means that we're caught in what I call this patrilineal trap.
#
If the available female earnings do not compensate for male honor, then women will continue to
#
And so that would be the story for South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.
#
As in Africa, much of Africa like in Zambia where I was, women will be trapped in rural
#
poverty and they will continue to bear many children.
#
Their families will not have the money to educate them.
#
So they will quit school at 16, bear lots of children and struggle to acquire the assets,
#
the resources to challenge dominant men to go to the cities where they learn about all
#
Everyone wants to know what will happen in the future and that's alchemy, right?
#
We cannot know, there's so much chaos and contingency.
#
But there are three reasons to think the great divergence will continue.
#
So there I am the pessimist.
#
I just, yeah, it's a terrifying moment because there's great cognitive dissonance because
#
I just realized that I'm optimistic on all three points you mentioned, but optimistic
#
I think in the short term and the medium term, I'm quite, I think the outlook is bleak, but
#
I'm optimistic briefly in the long term because, you know, as far as authoritarianism is concerned,
#
I think, I hope that we're not doomed to this forever and technology empowers individuals
#
and hopefully we'll find a way out of this.
#
As far as climate change is concerned, I think in the long run we will solve it.
#
I have enough faith in human ingenuity.
#
We've come through other crisis before and if we don't, well, you know, what's a big
#
deal if one species vanishes and, you know, adapting nuclear energy would just go a long
#
I mean, the campaign against nuclear is, you know, utterly daft and I've spoken about it
#
very often on this podcast.
#
I'm not so worried about, you know, economic growth either.
#
And I'm not, I'm not that worried about automation either because that's been a common concern
#
throughout history that, you know, machines will take away the job of humans, but any
#
disruption is temporary and in the end productivity goes up and it just works out for everybody's
#
But even if I were to agree with you on all of these...
#
So I'll just clarify, I'm not, I would not want to say what I think will happen.
#
All I'm posing is three risks.
#
Those are three risks and other people can assess whether or not they will happen.
#
All I'm saying, if those three things happen, then you should not expect a greater gender
#
You're not forecasting and neither am I for that matter, but even assuming that these
#
risks were to hold us back, it's an argument against, you know, that perhaps we may not
#
progress to where we hope to progress.
#
But my question was more like if we do progress to where we progress in a thought experiment
#
where, you know, the gender divergence sort of ends, that you get more or less equality
#
between genders, then I think a concept like marriage, the way we look at it today, along
#
with various other concepts, just it looks like one fixed template for a relationship,
#
which is skewed in one particular way.
#
And we need not follow this conventional template.
#
There are many other templates for how people relate to each other.
#
You know, in India, for example, people talk about the need for there to be a uniform civil
#
And my point is, no matter what you feel of a uniform civil code, your ideal end state
#
in a thought experiment is where there is no civil code, where people make voluntary
#
contracts with each other and voluntary agreements and live according to that.
#
Obviously, that's never going to happen.
#
It's at least not in a future I can foresee because society is just structured the way
#
And I think that you do need protection for for women, for different oppressed classes
#
But leaving that aside, moving on from sort of the question of, you know, marriage, which
#
you normalized, tell me a little bit more about your academic journey, that when you,
#
you know, you get into academics, you've taken a very unconventional route to where you are
#
in the sense that you haven't been formally trained as it were in these fields.
#
And we'll talk about Twitter later, but you were set upon by a mob.
#
And I noticed one tweet from somebody saying, oh, she calls herself an ethnographer, but
#
she hasn't studied ethnography.
#
She's run geography and this and that, to which my reaction, I mean, I just hate that
#
My point always is you have to judge people by their work.
#
You know, I haven't done a PhD in podcasting either.
#
And your work in that sense kind of speaks for itself.
#
But how did you navigate your way through academia as it were?
#
Like earlier you've, like, you know, in different episodes I've spoken with academics about
#
the great academic circle jerk, where it's like you're caught in what Indians would call
#
a chakravu, that once you're playing that game, you're stuck in that game.
#
You know, you've got to get published in certain journals, speak a certain kind of language.
#
There are topics and themes that are fashionable and you know, some subjects will get you funding,
#
And once you get stuck in that, it's just academics talking to other academics.
#
You're not going out and engaging with the world.
#
Right, but that's an active choice.
#
So lots of people complain.
#
So let me speak to two points.
#
Firstly, I would say on the, so my three formal degrees are one philosophy, two international
#
development, three geography.
#
And the geography was, I mean, geography is a broad field.
#
And then I studied qualitative research methods and that entire year was ethnography.
#
You know, I was living with families, I was fluent about me.
#
I think that counts as ethnography.
#
Let me say one more point.
#
So each of those, the transition from philosophy to international development, that's a big
#
change because you're going from questioning the meaning of life with zero empirical content
#
to suddenly starting social science.
#
That's a transition, yes, but I could do it because I was just going to read absolutely
#
I mean, I devour, I, one friend said, you know, you take the books like Combine Harvester
#
and a Field of Daisies, right?
#
And it's also important is the way that I read.
#
And this is something, so I did a postgraduate certificate in higher education where I learnt
#
And this is the idea, you know, passive learning is just reading a book, but often my students,
#
my dear, at the end of the chapter and I have no idea what they just read.
#
And part of active learning is creatively engaging and questioning and raising questions
#
And that's how I try to approach books by asking questions or thinking what this prompts.
#
So I've always been actively, so it's not just about the volume of the books, the volume
#
of books I've read, but also about the way that I read in a critical style, thinking
#
And Twitter really helps because sometimes I, you know, I try to explain, et cetera.
#
And then to go back to your question about being beholden to narrow gatekeepers.
#
Some people complain that one, each discipline, privilege is a specific kind of research.
#
So the geography journals wanted to talk about space, for example.
#
And they complain that they're constantly jumping through hoops.
#
But that in itself is a choice that we're making.
#
We're saying I want career advancement and so then I will do what these people want.
#
And I have decided that what's important to me is not my job title.
#
If I'm senior lecturer or reader, so what?
#
Like that's not the most important thing to me.
#
If my department thinks that I'm, it's just not important to me.
#
And this goes back to, you know, my fundamental idea that I need to work out what's important
#
to me and by pursuing that, I can liberate myself from these social conventions, which
#
we can question, which we can emancipate ourselves from.
#
So I have incrementally realized that I do not need to be beholden to conventions.
#
And it's also other people encouraging me and supporting me.
#
So there was this, I saw this prize, this blog prize that I'd never blogged, but I
#
saw there was a prize for blogging and so I thought, hey, I'll go for that.
#
And then I started blogging and I enjoyed it because that was another way of sharing
#
my research with the world.
#
And I've increasingly realized that that can have value and are useful because there
#
are many economists who might, you know, not read all that huge volume of anthropological
#
of quality literature, but can quickly go to my blogs and find something interesting
#
and I can synthesize these literatures and I can share these ideas and I can communicate
#
with a far bigger audience.
#
And I came to increasingly realize that, you know, journals, you know, are a locked journal
#
that one many people in many parts of the world cannot afford and cannot access.
#
And even if they could access, you know, it's only about eight people reading it because
#
they need to get the reference or the citation.
#
I mean, I don't understand why so many brilliant minds, enormously clever, brilliant minds
#
might be spending all their time, all their resources publishing things that no one's
#
going to read that I don't get that, that model doesn't appear to me.
#
But now this blogging and writing this book, yeah, then I can actually be sharing ideas
#
and what I'm trying to do now, you know, this isn't what my goal now is really not the mission
#
I'm trying to build a new field and I will only, and I cannot do that alone.
#
I absolutely cannot get, I cannot pretend that I will get the answer absolutely right
#
So what I really want to do is for others to be excited by this project and join me.
#
And, you know, they may, they, you know, everyone has got their different skills and interests
#
and whether it's a comparative study of Bangladesh or India or whether it's looking at the impact
#
of automation or whether it's looking about, you know, marriage, whatever.
#
I want to share this research so that other people realize, hey, this is a big fundamental
#
question and we want to answer it too.
#
We want to take a stab at that bit to look at what's happening in Spain.
#
So the more that I, what I'm actually trying to do is lower the barriers to entry.
#
I want more people, I want to create this field, create, you know, help people.
#
So I'm building the jigsaw, but I want to make it easier for other people to study these
#
questions in way that they find exciting and tantalizing.
#
So I'm not remotely territorial and this is part of you, I'm de-territorializing my
#
I'm saying, hey, come with me.
#
And so three weeks ago I was in Boston and I gave a talk with economists who were great
#
and we were talking about these ideas and I'm also giving a talk to anthropologists.
#
So I want to speak to all these different disciplines because there are so many people
#
with so many brilliant tools and techniques and their own ideas, their own ways of analyzing
#
And I want everyone to jump on board because there have always been many books on the rise
#
of the West, you know, economic divergence, but not on gender.
#
And so now I think, hey, let's take a crack at it and I'll take the first step.
#
I'll get out the broad outline, but you know, there'll be some, a lot of things that I'll
#
So, you know, let's, let's, you know, all hands to the deck, I say, so it is a different
#
It is a different model of academia.
#
And another thing I would say, another way it's different.
#
So when I try to reduce the barriers to entry to study in these questions and to share research
#
between different brilliant minds, whether that's through my podcast or through my blogs,
#
another aspect is academics have historically spent a huge amount of time applying for grants.
#
So they'll write these long, long, long documents.
#
So for example, earlier this year, I spent ages, maybe three months applying for 2 million
#
euros in funding because I wanted to get five PhDs and postdocs to study my research question,
#
comparative histories in gender in their own languages.
#
So in Arabic, in Mandarin, you know, I thought, Hey, let's get more Alice Evans's, but in
#
their own languages, because that's a huge amount of data.
#
Let's have other people with their own knowledge doing, doing what I'm doing.
#
Let's multiply Alice Evans, but you know, in their, in their way, I didn't get that
#
funny, but it was an enormous cost in my time, an enormous cost in my time.
#
So that was a total waste of time and I got nothing out of it.
#
And many academics do that.
#
They spend their time chasing grants that they don't get.
#
So now what I'm doing is actually trying to cultivate an alternative way of academic
#
Let me share this research and other people of their own volition will find it interesting
#
So we're not going through some complex bureaucracy.
#
It's not that I'm applying for grants, then recruiting and hiring RAs who are then under
#
What I'm saying is I'm making here are these questions.
#
If you liked it, come aboard of your own independent volition and we'll do it.
#
So there are numbers of ways in which I'm offering or exploring or experimenting with
#
No, I love the kind of open source inquiry that this is headed towards.
#
And I appreciate what you said earlier about it being a choice, whether you play the academic
#
game or not, but the incentives are all tailored in one direction.
#
And this is a common lament I hear even from people within academics that listen, we don't
#
have a choice, but to play that game.
#
So I, one, are you an outlier in that sense that you have chosen not to play the game
#
and you walked away and you're trying to do something different.
#
And two, when you talk about building a new field, do you mean building a new approach
#
to doing the kind of work you're doing or do you also mean building a new field field
#
and can you elaborate upon that?
#
So I just mean the great gender divergence.
#
So no one has ever, so the bit, the most fundamental fact about humanity that we don't know is
#
why some countries have become so much more gender equal than others, all of patriarchal,
#
but we can't explain that.
#
So that's the field, that the great gender divergence.
#
That's what I want people to explore alongside me.
#
Now why am I not beholden to career incentives to such a degree?
#
I would say two things.
#
One is it's this intrinsic love of learning and that matters more to me than any title
#
So I just want to know the answer.
#
I jump out of bed each morning because I'm excited by a book.
#
So yeah, so what is this intrinsic quest, I mean, it's like, sometimes people ask me
#
for productivity hacks or what's your routine and all that is endogenous because what's
#
underlying all this is like this intense, creative, obsessive, lust and passion to understand
#
So that drives me absolutely and that's what I think is important and that drives me.
#
So that's my fuel and the other aspect, so one is my goals may be different.
#
Another aspect is perhaps money doesn't matter to me that much and that may be in partly
#
because of my background of economic privilege.
#
There are many people for whom they have children, they have financial responsibilities, they
#
may want to acquire more wealth, but money's never been that important to me.
#
Money is not something, I mean, what am I going to do?
#
I mean, I already get, yeah, I spend a lot of money on books, but there's only so many
#
So one is I'm really, so I have the economic luxury of not caring that much about money
#
and that's a privileged position, I totally accept that.
#
The third aspect that I would say is incredibly important and I keep coming back to this is
#
that I have been enabled to do this by other people having faith and confidence in me.
#
So Princeton University Press, when I explained this project to them, I told them I would
#
need eight or nine years to study the global history of gender and they accepted it on
#
my terms and so they gave me a contract with that long time horizon.
#
So whereas other academics might be under pressure to publish every single year, I have
#
So Princeton University Press, I absolutely thank and support them.
#
I've also been able to cultivate a number of grants that, you know, enable me to travel
#
So that gives me a sense of financial freedom, financial autonomy, you know, people having
#
So going back to your point is me, my love of learning, two, me really not caring about
#
money and because of my economic privilege and three, other people's faith and support
#
So let's double click on the love of learning and at one point you said you read absolutely
#
I think you said that a few times and I tell my writing students don't use adverbs, but
#
in this case absolutely seems quite apt for how much you do seem to read because almost
#
every day on Twitter you're like recommending a couple of interesting books and I've bought
#
a bunch of books just because I've seen you tweet about them excitedly.
#
So tell me a little bit about what is your process of what you earlier described as active
#
Do you have a note taking app?
#
You know, what, what sort of your speed of reading in the sense, one of the things I'm
#
kind of blessed with, which enables me to do this podcast is I can read both fast and
#
I can take notes, but I'm, I have a feeling you read much more than me.
#
So I'd love to know about what your methods are of assimilating knowledge, of giving them
#
the time to seep into you and for you to think about them, contextualize them in the light
#
of everything else that you've read.
#
So take me a bit through that process.
#
Like you say, you bounce out of bed in the morning because you're looking forward to
#
So you know, so what's a typical day in your life and you know, what is this active learning
#
I want to answer that in two parts.
#
One is I want to share active learning that might be useful to others.
#
So I, as I mentioned earlier, I did this two year qualification in how people learn and
#
I was fascinated by that process of learning and I think that's enormously important because
#
we can be more productive if we, if we apply active learning.
#
And so I tell my students four, four fundamental things.
#
So one is when they read a paper or a book, they should be able to reflect on it and synthesize
#
that material in a single sentence.
#
So that active synthesis.
#
So what is the main argument?
#
Two, they should look what evidence is presented to support that argument.
#
So they should look through the book saying, well, where is the evidence?
#
And then three, does that stack up?
#
Does it support the argument and to be critical of the evidence or the methodology and four
#
then to think, well, how does this approach differ from other perspectives, other literature
#
So it's that four prong approach, which I use to, which I encourage my students to,
#
And then I always, yeah.
#
So that's what I encourage my students to do and now my process myself, again, trying
#
to apply my active learning, I sometimes use Twitter here because what I try to do is to
#
present a book in a way that appeals to a broader audience.
#
And that pushes me to be creative, to think, well, let me make this interesting to a wider
#
So let me connect this to a bigger, bigger question.
#
Let me help people understand this.
#
Let me help outsiders understand this.
#
So the more that I'm creatively engaging, thinking about how to present that material
#
and present that evidence is actually, let me confess, part of my active learning process.
#
And I'm thinking about the ideas relating it to the broader question.
#
So that public engagement is actually part of my active learning.
#
I mean, of course I don't tweet about everything that I read, I'll tell you a story from, so
#
I have this software called Zotero, which is a form of a referencing software.
#
And so just the number of things that I've cited, so that's not the totality of everything
#
But I think in the past three years, it's now up to three and a half thousand books
#
I mean, it's a lot, but it's always with this mechanism, always with this mechanism.
#
There's three a day, basically.
#
How many books do you read in a day?
#
Maybe some combination of books and papers, oh yes, you asked about my day routine.
#
So usually I jump out of bed, I have the hive of activity, and then exercise is very important
#
So I usually spend either one or two hours exercising at some sort of middle of the day
#
or something like that.
#
So I do my exercise and that's really important.
#
And I think there's huge endorphin release.
#
It's important to be away from the streets and my best ideas come to me when I'm charging
#
through the countryside running.
#
And I think there's also, and I don't know the academic research on this, so I present
#
this only as an anecdote, there's also a sense of confidence through being athletic and physically
#
Like I think one reason why I'm not intimidated when I'm traveling around the world is I can
#
see men and not be intimidated by them.
#
So I think that that could be one.
#
But the mental health, I have huge mental health benefits from being very athletic,
#
going through the countryside, fresh air.
#
And I do a range of sports.
#
I run, I cycle, I swim, I do yoga, I do Pilates, I lift weights, I do everything.
#
And I get a great joy out of that.
#
Yeah, you mentioned before we started recording that you went to a gym with a friend and you
#
were stronger than all the men there.
#
I'd be just the other way around.
#
If I went to a gym, I'd be weaker than all the women there.
#
There you go, playing to those stereotypes as well.
#
Here's my next question.
#
There's always a trade off when you get into a subject between thinking too broadly and
#
Now one of the traps that people in academics have fallen into is they've become what my
#
friend Ajay Shah would describe as the prisoners of domain expertise, right?
#
So they choose their specialization and they are kind of trapped there, growth in GDP in
#
the middle class in Congo between the year 1632 to 1633 and so on and so forth.
#
And they're completely trapped there and that's all that they can see.
#
And they're not bringing wider insights to bear on their work, even from their own discipline,
#
forget other disciplines.
#
And the allure of going broad is that you can bring different frames from different
#
disciplines to look at a problem that you can, you know, you may look at something that
#
is happening in one country and use your insights from other countries and be able to, you know,
#
see things that a domain specialist wouldn't do.
#
I think in, you know, somewhere, I forget where you wrote this, but you quoted Fukuyama
#
where you said that, you know, you don't know your own country if it's the only country
#
you know, something to that effect, right?
#
The danger, however, of being broad is that whenever you comment on anything that is narrow
#
or any specific thing, a narrow specialist who has studied only that thing will say,
#
hey, you're being too broad, you're generalizing, you're painting with broad brushstrokes, right?
#
And this seems to me to be an insurmountable problem.
#
I need to be as expert as every single expert.
#
So for every topic, whether it's marriage in medieval Europe, I need to know that literature.
#
I need to be absolutely on top of that literature.
#
And I don't believe there is a trade-off between breadth and depth if you have infinite time
#
and absolute passion to understand it.
#
So the comparative lens, so for example, by comparing East Asia and South Asia, we can
#
understand the massive importance of job-creating economic growth.
#
So back in 1900, both of these places were extremely patriarchal.
#
So South Korean women, rather, Yangban elite Korean women were veiled.
#
They even had this seesaw whereby behind the walls of the household, girls would play so
#
that one could jump high and see over the barricades.
#
So they were patriarchal marriages in East Asia.
#
Women were into arranged marriages with very little autonomy.
#
Confucianism had the three obedience, be subservient to your husband, your father, your son.
#
Chinese women, their feet were broken and bound.
#
Literature in China always celebrated female sacrifice for male honor, but through job-creating
#
economic growth, massive manufacturing, at first families might be reluctant for their
#
daughters to go out to cities because they were worried about losing honor, about losing
#
faith that other people would talk and their daughters would become unmarriageable.
#
And all this resonates with what's happening in India today, right?
#
That families worry that families are reluctant to allow women to go to the cities because
#
they worry about their daughters becoming unmarriageable and they only do it in cases
#
of economic desperation.
#
But in East Asia, job-creating economic growth was so insensitive that girls, the flocks
#
of women were going to the cities that it became a normal expected part of adolescence.
#
So no family needed to worry about sticking their neck out and others gossiping because
#
So that big comparative lens really enabled me to see the importance of job-creating economic
#
So that breadth helped.
#
Now I'm in India to understand the depth, right?
#
So I've been to Rajasthan, I was in Jaipur, I was in Udaipur, I went to a small village
#
I'm also going to Bangalore, I'm going to Chennai, Mumbai and Calcutta.
#
I've been speaking to Dalit journalists, Dalit politicians, Muslim families, students at
#
JNU, housewives, domestic workers, all these kinds of people because I need to understand
#
This is getting at the depth.
#
This is understanding people's stories.
#
This is understanding the nuance.
#
This is understanding every single life and people's diverse struggles, their aspirations,
#
their beliefs, how they see it.
#
So I am and I admit, I mean, you know, I know my project sounds outrageously ambitious.
#
You know, I'm trying to do breadth and depth and I believe and I may not get it perfectly
#
right but I'm trying to do it all because I believe that one should do it all.
#
And so that's why I want people to help me to, you know, to help me, you know, where
#
I fail, they should try, I'd like them to come and help me.
#
The two key words in your answer were infinite time.
#
You said it's possible to combine these two, there is no trade-off if we have infinite
#
But of course we don't.
#
That is a fundamental scarcity, right?
#
Princeton gave you eight years or nine years or whatever and you think they are being generous
#
but when you're in your ninth year and you realize you need another 18 years more and
#
they're knocking at the door, that'll be interesting.
#
Like one, I would say that, yeah, at some point you can perhaps reach the stage where
#
while you're coming at it from a broad perspective, you're not making major errors on any particular
#
You can get that kind of depth.
#
But at the same time, I think that given that one doesn't have infinite time, you know,
#
I would imagine that at some level that there is a trade-off but I'm guessing by saying
#
that you can do both breadth and depth, you mean that you can get adequately deep that
#
you're not making any big mistakes.
#
Well, let me at least try.
#
So I'm not going to pretend that my book is going to be perfect.
#
There will be things that I get wrong and other people should rightly call me out and
#
I welcome them calling me out and even in this journey of research in the book, there
#
are major ways in which I've revised my beliefs because I'm constantly learning.
#
So there were things that I previously didn't understand, that I've revised my...
#
Every single day I'm revising my beliefs, I'm learning.
#
My learning curves are astronomical.
#
So let me not say that I think I can get it perfectly right.
#
Let me just say that I agree we should try to master both breadth and depth and I will
#
I mean, one of the things that struck me while I was reading all your essays, I mean, you
#
call them blog posts, but they're all these wonderful essays, most of them, is that, you
#
know, one that I found that I have something to learn, not just from the content of it,
#
which of course I do, but also from the approach, which is an approach where you're constantly
#
rocking your own priors as it were to, you know, take the name of your podcast.
#
Like you wrote this piece about three things you got wrong about patriarchy and the first
#
of them is, quote, when I lacked globally comparative knowledge, I was blind to country
#
specific characteristics, stop quote, and there are two others and you're kind of talking
#
about all the things you got wrong.
#
And this brings me to your fascinating use of Twitter, which I absolutely love by the
#
Now here's the thing about Twitter and, and, and a lesson that I learned early is that
#
not everyone is there for the same reasons that you might be there for, right?
#
So my imagining of Twitter was that, okay, you go out there, you put your links out there,
#
Any conversations that happen, happen in good faith.
#
And this is like a very 12 year old view of it.
#
And obviously it's not like that.
#
There are different games being played on Twitter itself.
#
There are ideological tribes being formed within which you have people trying to raise
#
their own status by attacking others.
#
And you know, passing judgment on others always makes you feel more virtuous because you're
#
automatically on a pedestal if you're passing judgment on others.
#
And that's like a toxic face of Twitter.
#
Now by and large, I love Twitter because it's a great, if you curate your feed, well, we
#
feed well, you have access to the finest minds in the world thinking aloud every day for
#
This is such a bloody privilege.
#
Unimaginable 40 years ago, right?
#
Now what I see you as doing is that on the one hand, you're talking about the things
#
that you've learned and the research that you've done, all of which is very rigorous,
#
which has come through reading many books.
#
In fact, whenever one reads a blog post by you, clicking the links is, you know, a source
#
So on the one hand, you're doing that, you're presenting all of that.
#
On the other hand, you're thinking aloud, you know, you're walking through a town, you're
#
talking to the bus driver, you're talking to this person, you go to a wedding, you talk
#
to three people and you're putting that out there, right?
#
And you're thinking aloud and it's a very open source kind of way of thinking.
#
And these two are happening in the same account.
#
And even if they weren't, it wouldn't matter because, you know, people could still get
#
And the thing is, this is not a space where everybody is going to give you the benefit
#
of the doubt and figure out that, oh, this is what she's doing.
#
And most people, and I believe that the silent majority out there has goodwill, you know,
#
it's this process of seeking knowledge and refining knowledge.
#
Most people are like that.
#
But, you know, mobs will randomly form when somebody will interpret something you said
#
in bad faith and will, and, you know, we won't go too much into detail because I just find
#
it unpleasant to think about it, but you've been at the receiving end of a mob like this
#
I have a number of times in the past as well, right?
#
So how do you get past this?
#
How do you, like, what you do on Twitter by having, opening the space for dialogue where
#
you're essentially telling everybody that, hey, I'm thinking aloud.
#
I'll incorporate it, which is not just posturing because you actually do that.
#
It's very obvious from your blog post that you're engaging with everything that kind
#
But how do you sort of then deal with this kind of toxicity?
#
Because you know, you can't, and I remember having this conversation once with our mutual
#
friend Shruti Rajgopalan and, you know, and I was kind of telling her that everyone's
#
looking at you so closely.
#
They're so determined to misinterpret every damn thing that you say that you almost have
#
And her argument was, and I now feel she was right.
#
And her argument was that you can't be idiot proof all the time.
#
If they want to find something, they'll find something.
#
All you can do is be intellectually honest and say what you have to say.
#
So what are your feelings on this, given that it's such an important part of your process
#
of active learning, like you pointed out?
#
So one, I would raise another way in which Twitter has been incredibly useful, is that
#
so many people, knowing that I'm traveling through India, have contacted me saying, hey
#
Alice, would you like to meet up?
#
And they've been incredibly kind to the other day, let me give you a story.
#
So I, and I'll come to answer any of your questions in due course, but I received a
#
message from this anonymous account with the name of a white male European.
#
And they said, hi Alice, I'm in Jaipur, do you want to meet up?
#
And I was like, sorry, not to be rude, but who are you?
#
It's just like this anonymous account.
#
And they said, oh, I'm 23, I'm an MPhil student at JNU.
#
I was like, so you're female, you know, cause I have, you know, I need to be a little bit
#
careful before, you know, jumping on every opportunity.
#
And they said, yes, yes, yes.
#
And so we met and she was tremendously fast.
#
So she came from a Hindu Muslim family.
#
She told me all about her life, her student politics at JNU.
#
And the following day, she invited me to meet her family and they were incredibly warm and
#
Then we went to the village the day after that.
#
And we met many of their extended Muslim relatives.
#
And so I learned so much and we were traveling together and we're meeting up, I think tomorrow
#
And so I learned a great deal from her and there have been so many other interactions
#
So just yesterday for breakfast, a guy who was involved in JNU student politics around
#
the time of the 2012 gang rapes and how he became involved in the protests for resisting
#
impunity for male violence.
#
So many people have contacted me through Twitter.
#
So many Indians have invited me to their homes.
#
So for example, I posted data on Ahmedabad asking, you know, why is the rate of female
#
labor force participation so low, 13 percent?
#
And then someone contacted me.
#
She said, oh, I live in Ahmedabad.
#
Would you like to visit?
#
So and people have asked me to, invited me to Calcutta, you know, I'll raise the question,
#
well, what's going on here?
#
And people invite me to their homes.
#
And so I said, that's great.
#
And so Twitter has enabled me, a total outsider, because of people's warmth and their generosity
#
and their kindness and their support and understanding for this project.
#
You know, that would not be possible without Twitter.
#
And so I'm so grateful that Twitter has enabled so many different people.
#
Now, I, of course, grant that many of those people using Twitter are enormously privileged,
#
economically privileged, often Brahmin.
#
But also through Twitter, people see that I have a they see my profile, they know who
#
So I've also been able to contact Dalit journalists, Dalit politicians.
#
So, you know, is having your name people saying, oh, that's that person they've been treating.
#
So that gives you that helps.
#
And also through the many of the people that I meet, I'm able to expand the network.
#
So for example, the woman I met from the Hindu Muslim family, it was her who invited invited
#
me to the villages where people were living in a state of, you know, not, you know, prosperity.
#
So I'm I am able to use these networks to access more and different people.
#
So one is Twitter has been enormously beneficial and maybe let's say in several ways, one reaching
#
different people learning from them to the critique.
#
So that and because Twitter is so enormously valuable for something that I privilege, which
#
is learning that almost any cost is worth it.
#
So after the after the a couple of Twitter mobs, I did protect my account and I did lock
#
But I unlocked it for two reasons.
#
One is I saw someone celebrating the fact they cancelled me and I thought that was so
#
And I thought if someone is celebrating gleefully, suppressing my speech that I thought was dangerous
#
I did not want to perpetuate an environment that someone thought, yes, we've cancelled
#
her primarily because I was worried about I thought I don't want to be part of that.
#
If they think they're going to know, let's not.
#
But I also really I also because I privilege my research, because I privilege, because
#
I prioritize learning and because I realize the gains to Twitter, I wanted to unlock my
#
account to allow some abuse.
#
You know, that's a trade off, right?
#
I was willing to endure some abuse because the gains to my learning is so huge from Twitter.
#
Well, so that's so that's so that's the second point.
#
And the third point that enables me to third point is that I have been very lucky that
#
I have many kind friends that when they do see nastiness, they reach out.
#
So and they express kindness and that helps me realize, you know, that that gives me some
#
support and feeling that, you know, it's very upsetting when people say hateful things.
#
And when people when friends reach out and they say they understand and they and they
#
and they think that it's unfair, that legitimizes us and that actually relates to a broader
#
point in terms of feminist consciousness and the consciousness of marginalized groups more
#
broadly that many people may be privately critical of something, but they can be emboldened
#
to resist once they have the support and encouragement of others.
#
And so that's why I always emphasize this point of friendship and peer support.
#
And Shruti has always given me support and you did too.
#
And I'm grateful for that.
#
And then a final point, so to say, yeah, so I think those.
#
And so how do I but I won't deny that I won't deny that these things are hurtful, but particularly
#
because I would never I would never want to hurt people like I would never want to upset
#
I do care about people's feelings.
#
So I wouldn't want people to feel hurt by things.
#
And I also need to learn.
#
I need to learn to be more careful in how I present things.
#
So I'm not going to blame trolls for getting it wrong.
#
You know, I wouldn't even I shouldn't even call them trolls.
#
I should be more careful in how I present my research.
#
And that's absolutely on me.
#
And that's something that I learned through trial and error and occasional trolling.
#
You know, I'll push back a little bit at that very last thing you said, because the truth
#
is no matter how careful you are, if people want to come after you, they'll find a reason
#
I mean, a lot of what has been said about you has really been said in bad faith.
#
And if bad faith is your starting point, then it doesn't matter specifically what you say.
#
But but yeah, I mean, sort of I kind of get what you're where you're coming from.
#
And it's always disturbing, like my my way of dealing with it also, you know, is a way
#
of providing dopamine to myself in the sense I realized at one point, and this was a right
#
wing mob which attacked me after I criticized demonetization, that one, my strategy was
#
just to block everyone, not just block people who were trolling me or abusing me, but block
#
anyone who was being rude.
#
So my habit is block anyone who's being rude, who's engaging in bad faith, either with me
#
or with a friend, just block.
#
And after a point, I realized that days which were quiet, I was sort of missing the dopamine
#
hits that each blog gave me.
#
You know, you could say I was being addicted to blocking people.
#
But once I became aware of this, I successfully fought this addiction.
#
Otherwise, I could have, you know, been deliberately provocative just to be able to block people.
#
But anyway, thankfully, I haven't gone down down that road.
#
So you know, let's take a quick commercial break now.
#
And on the other side of the break, we'll, you know, continue talking about your life,
#
but also actually get to your work, the great gender divergence.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me.
#
And I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com, where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Alice Evans about her great work on gender, specifically her forthcoming
#
book called The Great Gender Divergence, which we're all waiting for, which even Princeton
#
Though they are pretty patient.
#
I don't feel like waiting another eight or nine years for it.
#
You know, I, right when I began my research for this, obviously the first step is you
#
Google somebody's name and there's an actress by the name of Alice Evans and I was like,
#
We must make sure that our Alice is the first Google search result.
#
And this other person, it's just intolerable, but leaving that aside, tell me a little bit
#
about how you arrived at this subject in terms of this is what I'm interested in and this
#
Like you already spoke about going to Zambia and doing that, you know, the narrow study
#
that you did, but how did that process take place where you kind of broadened your view
#
and you said that, no, I don't just want to study A or B or C. I want to study the whole
#
How did that come about?
#
Well, I was always interested in these long-term comparative studies.
#
Like you've seen that through my rural urban contrast, my Cambodia Zambia contrast.
#
So I really enjoyed that.
#
And I've always been interested in examining the causes of how the world came to be.
#
So some, for example, economists or political scientists might examine the effects of some
#
intervention or some shock.
#
I've always been interested in why is our world like as it is.
#
So that was my prior disposition, though I'll tell you, I actually stopped research in gender
#
in about 2017, no, 2016, 17, because as I was saying earlier, there really were, even
#
though I was publishing fine in very nice journals, no one was really that interested
#
in my research and there just wasn't the environment.
#
People just, they weren't bothered.
#
No one else was doing what I was doing, so I stopped it and I did labor repression and
#
global supply chains and I went on a total tangent of looking at corporate accountability.
#
I compared the political, the politics of labor repression in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
#
So I'd even given up on gender because there were so many, for example, in gender theory,
#
there's often a lot of understanding gender identities and gender fluidity and performances
#
The economists might be looking at smaller processes, RCTs, so no one was doing these
#
big comparative studies and I think I was a little bit lonely in the sense that I just,
#
there wasn't anyone who saw value in what I was doing and so I thought, well, let me
#
not do, let me, so I didn't have enough self-belief to continue it and then as I was saying I
#
encountered economic history on the great gender divergence, how the West became rich
#
and I loved this for the big comparative questions, striking at the heart of the differences in
#
our global society and also using interdisciplinary methods, so drawing on also economics and
#
understanding geography, so drawing on, marshaling every method to work out what's going on and
#
so I really loved that and so that's how I came to look at the great gender divergence.
#
Now in terms of my methodology, when I start a new region, first of all, I remember when
#
I started studying South Asia or the Middle East, I mean, I was totally overwhelmed.
#
You know, I'm a total outsider, right?
#
I know Zambia and Cambodia, what did I know about India?
#
And that's incredibly overwhelming and I accept, you know, it may seem mad that I even embarked
#
on trying to understand the history of gender in India.
#
I mean, to be clear, no one has written a history of gender or an explanation of how
#
countries became so patriarchal in any one country.
#
So I'm trying to do in every single country what has not been done as an explanation of
#
it and how I do that is one, first of all, start with some broad overview history.
#
So let me understand South Asian history or let me understand history in Morocco and then
#
I piece together that jigsaw so I go further back, I look at population movements by looking
#
at genetic data of who moved in where.
#
I look at archaeology, I read histories from medieval period, I read more recent studies
#
from economics, sociology, anthropology, so all this time I'm always piecing together
#
little different parts of the jigsaw, definitely learning from all these disciplines and iteratively
#
So I think one difference that distinguishes my methodology from some of the big books
#
on the rise of the Westwood, they often have their theory, but it's not necessarily developed
#
What I'm really trying to do is study every single society and not go in with any priors,
#
not go in with any priors at all, but try to assemble it from the bottom up so we can
#
use big studies in economics.
#
For example, there's a famous paper by Alassina and others showing that countries that had
#
a history of the plough typically have lower female labor force participation.
#
Then we can try to use anthropology to trace changes over time or archaeology or sociology
#
to understand why that might be important.
#
When you study each society in depth, you can try to understand why might the plough
#
be associated with lower female labor force participation.
#
It's an act of assembly, it's an act of working with a 4D jigsaw that's continually in flux
#
and everything should be up for grabs.
#
This goes back to my philosophical training that there are no sacred truths, that I should
#
be questioning everything and that I should be rigorously interrogating things.
#
For example, there are many beliefs that I now hold that I didn't go in with.
#
For example, as a very secular atheist nihilist, left-leaning, my prior was not that Christianity
#
was some great force for the world.
#
That's a position that will be taken by a center-right who I definitely do not agree
#
One of the arguments is that it was the Christian church that promoted the European marriage
#
pattern, that is nuclear families, and it's the church that Europe has these nuclear families.
#
I was so opposed to that idea.
#
I really did not want to accept the idea that there was something good in Christianity.
#
There are so many patriarchal aspects to Christianity and I associated it with the right that I
#
I really studied all the literature on medieval Europe.
#
I considered all the different hypotheses.
#
I looked at the evidence.
#
One thing that really changed it for me, I was reading this fantastic book called Ties
#
That Bind by Barbara Hanewelt.
#
She looks at coroner's reports from before the Black Death, so in the 11th century.
#
What she finds is that even before the Black Death, these peasant families in England
#
were cooperating outside their kinship group.
#
They lived in nuclear families.
#
She shows that the nuclear family existed long before the Black Death.
#
The other geographical theories that the Black Death led to a far deeper labor market and
#
it was those jobs in service that enabled people to live apart from their families and
#
that broke down these kinship groups.
#
She's showing actually all this existed long before the Black Death.
#
She also found that people were refusing cousin marriage.
#
They were abiding by many, many of the prescriptions of the church.
#
She doesn't use her book to relate to the nuclear family pattern, but I realized that
#
actually the church was incredibly draconian.
#
The church was interfering in people's private lives.
#
I realized that nobles were leveraging those incest prohibitions in order to stop their
#
rivals from consolidating wealth.
#
Against my own priors, against what I consider to be my better judgment, I increasingly realized
#
that there was an important role for the church in that they stamped out cousin marriage and
#
then as a result of that, couples were expected to form nuclear households.
#
You could only form a nuclear household when you'd acquired sufficient resources and that
#
meant that both men and women often worked in service on very, very low wages and that
#
meant a rather late age of marriage because you had to acquire enough wealth before marrying
#
and then women continued to work after marriage in medieval Europe.
#
As a result of that, husbands and wives often cooperated.
#
Now, that's not to say that Europe was gender equal.
#
It was incredibly patriarchal.
#
Men dominated the judiciary, the courts, the medicine, health, parliament, etc., religion,
#
but at least women were working.
#
There are so many things that I've been – it's really this continually testing my hypotheses
#
and studying all sorts of bits together that's helped me work out what's going on.
#
And the comparative aspect is really helpful too.
#
Yeah, and that seems almost radical given the context of academia.
#
One lament that historians who've been on this show have is that within academic history,
#
you're always expected to have some lens or the other, right?
#
So you'd imagine that what is history?
#
History is you're talking about what happened.
#
But actually, you look at academic history and there'll be Marxist historians who'll
#
always have that specific lens and they'll apply that to everything.
#
Within all the humanities, it becomes as much a propagation of a particular political ideology
#
as much as it is a pursuit of truth.
#
And therefore, the approach that you've taken with this book is that I will have no priors
#
and I will just bring in frames from everywhere to look at this seems almost radical and also
#
But has there sort of been the reaction from within academia, for example, for something
#
So like, this is a big book, Princeton has commissioned it, it's a huge project, you
#
know, do you get pushback from your academic peers and colleagues and so on and so forth?
#
How does all of that play itself out?
#
I think that academics often talk about positionality, that our background experiences will shape
#
the kinds of questions and research we pursue.
#
And maybe listening to this podcast, some people might think, oh, she had an abusive
#
father, she was born without a vagina, of course, she ends up studying gender.
#
And I would like to say two things.
#
Number one, none of those experiences led me to gender, it was actually just because
#
I knew the supervisor who was studying the Gambia.
#
Secondly, I think my background experiences made me – I think through overcoming adversity
#
and iteratively travelling the world gave me the confidence and the ambition to take
#
But what I would hope and what I aspire to is that anyone else who studied the exact
#
same question who looked at the same data would come to the same conclusion.
#
So it may be my background experiences that led me to take on this big project, but I
#
think that there is an objective truth which others could also reach out.
#
And if I get something wrong, they should correct me.
#
So that's my point about background positionality.
#
So all my research is going to be influenced by my prize, but I should try to challenge
#
them and read work that challenges them.
#
Now, I also need to be careful about how I present my research because to some, for example,
#
it might be seen like I'm – I might be seen in various ways.
#
So for example, when I talk about economic growth, I need to be quite emphatic that my
#
One is on job creating economic growth, not worshipping GDP in itself, and two, that job
#
creation enables female solidarity.
#
And the real point is this friendship and exposure and questioning and challenging.
#
And I need to make that clear because if I'm not sufficiently nuanced, someone might think
#
Alice is this neoliberal defending GDP, for example.
#
So it's partly about how I phrase and present my research.
#
I think that's important.
#
Yeah, it's difficult to know at this stage how everyone feels about it.
#
I'm sure there is some resistance.
#
I mean, in some groups, might not like the point of regional comparisons.
#
Gender research is often very specific about a very specific place.
#
Some people don't even like the idea that I'm doing big regional comparisons.
#
So anyone who knows India will say, well, there's huge heterogeneity within India.
#
And that's absolutely true.
#
But across India as a whole, men represent 89% of its leaders, of its political representatives.
#
Across India as a whole, pretty much every state has a female labour force participation
#
rate and certainly an urban female labour force participation rate of below 20%.
#
So although there's that heterogeneity, and that's well below the global average in terms
#
of both female employment and political representation.
#
So for example, if you look at the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, where they look at
#
these different objective nationally representative data on gender inequality, we do see that
#
North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia are different from the global average.
#
So some people, but some people would see my analysis as far too sweeping by ignoring
#
that heterogeneity in it.
#
So I think, so there are some people who have reservations with even asking the question
#
that I'm asking for sure, for sure.
#
We all ask different questions and I can, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, let
#
other people do their own research.
#
But I think this is important and let me try for all those who are interested.
#
Let a thousand flowers bloom indeed.
#
Let's sort of get to the topic at hand.
#
And one of the essays I like the most is one that's titled 10,000 years of patriarchy updated,
#
Because that is such a sweeping look at, as the title suggests, the broad history, you
#
know, what is patriarchy, where did it come from, what are the different factors that
#
And before we actually get to that, a final sort of meta question, which is that were
#
there any role models you had in terms of either researchers or writers who have attempted
#
similar things in different fields, obviously, not this one, like within, for example, popular
#
nonfiction, you have people like Jared Diamond, who wrote his books on, you know, why countries
#
turn out the way they do, the importance of geography and so on this Paul Collier, who's
#
also looked at why nations have developed the way they have, were there models you have
#
where you said that, yes, this person is great, they're bringing this frame and that frame
#
and there's something new happening here.
#
Who were your influences in that sense?
#
That's a great question.
#
I think in terms of introducing me to economic history, Pseudo Erasmus, who's an economic
#
historian blogger, he was enormously influential and the rigor through which he looks at different
#
theories and exploring evidence, that was hugely influential.
#
I also have a really great friend who's really supported me and I share many of my hypotheses
#
with him, Professor Daron Adjemoglu at MIT and he's written a number of big books.
#
I don't have so many friends with whom I can discuss my research, but he's one person who's
#
really supported me and I share ideas and we talk about it a lot together, so he's really
#
I think that, yeah, there are a number, I mean, you mentioned all those big names, those
#
big books, those big sweeping books were great and fascinating, all of those were written
#
All of those big ambitious books were written by men.
#
Women tend to be much more focused, much more specific and among those, I would highlight
#
the work of Professor Naila Kabir, she's a brilliant scholar.
#
So there are many scholars, also Professor Sylvia Chant, my supervisor.
#
So there are many, many brilliant scholarship.
#
Also another person who I have greatly admired and I know Bill and her insights are hugely
#
important, Professor Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard and by analyzing the US labor market,
#
she drew the importance of tightening labor demand that initially firms would impose marriage
#
bars that women had to lose their jobs when they got married, but when demand tightened,
#
when firms and factories needed women, they abandoned these marriage bars.
#
I've seen that pattern repeated across the world that when you have tight labor markets,
#
men firms increasingly want to hire women and we can talk about that in the case of
#
So there are so many scholars whose work has greatly enriched me, greatly enriched my understanding
#
and improved my analysis and it really is a collective project.
#
It really is a collective project of me learning from other people and I'm always very, very
#
grateful when people message me again on Twitter, sharing their papers, sharing their research
#
because that really helps me.
#
It's absolutely, improving our knowledge is absolutely a collective project.
#
I don't want to give the impression that I think I'm this one maverick going by myself
#
It's very much through learning from other people's brilliant research.
#
Let's talk about the history of gender now and you've written about three major waves
#
of patriarchalism as it were.
#
Why do you academics use such big words?
#
It makes it so difficult for me.
#
I don't think of a better word for this.
#
Three major waves of, I mean, I just break it up, you know, male domination or something
#
Patriarchy is better than patriarchalism.
#
Okay, fine, fine, fine.
#
No, no, I'm just kidding.
#
I'm just pulling your leg.
#
That's great because that's what I tell people about me as well, that you can't offend me,
#
I mean, there's nothing you could say that would offend me.
#
I'm not even going to try to test that.
#
So yeah, I'm not interested in offending others either, but no doubt others will test it out.
#
So give me a broad sweep version of how patriarchy grows everywhere in the world.
#
What are the factors that bring it about and, you know, what are the traditional kind of
#
And I know you've, you know, come up with seven explanations.
#
I'm familiar with two or three of them.
#
I knew the evolutionary one pretty well because I knew all of that literature.
#
But what you've sort of done is that you synthesized all of that and this is, you know, beautiful
#
sweeping narrative, which takes us all the way through 10,000 years to the present day.
#
So let's start at the very beginning, as it were.
#
Are you ready for this?
#
200,000 years in which we are hunter-gatherers, the evidence is pretty threadbare because,
#
you know, they didn't leave that much stuff.
#
But I think if we look at contemporary studies of foragers and hunter-gatherers over the
#
past 200,000 years, over the past 200 years or any guide, usually women in forager economies
#
are not secluded, though I don't think we should expect any kind of feminist utopia.
#
Women may still be beaten, raped, forced into polygynous and arranged marriage.
#
I think the real step changes, the three major drives of patriarchy, were the plow, nomadic
#
pastoralism, and male-dominated religions.
#
So the Neolithic Revolution, the advent of agriculture, did not necessarily entail patriarchy.
#
So if we look at Cattlehayuk in Turkey, we see that men and women appear to have lived
#
So bones and burials suggest no difference in stature, status, or how they spent their
#
We've seen like equal amounts of soot on both men and women, suggesting they spent similar
#
Similarly, if we look at Bronze Age Thailand, we don't see big differences in graves.
#
Like whereas ancient Egypt, women had equal rights under law, they weren't veiled, women
#
were priestesses to the cults of goddesses, women were managers in worship, especially
#
So women exercised status and had equal rights under the law.
#
The major step change is one, the advent of the plow, irrigation, and the advent of cereals.
#
Now what I think occurred is that this raised the value of land, because this increased
#
Now suddenly land became an important resource that could be inherited and bequeathed down
#
Now a man who inherits land is able to attract or otherwise conquer many wives and concubines.
#
So once you have inherited wealth, there's a selective advantage for patrilineum.
#
That land can also become under threat, because other people might want to raid and attack
#
So groups will be more likely to survive and flourish if they're what we call patrilocal,
#
if men band together with our cousins and uncles.
#
So that seems to encourage patrilocality.
#
So if you look at wherever there was a plow, irrigation, cereals, we tend to see the emergence
#
of patrilocality in which those tight-knit clans cooperate and share honor collectively.
#
Now another important process is nomadic pastoralism.
#
So 5,000 years ago, these gangs of young men erupted out of the Pontic steppes, so that's
#
across Eurasia, and they were calling each other names of wolves and dogs.
#
And if we look at the genetic data, we see that indigenous men were slaughtered and these
#
steppe pastoralists raped or otherwise reproduced with women.
#
And so from Spain to Korea, the male line howls back to the steppe, and what they did
#
is institutionalize male dominance.
#
So from both pastoralism and the introduction of plow heightened, so we see patrilocality
#
Now as those societies expanded, as they flourished, as they became more socially economically
#
complex, getting to a population of 40,000 or 100,000, we also see with the emergence
#
of city-states, we also see the emergence of moralizing supernatural punishment, religions.
#
And there's been debates in academia where people are like, well, is it that socioeconomic
#
complexity led to religion, or was it vice versa, or is there a coevolutionary process?
#
And I think my general understanding of the literature is by religions often promoted
#
social cooperation, like thou shall not kill.
#
There are a bunch of things that make people get along with each other.
#
If you believe there's eternal damnation for not doing it, you're sort of a bit nicer
#
What some of that literature overlooks is another important driver of cooperation.
#
So many of these religion, the Abrahamic religions across Eurasia, promoted female chastity,
#
sexual segregation, veiling, virginity tests, keeping men and women apart.
#
And I think that could be an important part of social cooperation and state expansion
#
because it would have mitigated male sexual jealousy, or even female sexual jealousy,
#
by keeping the sexes apart, people will be less jealous of other men, less likely to
#
And so I think that patriarchy actually could have been, in inverted commons, good for social
#
flourishing and cooperation.
#
In addition to that, many of these ancient rulers often claimed divine authority.
#
So in southern Mesopotamia, in Song China, in Herod, for example, they often claimed
#
The rulers claimed that they were backed up by God.
#
Now if you're backed up by God, if God is with you, how on earth do you explain floods,
#
They blame disobedient women.
#
So in 13th century Mamluk Sultan Basbari, he blamed food price hikes and floods and
#
the rising bread prices on disobedient women and banished them from the city streets.
#
So we do see the coevolutionary process of male-dominated societies, social expansion,
#
and also these prescriptive social codes.
#
And that's repeated across Eurasia.
#
However, that process of cultural evolution was mediated by geography.
#
So the plough nomadic pastoralism could not spread in places where you have oceans, parasites,
#
In those places like Southeast Asia, the Andes, the Gulf of Guinea, land never gained value.
#
So in the Andes, the biggest animal was the llama.
#
What can you plough with a llama?
#
It's not much bigger than me.
#
And so in those communities, land was not high value, so we don't see the patrilineal
#
Women were never tightly policed.
#
There were no strict restrictions on female chastity or ideals of female virginity.
#
Women continued to move freely and maintain their own social networks and political hierarchies,
#
valorize women in folklore that recognize their authority, and they continue to contest
#
men's attempts to check their authority and autonomy.
#
So that's the broad story.
#
So it's about the plough, pastoralism, male-dominated religions spreading to places where possible
#
or otherwise limited by geography.
#
That's the sort of nutshell.
#
And it's fascinating because we always assume that progress happens in one dimension, right?
#
And as you point out, you know, that's not the, like just the Minoans and the Etruscans,
#
You know, you point out that, you know, they of course predated the ancient Greeks and
#
the Romans and all of that.
#
They were far more gender equal.
#
It wasn't like heaven on earth or something, but they were far more gender equal.
#
Women had a much better time and so on.
#
But then the invasions happened by the pastoral, the nomadic pastoralists.
#
I was about to say the pastoral nomadists, but whatever.
#
And everything kind of changes.
#
You also, I love this quote where you have from Mesopotamia, where you quote Urukagina,
#
who is a king of Lagash in 2400 BC, who says, quote, the woman who has sinned by saying
#
something to a man, which she should not have said, must have a teeth crushed with burnt
#
And again, the whole pattern of controlling female sexuality, you know, where you write
#
quote, I suggest that controlling female sexuality, reduced male jealousy, enabled social cooperation
#
and flourishing commerce.
#
This long predated Islam.
#
So being that toxic as it was, there's a particular reason, an instrumental reason why it came
#
about at that particular time and why it spread.
#
Let's sort of talk about India and I've done a couple of episodes, which kind of touch
#
I've done an episode with Tony Joseph, who's wrote the great book, early Indians and with
#
Peggy Mohan, who essentially again looked at that early period, but through the prism
#
So, whereas, you know, Tony looked at what genes can reveal about where we came from
#
Peggy looked at languages and it was incredibly fascinating because, um, you know, the Aryan
#
migration as it were, uh, happened around 4,000 years ago, right?
#
And they come out here in the way Peggy describes it.
#
It is exactly as you write about nomadic pastoralist that it's troops of men just coming, marrying
#
And it's very interesting because they have different languages at the start and those
#
different languages persist through generations and that's a fascinating narrative there.
#
But the revelation there and the turning point comes around 2,000 years ago.
#
And there's a great quote by David Reich, where he talks about populations and he says
#
that if you're looking for a large population, look at the Han Chinese.
#
But in India, you won't find large populations.
#
You'll just find many, many, many, many small populations.
#
What he means by that is endogamy, where somehow 2,000 years ago and before that the party
#
for 2,000 years before that, after the Aryans came, everybody was mingling with everybody
#
But then a particular ideological or political strand kind of won over and you had cast and
#
endogamy and therefore you have a sort of the India that we have today.
#
And that cast endogamy obviously then has this preference for female seclusion, as you
#
put it, because once you have this situation where everybody from any other cast is a threat
#
to your property, a threat to your women, so to say, then that increases the incentives
#
for keeping the women locked up at home, for policing them, for policing their sexuality.
#
And it kind of gets worse and worse and it's a worse problem in South Asia and in India
#
than in other parts of the world, where that drive to female seclusion is not so high.
#
And you also talk about how this is further exacerbated in North India as compared to
#
South India, when you have the constant invasions by, you know, Turkic Muslim empires or the
#
Mughals as we would call them and, you know, they come in bringing Islam and Islam is again
#
a male dominated sort of religion.
#
They have their own regressive traditions like Parda and all of that, which for various
#
reasons, you know, it just exacerbates what is already happening out here.
#
So give me a little sense on how we can look at India in the light of all this, this broad
#
You know, I'd ask you to then turn your attention to India and sort of tell me a little bit
#
about this because obviously very heterogeneous, a lot of local variations, there is so much
#
shit happening out there.
#
You cannot generalize all that is fair, but at the same time, you know, looking at it
#
broadly can also make a lot of things clearer.
#
So, and again, listen, I'm sure many of your listeners are more knowledgeable on this than
#
I am and they should correct me.
#
So absolutely, yes, we know from the genetic data that caste has existed for at least 2000
#
years and that tight endogamy is only possible by strictly restricting women's mobility.
#
So of course, women were used, women did participate in farm work, but that's on your own farms
#
and so you can limit their contact with outsiders, whereas when people gained wealth, women might
#
retreat to the family courtyard.
#
On top of that, I think another really important point is that there was ancestral pastoralism
#
Now, ancestral pastoralism, as we know from work by Anke Becker and also Nathan Nunn and
#
others, is that this is typically associated with higher rates of female seclusion and
#
greater idealization of male honor and violence, and I think a part of that is if you have
#
agriculture, cereal cultivation, then the harvest can be easily taxed and appropriated
#
and stored and that can enable the formation of states and rule of law and imposition of
#
rule of law, whereas pastoralists can always easily evade the rule of law.
#
And so that condition of anarchy can itself cultivate macho men because you need to act
#
just super tough so that no one dares fuck with you, right?
#
You need to seem so tough, so violent, they need to anticipate that if they come to you,
#
you will destroy their entire clan.
#
So that itself may cultivate this ideology of clan sharing honor collectively and protecting
#
Especially a wonderful book on medieval Rajasthan looks at how when one dominant group would
#
take over another, they would often raid and take their women, and it was a way of humiliating
#
the opponent and demonstrating one's mastery.
#
And still today in Rajput weddings, for example, they take this – and I forget the precise
#
term, but it's like a long silver sword-type pole that they used to hit the banner that
#
would go over the front of the house.
#
And also in North India, there tends to be the bridegivers have the subservient status,
#
and I think that goes back to this history of the conquering clan seizing the women from
#
the others and using them as concubines, sex slaves, et cetera.
#
So in that history where we have caste endogamy, where we have ideals of purity and female
#
seclusion, where male honor is contingent on female chastity, and that condition of
#
conquest then in came one raids and slavery and taking our women, and that's an assault
#
on male honor, and I think that may have exacerbated – that may have politicized religion.
#
So still today, if you look at Pew data, their people are much more religious in North India
#
It's like 88% in the North, 35% in the South.
#
There's also far greater opposition to inter-religious marriage in the North, and again, that may
#
stem from this history of not wanting another community to take our women.
#
And again, it's a sense of social policing, these are our women.
#
Also I think a really important point when we talk about Islam is to understand the cultural
#
evolution of Islam, because this isn't about the Quran per se.
#
Now the Quran per se has many egalitarian aspects addressing both men and women.
#
Actually there was a step change in the 12th century when Iraq became the seat of the Sunni
#
Muslim empire, and those rulers gained legitimacy through their close alliance with Persian
#
theologians, and Amit Kuru in his wonderful book calls this the Ulema State Alliance.
#
And as we were already discussing, Southern Mesopotamia was one of the most patriarchal
#
So now you have those Persian theologians, Tusi, Davani, Ghazali, they are empowered
#
and emboldened to run these madrasas, and then those Persian texts came to influence
#
So I don't want us to say that we're talking about Islam in its original state.
#
This is a process of cultural evolution influenced by some of those Persian ideas.
#
And there were some aspects of the way that the influence of Arab tribes shaped the cultural
#
So for example, to avoid the Jizah head tax, people had to learn the Quran over in the
#
Middle East, had to gain an Arab patron, and that fostered cousin marriage because women
#
under Islam, married women can own and maintain their own property.
#
And that cultivated cousin marriage because people wanted to keep wealth in the family.
#
So you see these strong kinship groups, and these Persian theologians like Ghazali, and
#
I'd recommend this wonderful book by Zahra Ayyubi called Gendered Morality.
#
She talks about how Ghazali and others promoted this idea that men are intellectually superior,
#
men are uniquely capable of reason, and they gain piety by preventing fitna, that is moral
#
So this isn't something in the Quran, this isn't something in Chariah Lot, and I want
#
to be very explicit about that.
#
So it's this cultural influence combined by slavery, which is exacerbated by history of
#
male honor being contingent on female chastity, and this I think may heighten some of these
#
But again, and I think that's part of the reason why women increasingly retreated into
#
the family courtyard, and as families gained wealth, women were kept closer to the home.
#
But all of this is also subject to flux and change.
#
So I think that's my broad understanding of why North India generally tends to have higher
#
So for example, if we look at Rajasthan, the rural rate of female labor force participation
#
is 40%, but in urban areas, in towns and cities, it's 13%.
#
And this is what I call the honor income trade-off, in that families are perfectly happy for women
#
to work in the fields because they're not mixing and mingling with outsiders, but in
#
urban areas, families might be much more reluctant for women to be mixing and mingling in the
#
streets because then they could be mixing with outsiders, and that is a risk to male
#
So even though many women who I've spoken to in Rajasthan would like a job, it's principally
#
a government job, because that's a respectable position, and there's less threat of mixing
#
Tell me a bit more about the honor income trade-off, as you call it, because it's something
#
I mean, we'll come back to history later, where I want to know about the rest of the
#
world as well, the way we've spoken about India over the last 2000 years, so to say.
#
But the honor income trade-off is something that seems especially to be a factor in India
#
and an impediment to gender equality.
#
So tell me a bit about what that phrase means and what are its implications.
#
The honor income trade-off is, in societies where male honor is contingent upon female
#
chastity, then female labor supply only rises when female earnings are sufficiently high
#
to compensate for that loss of male honor.
#
And so that's precisely what we saw in East Asia.
#
So for example, Taiwan had incredibly labor-intensive growth, job-creating economic growth, smaller
#
medium enterprises from the 1980s really ran out of skilled labor.
#
They couldn't hire enough men, so they increasingly recruited women, and the gender pay gap increasingly
#
And Taiwan now today has a smaller gender pay gap than the USA.
#
Its legislature is 44% female, it has a twice-elected female president, and that's partly a result
#
of the income compensating for the loss of male honor.
#
But let me nuance it a little for India, is that in Delhi today, not many people will
#
talk about honor, right?
#
That's not something that's so important, maybe in rural Rajasthan, but maybe not in
#
But still, this history of male honor has profound repercussions for culture.
#
So caste endogamy and ideals of seclusion were maintained by keeping women close to
#
Because women stay at home, we come to see the cultural celebration of female sacrifice
#
for men, female sacrifice for men, and the ideal of male dominance.
#
And that's ritualized and celebrated through culture.
#
So the idea of women fasting for their husbands, the idea of women performing housework.
#
Feminists, economists, and sociologists often talk about housework as its attacks on women's
#
And this is an asymmetric tax, and women are doing the lion's share of it, and this is
#
unfair and we need to reduce those time costs.
#
And some people, for example, they look at data on India and they see that married women
#
are spending a huge amount of time on housework, and they think that it's housework holding
#
And that's true, but housework is also endogenous to our normative expectations.
#
And the underlying idea, or at least as I understand it, is women performing their subservience
#
to male dominance, that women doing things for men.
#
So mothers doing all this housework for their sons, and revering their sons, and maybe treating
#
their sons as small gods, or treating their husbands as small gods.
#
And that itself has important repercussions, because even if piped water supply, for example,
#
would be able to reduce the absolute time burden of housework, that improved infrastructure,
#
that development, doesn't change the underlying cultural ideal that women are performing subservience
#
And as long as that's happening, then that cultural mindset persists, that women are
#
And I think that culture has emerged through this valorization of, you know, the number
#
of ways that culture persists.
#
So for example, as long as you have this institution of patri locality, that a woman leaves her
#
household to join the groom's household, which as I was saying, emerged through a number
#
of traditions, then women are socialized to accept subservience.
#
So for example, in my interviews with women, they talk about how one woman was saying how,
#
you know, her mother would say, don't be stubborn.
#
How are you going to live with your in-laws?
#
They won't keep you if you're like this.
#
So women are socialized, and I'd really recommend the book Chop on this, is women socialized
#
not some women, I should say.
#
Some women socialize not to have their own preferences, not to be independently evaluating
#
things because if the expectation is that you have to leave to fit in with another household,
#
to be subservient under another family, then women are socialized to take up less space,
#
to adjust because they're inculcated, because some are inculcated with the fear that they
#
are then dependent on that family's support and favor.
#
And another important way in which this is institutionalized is through the mother-in-law
#
And this is an important element of gender inequality that Anukriti has written about,
#
for example, is that, you know, in poor patrilineal societies where female employment is very
#
low and women lack economic independence, mother's prosperity and security is reliant
#
Women need sons to survive because a son is going to provide for her to take care of her.
#
So you know, women have son preference, and that's also encouraged through the cultural
#
idealization that men continue the family lineage.
#
But if a woman is economically dependent on her son, then she may resist and be resentful
#
and be jealous of this incoming wife who's claiming an alternative alliance because she
#
worries that that wife may destroy and fracture her relationship with her son and take him
#
away and then she'll be left all alone and isolated.
#
So that kind of female jealousy and animosity can lead to bullying and abuse between the
#
So earlier you were talking about marriage as a toxic institution.
#
There are a number of other institutions and relationships between women that can also
#
perpetuate patriarchy in a context of low female employment and dependence on men.
#
And there's a combination of the way that economic dependence builds on the cultural
#
valorization of men, you know, men treated as better example.
#
And an unintended consequence of this, you know, this saas-bahu, this mother-in-law-daughter-in-law
#
relationship also is a rash of terrible TV dramas, which we kind of suffered through
#
I mean, not that I watched any of them, but it crowds out better content.
#
But anyway, that is one sort of common narrative about women's empowerment and you mentioned
#
it in your book in the context of other places is that household tech is a big deal, right?
#
Because once you have a washing machine, once you have a dishwasher, your tasks become much
#
easier, you have much more time.
#
But what you're saying is that it doesn't really matter so much that one of the key
#
reasons why a woman is doing all of those is to express her subservience to the man.
#
And she's got to do that anyway, if not this way, then some other way.
#
It doesn't mean that if she has more time, she's necessarily going to go out and work.
#
And therefore, at least in India, it's not as much of a panacea as one would think.
#
Is that what you're saying?
#
So let me say two things.
#
There's a lot of literature showing, for example, there are several papers in the USA
#
that suggest washing machines were engines of liberation, they reduced women's time
#
But actually, that demand for washing machines may have been endogenous.
#
It may have been that there was job-creating economic growth, women went out into the labour
#
force, they were eager to pursue careers, and then they wanted washing machines to reduce
#
their time burdens, so that it could be the reverse relationship.
#
And in India, we do see that even though fertility has fallen, which should have reduced women's
#
time burdens, women remain laden with a number of domestic duties.
#
And I think this reflects a global trend.
#
So if you look at cross-national data, we see that in countries where the male breadwinner
#
ideal is widely endorsed, women perform a larger volume of housework.
#
So the actual volume of housework could actually stem from ideology, and the child penalty
#
– that is the cost of having your child when you compare European countries – where
#
people believe that a mother should stay at home with their children, then you see a larger
#
So the normative expectations that women should be performing this labour for men and for
#
their children could be shaping women's responsiveness to economic opportunities.
#
And so, for example, let me give a couple of examples that some rural families might
#
want women to make fresh chapatis twice a day, the expectation, or women should be preparing
#
for Hindu festivals, and the absolute enormity of that work, whether it's making laddu or
#
other things, the enormity of the expectations of all the things that mothers should do.
#
So there's a nice paper – and I'll forget the name and terribly offend people – that
#
they suggest that actually one reason that educated women might even be limiting their
#
labour supply might be so they can support their children's education, so prioritizing
#
the family and putting their children first, putting their families first.
#
So there are a number of things that the idealization of serving men may persist and may increase
#
the total burden of housework.
#
It's not just about housework, but it's the idea that these cultural ideals can persist
#
You know, just the thought of women making laddus for everyone, it's a kind of sinister
#
revenge because sugar is poison, of course, so you're gradually killing your whole family
#
Pat on the back to all the women who do that.
#
And it reminds me of Parkinson's law, which you could call the Parkinson's law for women
#
because it applies so well, right?
#
Work expands to fill the time available.
#
So your point being that it isn't enough if time-saving technology comes along.
#
The point is that there's something deeper at play here.
#
And just going back to the honor income trade-off, where the honor side of the ledger is a bit
#
weaker to begin with, for example, where there isn't such a preference for female seclusion,
#
it's much easier for women to go out there and work.
#
All you need is that the economic returns increase and then it makes sense.
#
But here it's not just about the economic returns increasing.
#
That is one way, but the other way is, as you've pointed out, if there are fewer concerns
#
For example, there's less of an obstacle to women working in businesses owned by other
#
You've pointed out because the assumption is that they're safer.
#
So when families are more confident that women's honor is protected, then they're generally
#
much more supportive of female employment.
#
Let me give you two examples.
#
So earlier I was mentioning Soumya Dhanaraj, NVIDIA Mahambri's research, that they point
#
to factories often assure rural families in Bihar that, yes, we'll look after your daughters
#
by keeping them in these incredibly surveilled prisons.
#
We're going to escort them to the market on the Sunday and return them back safely.
#
So factories redouble their efforts to control and monitor women to reassure the families
#
in Bihar so they can be assured of the labor supply.
#
The same was true in East Asia.
#
When women's honor is secured, we do see generally higher rates of female labor force participation.
#
Let me give one more example that I wanted to share.
#
In India, 34% of women say that male violence is justified, that men can beat their wives
#
if she neglects the children or burns the food.
#
So never mind men doing zero care work.
#
If a woman does that care work inadequately, it's okay to beat her.
#
So this is what I'm talking about, the normative expectations of housework.
#
And again, coming back to Soumya Dhanaraj and NVIDIA Mahambri, they show that in North
#
India, when women who work, they're much more likely to be beaten by their husbands.
#
So that in itself is another reason why women might be reluctant to step out.
#
I mean, it's not so great.
#
And Anu Kriti, whose work I was mentioning, she finds that in areas where you see higher
#
rates of female political representation as a result of quotas, you see higher rates of
#
And there are parallels in Bangladesh.
#
Women who work in garment factories or microcredit might be at higher risk of patriarchal backlash.
#
So in societies where male honor is paramount, where men want to demonstrate their mastery
#
over women, then they can respond negatively.
#
But I also wanted to say, let me share why actually, but the way that this can be overcome
#
is through job creating economic growth.
#
And I want to share some data from the UK.
#
So when Hindu Indian women come to the UK, they do work.
#
So in the UK, the rate of female labor force participation among white British women is
#
Among Indians, it's 69%.
#
So when they're a job creating economic opportunities and when public safety is assured, women are
#
I mean, and in the UK today, Indian families are relatively wealthy and women are thriving
#
as accountants in finance, in myriad fields, in accountancy.
#
Many of our doctors are Indian women.
#
So I think that really shows the honor income trade-off that when honors can be insured,
#
when their income returns are sufficiently high.
#
So there's no fundamental, there's no fundamental bottleneck, you know, culture isn't set in.
#
So it's this trade-off that I'm trying, that's what I want to communicate.
#
And I was also sort of fascinated by two other data points that you bring to bear.
#
And one of them is that Bangladesh is better in this respect because there is lower endogamy
#
So that's something I got wrong.
#
That's something I got wrong.
#
That's something I changed my mind on.
#
So I initially thought that, so right.
#
So India has seen its rate of female labor force participation plummet, while Bangladesh
#
has seen its rate of female labor force participation increase.
#
And I think that fact alone is fascinating and deserves more research.
#
And some people say, well, it's garments, but no, in a population of 160 million, garments
#
are only employing four or 4.5 million.
#
I also realized it's actually not culture.
#
It's not that Bangladeshis care less about honor.
#
If you look at early marriage, that's incredibly high in Bangladesh.
#
Early marriage indicates huge concern for female virginity.
#
We must marry our daughter early to preserve her virginity to get to the right lineage.
#
Bangladesh had a history of female veiling, which indicates a concern for female seclusion.
#
So when Bangladeshis go to the UK, their rate of female labor market participation is actually
#
So faced with those exact same economic opportunities, they're much less likely to seize them.
#
The economic returns, the female employment are not high enough to compensate for male
#
Now the Bangladeshi families also tend to be less educated and less wealthy than Indian
#
families and that itself might suppress female employment, but even controlling for that,
#
even Bangladeshi women are less likely to work.
#
So again, it's not that Bangladesh is actually more gender equal.
#
What I suspect has gone on is, and this is going to sound controversial, and I need to
#
be careful about how I put this, over the past 50 years, there has been massive labor
#
repression in Bangladesh.
#
So trade unions were banned ever since the 1970s.
#
Successive governments co-opted trade unions and used patrons to control them, and they
#
became fairly defunct and weak and useless, and people lost faith in trade unions.
#
As a result of that weak activism, labor inspectors were understaffed and fairly ineffective.
#
They were even banned from export processing zones.
#
National legislation around labor rights does not apply in those places, and that has enabled
#
Bangladesh to compete on price for low-end garment jobs.
#
But more than that, with very weak labor protections, with huge labor repression.
#
For example, in 2019, when there was a sporadic outburst of strikes, the police returned with
#
water cannons and rubber bullets and 50 people died.
#
So as a result of that labor repression, as a result of those weak labor protections,
#
it's not enormously costly to hire more formal labor.
#
So firms actually have a great economic incentive to hire more and more workers because it doesn't
#
come with so many burdens of protections for the worker, for the formal worker.
#
So Amit Basole over in Bangalore has a fantastic paper looking at the growth elasticity of
#
employment, and he finds that in Bangladesh compared to India, we see that growth generates
#
more jobs, it generates more non-agricultural jobs, and it generates more formal jobs.
#
There's the difference, I think, in India, and we could contrast West Bengal, for example.
#
In West Bengal, as you know, there's been the left front and leftist agitation since
#
the 1970s, and that raised the cost of labor relative to productivity.
#
And if labor is more costly than productivity, factories closed, and we saw deindustrialization.
#
That also occurred in Kerala in the 1970s.
#
So while many of us may think it's a great thing to have formal labor protections, that
#
can actually protect a labor aristocracy while leading to the decimation of industry.
#
So in the 1970s, many biddy factories actually closed down.
#
They relocated to Tamil Nadu, or they outsourced to home-based workers.
#
Those women are working at home under the control of patriarchal guardians.
#
So some of those labor protections, even though they're well-intended, at least by their labor
#
aristocracy, may actually be suppressing job-creating economic growth, may actually be compounding
#
So for example, just yesterday, I interviewed a female entrepreneur who has a printing business,
#
and she was saying that by staying small, she's actually able to avoid many of these
#
bureaucratic controls and labor regulations.
#
So what she does is a relatively small staff of formal workers, and then she has an additional
#
dozen contract laborers.
#
So she keeps her formal workforce small in order to avoid some of the costs, and that
#
enables her to be much more productive.
#
But the consequences, and as a result, as I remember Solé shows, is that 77% of Indians
#
continue to work in firms employing less than 10 people, and that has barely changed.
#
And this has a number of consequences for gender relations.
#
First of all, if people remain in informal, unorganized, precarious labor, then they remain
#
And there is very weak social security.
#
No one wants to end up in a government hospital where you can be waiting for days, or poor
#
quality education, or just the total lack of social security.
#
And so that means to protect themselves, to mitigate health shocks and economic shocks,
#
people cling closely to their caste and kinship networks, their jati, as shown by Munshi,
#
So that precarity tightens reliance on kin.
#
That tightens the incentive, the economic incentive for endogamy.
#
Now of course there are also cultural reasons, the ideals of purity, ideals that we should
#
marry within our own kin, but it's also the nature of India's economic development that's
#
reproducing some of those caste ideals.
#
So if we look at caste-based residential segregation, we see that that is weakening slightly in
#
thriving cities with more salaried employment.
#
We also see that people are more likely to live in nuclear homes if they work for non-family
#
businesses, if they have salaried employment.
#
So if they're economically independent, then they're more likely to go at it alone.
#
Whereas sons who think that they need to rely on their family business for inheritance for
#
their economic security may feel they have little option but to challenge ideals of arranged
#
But of course there's cultural content too.
#
For example, in North India, and I believe as a consequence of the close-knit clans banding
#
together, the rate of joint families is four times higher.
#
So there are cultural factors and the idea that people should revere and respect their
#
parents and wanting to please their parents, and so that perpetuates arranged marriages.
#
But this is exacerbated and perpetuated by economic development.
#
So where you have precarity that heightens reliance on kin, where you have slow job-creating
#
economic growth, women remain under the control of patriarchal guardians.
#
And it also suppresses economic opportunities.
#
For example, if there are no jobs in town, then Dalit women cannot escape the villages.
#
So they remain under what Ambedkar referred to as what is the village but then of nepotism
#
and ignorance and communism and narrow-mindedness.
#
So going back to your question, sorry, I should be more concise, is that the nature of India's
#
economic development, with one factor among many maybe being the extent of bureaucracy,
#
the incentives for firms to stay small.
#
And I should say there could also be cultural incentives for firms to stay small.
#
As long as people trust their close-knit kin, as long as people trust their family members,
#
they may prefer just to stay small among themselves.
#
But I don't think that can explain the Bangladeshi-India difference because Bangladesh is also a close-knit
#
So answer your question, why is female employment sought in Bangladesh but not in India?
#
I think, paradoxically, it might be labor repression and labor protection rather than
#
I think that's the best way to explain it.
#
And I really like that comparison.
#
I think that contrasting Bangladesh and India tells us actually more about India and about
#
So I find that intriguing.
#
You said at the start, this borders on being a controversial explanation and you just called
#
And I don't think it's either because I think outside of left-leaning academia, it's well
#
accepted that most labor laws and most labor regulation harm workers rather than help them.
#
And we've seen that in India.
#
And this is a classic example of that, frankly.
#
It's just an extremely cogent explanation which you just gave.
#
I want to pick up on another strand that you went down on.
#
When you mentioned Soumya and Vidya's research, and they'd be so happy, of course, to hear
#
the name so many times, but what you pointed out was how their research has shown that
#
these factory workers, to alleviate concerns about are the female workers safe, will herd
#
them into safe spaces and make sure they get back home all right and so on to fight some
#
of that sort of urge for female seclusion, as it were.
#
And my question is about sort of those spaces where these women are together, about those
#
spaces not just in this context, but in any context where women talk to each other.
#
You know, earlier you'd spoken about the Cambodia case where these women are comparing
#
notes and saying, oh, your husband helps out at home, mine doesn't.
#
And there's some kind of solidarity and empowerment happening there.
#
And this is something you've written pieces about, you've discussed on a podcast, which
#
Shruti, all of which are linked from the show notes, of course.
#
So tell me a little bit more about this, because part of the puzzle of figuring out where you
#
are to begin with and what is wrong with where you are is just talking to others, sort of
#
broadening those horizons.
#
And female friendships therefore play a huge part in female empowerment.
#
So you know, before we get back to the historical and geographic narrative, let's talk a little
#
So Anu Kriti and others have found that in parts of Uttar Pradesh, 26% of women have
#
no friends outside the home.
#
And so their networks become limited.
#
Also there's a nice study of West Bengal looking at who people make phone calls to, and they
#
find that women often make phone calls to their family or their husband's family, whereas
#
men have much wider networks.
#
And if women are reliant and dependent on their husband's family, then they have narrow
#
social circles, then they're less aware of alternative ideologies, and they might not
#
necessarily have the support, the encouragement to transgress, to try new things.
#
And so I think friendships are important in two ways.
#
And it's also, it's not just friends per se, but also a rich diversity of friends.
#
So it's JNU women coming together, meeting people from Bengal, meeting people from all
#
different parts of the country with different experiences and different ideologies.
#
Because women in the village may have friends, but they might be similarly marginalized women
#
with similarly economically dependent on their providers, with little exit options, and instead
#
they themselves may practice Islamophobia, casteism, colorism, for example.
#
So it's not just female friendships, but it's having these diverse networks with both
#
economically privileged people who might help you with resources, but also people with greater
#
So friendships are important in two ways.
#
And in my analysis of gender, I tried to differentiate between our internalized gender ideologies,
#
so that is what I privately think is right or wrong, but also our norm perceptions, my
#
perceptions of what is condemned or championed by others in my community.
#
So within my internalized ideologies, we might look at my self-belief, whether I have confidence
#
in myself to speak out, whether I myself think women are more competent than men.
#
But even if I myself am privately critical, I may nonetheless comply with gender inequalities
#
and hierarchies, maybe because I'm not entirely confident in myself or also because I anticipate
#
So yesterday I was at JNU and I was talking to these women, how they came to JNU and they
#
came to question all these patriarchal ideologies that women shouldn't date, or that women
#
shouldn't choose for themselves, or that women shouldn't wear shorts, or that women shouldn't
#
do all these things, or that women should adhere to their parents' choices in marriage.
#
And it's friends encouraging each other, emboldening each other.
#
So one girl had traveled internationally, so she was from a slightly more economically-privileged
#
Another girl had not traveled at all, but she'd managed to get a scholarship to go to
#
And those two friends encouraged each other.
#
So even though families might be more conservative, even though families might be concerned for
#
their honor, these women are supporting each other, encouraging each other.
#
And it's these iterative transgressions.
#
So for example, when I was in Cambodia, girls would see that other girls down their street
#
were getting homework, and they were jealous.
#
They wanted homework too!
#
And so they were pushing their parents to take them to school and things like that.
#
So it's absolutely one.
#
And I say, and many of the women I've also spoken to who might be in abusive relationships
#
and not recognizing those harms.
#
So thinking, for example, all this controlling or jealous practices, because he loves me
#
so much, for example, but friends can help each other to see that critically, to question
#
some of those ideologies.
#
So it's one about questioning, to question ideas, and two, to be supported, to be emboldened,
#
to be encouraged, that's really transformative.
#
So this is why I say friendships are absolutely the foundation of both feminist consciousness
#
One observation that I sometimes make is that India lives in sort of three centuries at
#
There's a 19th, 20th, 21st, right?
#
The girls you encountered in JNU, regardless of background, are pretty much firmly in the
#
21st century, in that sense, where large parts of the country are in the 19th century.
#
And I think that's also something to keep in mind that it might seem to be the same
#
geography, but within that geography, there are these overlapping realities, as it were.
#
So you know, the drive to female seclusion would definitely be there, for example, from
#
those still in the 19th and 20th centuries, and not really so much in the 21st century.
#
But I'm struck by the distinction that you made between internalized ideologies and what
#
Or our norm perceptions, our perceptions of what?
#
Because as Timur Koran has highlighted, there can also be pluralistic ignorance.
#
So we may underestimate wider support for disobedience and rebellion, and that itself
#
can create a negative feedback loop, or what I call a despondency trap.
#
So it may be that many other people are privately critical, but as long as they anticipate social
#
disapproval, they won't actually stick their necks out and voice their concerns.
#
And so that in itself traps people from thinking differently, which is like my vagina example.
#
And I like Timur Koran's term, term preference falsification, where, I mean, the whole idea
#
is that you feel a certain way, which is your internalized ideology, but you perceive the
#
norm to be something else, and therefore you don't express yourself until eventually there
#
is what he calls a preference cascade, and then people feel emboldened to express themselves.
#
Now, classic example to go back to the Cambodia case would be that, you know, you could have
#
a woman who believes that it is a wife's job to do all the work at home, but then she meets
#
friends and her internalized ideology changes.
#
She thinks that, no, men should also share in it, right?
#
But she perceives a norm to be so patriarchal that she did not question it.
#
But here there's a sort of a third factor besides these female friendships, which kind
#
of comes into play, which is the way technology spreads a sort of globalized culture, where
#
you could be watching things on Netflix or Hotstar or whatever, where men are actually
#
cooking, where women are actually working outside.
#
So is that something that that is a source of hope for you as well in terms of the norms
#
themselves changing over time?
#
So if you have that internalized feeling that, hey, I shouldn't have to do all the housework,
#
but you're too scared to say it, because of all of that culture around you, you know,
#
does that change the culture at home as well gradually over a period of time?
#
OK, so let me make three points on that.
#
One is that use and adoption of technology is itself endogenous to culture.
#
So for example, in 2017, there was a cap panchayat that actually in Uttar Pradesh that banned
#
women from having mobile phones.
#
There are also instances of surveillance technology on mobile phones, mirroring women's phones,
#
creating cameras to create their surveillance.
#
So the kind of technologies people use is endogenous to culture.
#
My second point is that, yes, on Instagram people may see inspirational feminist messages,
#
they may see Bollywood stars doing things differently, refusing dowry, for example.
#
But what is equally important through my interviews is – and wait – and that is often contingent
#
on a democratic environment.
#
So for example, as I was saying in China, much of that is blacked out by the CCP.
#
So the advantage of India, there's less surveillance on that.
#
But still, even with the exposure to all those alternative ideologies, people often reflect
#
on them in their friendship groups, and their ability to act them out is dependent on how
#
they think they will be perceived and treated in their own communities.
#
So earlier last year, there was the torn jean thing.
#
So some guys said women shouldn't be wearing torn jeans, and then a bunch of women said,
#
hey, I'm wearing my torn jeans and I'm proud of it.
#
But still, even if you saw that living in rural West Bengal, women might themselves
#
not wear shorts in that environment.
#
And so instead, JNU students, for example, were saying how excited they were to come
#
to JNU, where they knew it would be possible to wear shorts in that environment.
#
So it's not enough to see those Instagram inspirational messages.
#
It's about the specific environment, how you think you'll be perceived and treated.
#
So I would not say technology is inevitably emancipatory.
#
And technology itself can spread hateful, casteist, Islamophobic, sexist, racist messages.
#
So technology is always mediated by our culture, our institutions, et cetera.
#
I mean, it's not a magic bullet, but at least you're aware another sort of world exists
#
Let's sort of go back to talking about global history.
#
We've looked at India and how India has evolved and so on and so forth.
#
Now, the rest of the world has evolved differently from India and differently from each other.
#
So give me a sense of that, you know, Europe, China, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, you
#
Give me a sense of the sort of currents that are shaping patriarchy or mitigating it in
#
different ways in all of these places.
#
Well, perhaps let's start with East Asia, because I think that's one really important
#
point in that I think it's important to understand how patriarchal it was historically, because
#
I think that's a really great comparison with South Asia.
#
So the idea that men plough and women weave has this sort of gender division of Lee Baber
#
has always been idealized in Chinese literature right through to antiquity, but the idea of
#
the cult of chastity, the idea that the women should be confined to the inner quarters really
#
took root when Confucianism was popular.
#
So actually after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 500 A.D., 589 A.D., when Confucianism
#
lost favor, actually we saw the flourishing of Taoism, and women were recognized as scholars,
#
women were recognized as knowledgeable authorities, as moral authorities, and yeah, women have
#
exercised far greater freedoms and authority.
#
So what changed, the big step change in Chinese gender relations and patriarchy was the Song
#
Several things happened, they introduced a meritocratic civil service exam, and also widespread
#
printing, and now what happened is the landed gentry was suddenly in a position of insecurity,
#
and here I'm heavily borrowing from the work of Yuhan Wang, who's over at Harvard, and
#
he's got a new book out on this.
#
And so meritocratic civil service exam means that you have to massively invest in your
#
son's Confucian education in order to get that elite spot in the, everyone wants a government
#
Today it was also true in Song dynasty, right?
#
That was your pathway to prestige and power, et cetera.
#
So people heavily invested in their sons, but that also motivate, that also require,
#
but people also, but people that heavy motivation to invest in sons cultivated a desire for
#
intergenerational reciprocity.
#
So if you massively investigate in your son's education, you need to make sure they pay
#
back, and you need these close-knit clans to cooperate to ensure basic survival, whether
#
it's irrigation, social services, health.
#
So close-knit clans are bonding closely together, and they idealize the male lineage.
#
We see the flourishing of genealogy books, the flourishing of ancestor worship, the idea
#
of the, and that's preserved through the purity of the male line.
#
And once you idealize the purity of the male line, then you need tighter restrictions on
#
female ability, as was emphasized in Confucian literature and Confucian philosophy, which
#
of course everyone is studying, or many learned people are studying because they need to get
#
into their state exams.
#
So we see this emergence of the cult of genealogy, the emergency, the ideal of male purity, and
#
women increasingly retreat to the private sphere.
#
So this is when we see the cult of chastity being idealized in Song literature.
#
Literature also emphasizes and celebrates female purity and celebrates women sacrificing
#
themselves for their family.
#
And I think this is such an important point that I previously didn't realize is that
#
how our mental models are shaped by literature and how actually many women might comply with
#
patriarchy because that is how you gain social esteem and praise.
#
The greatest thing a woman can do is sacrifice herself for male honor, and we see parallels
#
of that in India with Sati, for example, or Johar.
#
And then another step change occurred with the Mongol invasion.
#
So the Mongols came down to China, basically raiding, raping, and pillaging, massive assault
#
on male honor with close parallels with Northwest invasions in India.
#
And then the Mongols tried to cultivate local legitimacy by adopting Confucian ideas.
#
They tried to show, you know, we're just as Chinese as the Chinese.
#
And the Han officials underneath them also wanted to preserve their culture, so they
#
closely cling to these Confucian ideas.
#
And so then we see the ramping up of all these very patriarchal norms.
#
So paintings of that era, you do not see women on city streets.
#
So women, their feet are bound and hobbled, especially in the north, less so in the south,
#
and literature reflects it.
#
So that's really the emergence of patriarchy in China.
#
As I was saying, from ancient Greece to Mesopotamia to much of the Middle East and North Africa,
#
also incredibly patriarchal.
#
So the whole of Eurasia was incredibly patriarchal at that time.
#
Now the areas that were different were places where you did not have nomadic pastoralism,
#
where you did not have the plow, and where male-dominated religions did not emerge.
#
So for example, in the Philippines, where they didn't have plow agriculture, women
#
So as we know from 10th century Chinese and European traders, they encountered Philippines,
#
Southeast Asian women trading, they traveled great distances.
#
In the Philippines, it was women who acted as religious priestesses.
#
If men wanted to be religious figures, they had to act effeminently.
#
And if a woman wanted divorce, she could easily go and live with half the shared slaves, half
#
And in fact, women were in such a position of authority and autonomy that they were in
#
a position to prioritize their sexual pleasure.
#
And so some asserted and demanded that men wear rather painful penis pins.
#
So this is one country, to the best of my knowledge, where you have female sexual pleasure
#
I don't know exactly, but from the drawings, and I'll share that it looks like a pin that
#
goes through the penis with slight knobs on either side, perhaps some people.
#
So I think it's designed to enhance friction for female sexual pleasure.
#
I guess men deserve it.
#
I guess men deserve it, right?
#
Payback for patriarchy, right?
#
Yeah, payback for patriarchy.
#
I'm just glad it's not me.
#
But I confess, I have no ethnographic experience to comment in this regard.
#
So Southeast Asia, relative weak restrictions on female mobility, and the Andes are also
#
So if we, although we don't have written scripts, so we have to be careful in furthering and
#
understanding what these societies were like.
#
If we look at iconography, if we look at art, if we look at artifacts, we see this strong
#
ideology of gender complementarity, that we see men and women working together.
#
And I suspect in the Andean civilization, well, they didn't have money, and instead
#
it was a tribute redistribution economy, in that people paid service to the empire.
#
So women contributed cloth, men contributed labor.
#
And so women's work was recognized as equally valuable, and we did not see this patrilineal
#
inheritance of wealth, a relatively weak restrictions on women's mobility, that even recognized
#
and celebrated trial marriage, premarital sexuality.
#
They had this idea of bilateral descent, so that women descended from women, and ultimately
#
So there's this idea of gender complementarity running right through the Americas, with relatively
#
weakens restrictions, and that's celebrated through folklore, et cetera.
#
Now Africa is also incredibly fascinating, and I think this is a great example of how
#
geography mediates cultural evolution.
#
So maybe 5,000 years ago, much of Sub-Saharan Africa might have been matrilineal, but this
#
changed with cattle and pastoralism.
#
So one, we have the Bantu expansion, and that led to the spread of cattle.
#
Cattle raises the value of land, patrilineal inheritance.
#
Also we see nomadic pastoralism.
#
So again, it's gangs of men, gangs of young men, raiding, raping their way through the
#
Horn of Africa, down into Southern Africa, as we know through the genetic data.
#
And they institutionalize patriarchal dominance and ideology.
#
So if we look at the Maasai or Swana, these are male-dominated village assemblies.
#
Women are minors without the voice of their own.
#
And there's also, for the Swana, for example, men are revered, they are buried in the cattle
#
There are numerous sayings and proverbs saying, you know, women cannot lead, men are the ones
#
who are autonomous, men are the ones who are the good leaders, et cetera.
#
So that's the institution of patriarchy.
#
But the spread of pastoralism and cattle was mediated by geography.
#
So around the Gulf of Guinea, for example, they had the, I mispronounce this every time,
#
It's pronounced differently.
#
I've buggered it up, but you'll forgive me.
#
This fly causes a sleeping sickness in cattle.
#
And so it was not possible to have cattle there.
#
So instead, land never became a valuable source of inheritance.
#
So although many of the communities in the Gulf of Guinea had patrilineal succession,
#
it was only men's control over the children.
#
So through bride wealth, their men are getting the children.
#
This is not about inherited wealth.
#
So as a result, these communities, women are moving freely.
#
Women have their own networks in the Yoruba and Igbo.
#
And I especially recommend Professor Nwando Achebe's book on this.
#
She highlights how there were women exercised authority and spirituality.
#
So you see that Lessa, the name for God, is neither male or female.
#
You see oracles and deities and women exercising spiritual authority, Queen Mothers also revered.
#
Across West Africa, women are traders, they're merchants, they're running West African markets.
#
And because they have this mobility, they were able to protect their own turf.
#
Now on top of this, Islam spreads via networks of trade, but also amongst pastoralists.
#
So there's another element in which geography mediates cultural evolution.
#
And then fast forward a little bit to the 18th and 19th century, we have fuller jihads.
#
And these fuller jihads are led by pastoralists.
#
In northern Nigeria, they institutionalize sharia law.
#
And at that same time, we see the emergence of purdah.
#
If you look at architecture, for example, that is when women are increasingly confined
#
to the inner quarters, and families gain respectability by secluding their women and differentiating
#
themselves from slaves used in labor.
#
So it's this process of both geography and cultural evolution that's really important.
#
So we have patrilineal, patrilocal Eurasia, and then we have these matrilineal and bilateral
#
And then there occurred an important divergence within Eurasia, and that is what I was talking
#
about earlier, the emergence of nuclear families in Western Europe.
#
And so that created a latent asset.
#
So Europe was not gender equal.
#
As I was saying, every institution was headed by men.
#
I don't want anyone in the world to think that I'm saying that Europe was ahead, Europe
#
We had some great culture.
#
In fact, women, so let me explain this, so one, even though women were working before
#
the modern era, women spent 60% of their adult years either pregnant or nursing.
#
So their mobility was hobbled, whereas men had far greater ability to capitalize on the
#
transition from feudalism to commercialization.
#
And as this occurred, men built guilds.
#
So these are organizations that preserved existing privileges and locked out other groups.
#
So they tried to disadvantage their competitors and prevent other groups from competing against
#
them or undercutting them.
#
So in places where there was weak economic growth and slow demand for labor, those were
#
especially patriarchal.
#
So for example, in Western Germany, women had no rights.
#
They weren't allowed to compete with the girls at all.
#
They also discriminated against immigrants for the exact same reason.
#
But where you see greater prosperity, like the Netherlands and parts of France, Paris,
#
then women could actually be included in guilds.
#
So when the pie was a little bit bigger, people might be a bit more prepared to share.
#
So the girls discriminated against women.
#
So the discrimination in Europe was not coming from within the household.
#
It was primarily coming from outsiders who didn't want women competing against them.
#
But women still had very weak social capital.
#
So when Protestant and Catholic churches competed in the counter-reformation in their struggle
#
for Bamazon seats or pews, they wanted to demonstrate their superior power to vanquish
#
And they did so by burning witches, primarily women.
#
So women's social capital was weak.
#
Now let's fast-forward to the Enlightenment.
#
Now the Enlightenment was an age of great innovation and discovery.
#
And men, whether they're engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, they gather together to hear
#
the latest innovations, to hear about scientific advances.
#
And this enables collaborative creativity.
#
The brilliant people, like when we went to our conference in Udaipur, brilliant people
#
come together, share ideas, encourage each other, support each other.
#
And Joel Mokia has a wonderful book on the Enlightened Economy talking about why collaborative
#
creativity is so important.
#
And these groups are amplifying each other, they're supporting each other, they're amplifying
#
each other's ideas on megaphones.
#
Freemasons go to court to protect each other's reputations.
#
Whereas in the English-speaking world, 95% of these associations are male, discriminating
#
And so there were brilliant women, but they're toiling in solitude.
#
I mean, there were a few Dutch Masonic lodges.
#
London had a few women debating societies.
#
But for the most part, women were locked out.
#
So they're not getting that kind of support and encouragement and peer feedback, etc.
#
So they're not able to benefit from this enlightenment.
#
That said, we do see slightly higher rates of female writing in Protestant countries.
#
And that's partly as a result of Sola Scriptura, the idea that every person should understand
#
the Bible for themselves, and that led to a reduction in gender gaps.
#
So we did have a little bit of women's writing, especially in Protestant countries.
#
But still, all the institutions are male-dominated.
#
So Europe, patriarchal, but with this latent asset of participatory institutions, nuclear
#
families, and state institutions.
#
Contrast that with the Middle East and North Africa, and these Ottoman towns are much more
#
But women were by no means passive.
#
So because married women had these property rights, if you look at court records from
#
Eintab, from Cairo, Damascus, you see women litigating in court.
#
They're pursuing thieves, they're hounding, they're hounding people, they're pressing
#
for their inheritance rights, they're pressing for their claims on property, they're owning
#
various houses, assets, gardens, orchards, donkeys, etc.
#
But elite and wealthy women tended to send emissaries on their behalf, so they could
#
maintain seclusion because that was respectable.
#
But again, I still would not say that the Middle East was especially patriarchal at
#
that time, because at that time, the vast majority of people across the world are peasants.
#
Pretty much most women are working in peasants in family farms, where again, you don't have
#
many exit options, so again, you're vulnerable to male violence, etc., and many people would
#
have internalized patriarchal traditions.
#
So Ottoman towns are more gender segregated, but much of Eurasia is very patriarchal.
#
We just have this latent divergence that would appear much more important later on in the
#
Another important issue I should highlight, skipping over to Song China, is Song China
#
actually outlawed cousin marriage, so you're not allowed to marry anyone with your same
#
So that would have led to weaker clans, so far weaker kinship intensity, which would
#
prove important later on.
#
Right, so now we have the vain map of the world.
#
Oh, I should also talk about colonialism, the impact of colonialism.
#
So many scholars raise concerns that colonialism could have perpetuated patriarchy, because
#
of course, the Europeans were incredibly patriarchal at that time, undeniably, and they often emphasize
#
that, but I do not think that colonialism is responsible for the contemporary divergence
#
in outcomes by pressing for their patriarchal beliefs.
#
So let me give you the example, but we have to take each region in turn.
#
So if we look at colonialism in Latin America, so colonialism was horrifically impressive.
#
They spawned disease, millions of people died, they also butchered and enslaved Native Americans
#
and there was horrific violence, rapes, et cetera.
#
That said, indigenous people fiercely maintained their own traditions.
#
So while Catholics might call trial marriage diabolical, Andean civilizations often continue
#
In fact, in 1789, there was an indigenous people's rebellion, 44% of those leaders
#
So they continue to practice their ideal, and still today, Peru has very high rates
#
of female labor force participation.
#
And for the most part, across Latin America, they had fairly weak ties of kinship.
#
There were fairly weak marital bonds in Sao Paulo in the 17th century, in Mexico City
#
You'll find lots of single women working by themselves independently.
#
It was really only the very, very tiny elites, landowners, that would practice cousin marriage
#
and female seclusion and chastity and confinement in order to preserve their important land
#
So Latin America, though I'd say one more important aspect there is the spread of Catholicism.
#
Catholicism promoted this idea of the cult of virginity, the idea of shame.
#
So Catholicism definitely a regressive religion for the most part, but whether people adopt
#
that and how they adopt it is mediated by their indigenous culture.
#
Now let me put colonialism on hold because I'll come back to it in the case of Africa,
#
but I can talk about colonialism for any reason, so I'll come back to that.
#
Now what I want to do is to talk about industrialization in the 20th century.
#
Now this was phenomenally important, and this is where we see the honor income trade I've
#
taken off, because with technological change, reducing the domestic drudgery, and also job
#
creating economic growth means that employers who might initially prefer to hire men eventually
#
And here I'm borrowing work by Professor Claudia Goldin, and they run out of men, so they run
#
out of men and increasingly hire women, and so we see this in every single country.
#
Even more recently in Turkey where we have strong job creating economic growth, at least
#
before 2018, then we see rising female labor force participation, same in East Asia, Taiwan
#
So in Europe where the constraints, where the restrictions on female mobility are relatively
#
weak, then when you get higher female education, then when fertility goes down, women seize
#
economic opportunities in their droves.
#
And this is because of the latent asset of nuclear families, where there is this weaker
#
concern for honor and where families really, where a woman's earnings make a massive difference
#
Then we see in the 1970s, there's liberalization of divorce laws, both in the USA and Europe,
#
and women cease to believe that marriage offers decent security and insurance, so they become
#
much more committed to the labor market, they pursue careers, and they become much more
#
independently minded, and through that they generate friendships.
#
So that's the really important, that's why the great gender divergence occurred in the
#
20th century, because it's this economic, the culture is responding to economic changes.
#
Now another really important dimension is communism.
#
And here again, I can say something controversial, that I think communism, totalitarian communism,
#
may be the world's greatest intervention for women's economic empowerment.
#
So totalitarian communism is run on a model of extensive growth, that central planners
#
set wages low and demanded very high productivity targets.
#
So consider yourself in the position of each firm.
#
It's very cheap to hire in labor, and you want to get as much labor as possible in order
#
to meet your production targets.
#
You recruit lots of men, and you also recruit women.
#
And women themselves have a strong incentive to seek those jobs, because male wages are
#
very low, the male breadwinner model would not exist because male earnings were so low.
#
And also jobs with a passport to social security, social services, holidays, amenities, everything,
#
So post-communist countries have very high rates of female employment.
#
It's not just that women are working, but also labor market advancements.
#
So in Russia, 44% of economists are women.
#
We see much smaller gender gaps in business ownership, business management in post-communist
#
And also post-communist countries have very small, and well, they're the smallest gender
#
gaps in competitive chess.
#
So in terms of the economy, yeah, the gender gaps are smaller.
#
However, because totalitarian communism suffocated activism, we do not see the emergence of feminist
#
activism as I mentioned earlier.
#
So we don't see strong pressure for reforms in government, for female representation,
#
and also protections from male violence.
#
However, and this is where my comparative lens is important.
#
If you compare post-communist countries to their peers, you see that generally people
#
in post-communist countries are more sexist, but there's one exception, Central Asia.
#
So Central Asia, we're talking about Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan.
#
Now in Uzbekistan, in Fergana Valley in the 1920s, women were marrying at 13.
#
Their faces are covered, they're clinging closely to the walls.
#
What then happens is that the Soviet Union was incredibly brutal.
#
They butchered, decimated, and destroyed traditional institutions, just as they did in Russia.
#
This destroyed indigenous resistance, so it's harder to preserve indigenous traditions.
#
They also forced collectivization.
#
Now millions of people and also animals died, but it also made that the Soviets were able
#
to assert their ideology.
#
So they imposed secular schools where women were taught and prepared for a life in the
#
public sphere, so taught drama and sports, et cetera.
#
Also, because they ramped up industrialization, they created hydroelectric power, they had
#
Those factories needed women, and they also provide nurseries and crushes.
#
So we see a rapid increase in female labor force participation.
#
Now I'm not trying to say that Uzbekistan is some feminist utopia, but if you listen
#
to women's narratives, you listen to women who are post-graduate researchers in science
#
and technology, and their work is being celebrated.
#
Even beetroot farmers are celebrated as heroes of socialist labor.
#
They'll say, compared to my mother, when my mother was secluded, my mother was treated
#
as a slave, and here I am as an independent career woman.
#
Now of course, feminist activism is suppressed, of course, but if you compare those countries
#
to the relevant counterfactuals, which might be Afghanistan and Pakistan, then you see
#
an enormous divergence in outcomes.
#
So in that respect, those post-communist Central Asian countries are actually much more gender
#
equal as a result of communism.
#
So communism's impact in gender relations differs on its domain, economy versus the
#
political environment, and it's also mediated.
#
I would say that for China and Russia, and those countries where there are relatively
#
weak constraints on female mobility, communism actually took gender equality backwards, or
#
is worse than it would have been, because female employment could have risen anyway
#
with growth, and communism made it more patriarchal by suffocating activism, which is incredibly
#
Now I think the lesson from communism is that high female employment is no guard against
#
You can still have incredibly high rates of male violence, persistence of sexist ideologies.
#
In Russia, the Orthodox Church champions very patriarchal ideologies.
#
So what's incredibly important is feminist activism, and I think a great example there
#
So this was a patriarchal region, partly thanks to Catholicism.
#
For example, in Chile in the 1990s, the cabinet parliament was entirely male, but women have
#
increasingly organized, with relatively weakenship intensity, relatively weak concerns for honor.
#
Women increasingly seized the economic opportunities.
#
They increasingly gathered in the public sphere.
#
They organized collectively.
#
Women were at the forefront of many of the protests for democratization, protesting the
#
Then those women are organizing, sharing, and learning from each other across the region.
#
And this I think is a really important point about activism, but it's by seeing that people
#
who we think are in a similar position as us, or as our relevant peers, if we can see
#
people we think are like us gaining something through successful activism, then we may become
#
So as Latin American feminists saw that a neighboring country could mobilize and gain
#
some returns, that emboldens hope, and that encourages relentless activism.
#
And so we see these encuentros across Latin America, whereby women are increased.
#
So in 2015, one woman tweeted, ni una menos, and that means not one woman less.
#
One woman less should die from male violence and femicide.
#
And so 200,000 women took to the streets of Buenos Aires.
#
So now in an environment of democratization, urbanization, social media, these ideas can
#
And they're celebrated in street murals.
#
And people are challenging ideas of shame, challenging the idea that if a woman is raped,
#
then it's her birth, and it's her shame, and her stigma, and she should keep it to
#
herself, and she should be quiet.
#
And so there was a Chilean protest anthem saying, you know, the problem is with the
#
The problem is not with me.
#
And so those ideas reverberate, and women become emboldened.
#
So we see massive campaigns for women's political representation.
#
Across Latin America, gender parity, not gender quotas, but parity is seen as part of human
#
So we see huge struggles for domestic workers' rights, for protections against male violence,
#
for political representation.
#
And this builds on a culture where there's been massive resistance, where there's been
#
indigenous people's movements, where there's been piqueteros in Argentina, for example,
#
the gas wars in Bolivia, the water wars in Bolivia.
#
So that environment of resistance, seeing that by mobilizing people can change the laws
#
of the land also emboldens feminist activism.
#
So feminist activism is endogenous to that culture of resistance.
#
So that's Latin America as an example of feminist activism, and that's true for the whole world.
#
Now this is where I want to come back to colonialism.
#
So Sub-Saharan Africa has also seen many feminist movements pushing for greater women's representation.
#
And we especially see those in periods of transition, regime transition, or after post-conflict
#
women's movements mobilize and organize for better representation and gender quotas.
#
However, one part of Africa remains especially patriarchal in terms of governance.
#
And that surprisingly is the Gulf of Guinea, which I previously said was very, very gender
#
So what on earth happened there?
#
Now this is my hypothesis.
#
So yeah, we have this conundrum that we have definite evidence of traditions of women exercising
#
authority and being respected as positions of authority across the Gulf of Guinea.
#
But now, this is one of the most patriarchal regions of the world.
#
So Nigeria's parliament is 94% male.
#
And it's true across the Gulf of Guinea, all those parliaments are very, very patriarchal.
#
So my hypothesis is, and this is borrower and heavily on the water of Nathan Nunn and
#
Leonard Wanjekon, is that this is the area that was heavily hit by slave raiding.
#
So as there was slave raiding, indigenous Africans tried to protect themselves often
#
through this weapons and slaves vicious cycle.
#
So to protect themselves against raiders, they sought to actually raid other slaves
#
and sell them to Europeans in order to buy the weapons that they needed to protect themselves.
#
And this cycle of violence and conquests and slave raiding may have exacerbated distrust,
#
may have exacerbated ethnic division.
#
So if we look at West Africa today, we see that ethnic divisions and stratification are
#
especially politicized in West Africa.
#
Now why might that be correlated with this patriarchal governance?
#
My suggestion is that, well, colonial borders were imposed arbitrarily across ethnic groups.
#
So you've got a bunch of ethnic groups grouped together, and because of that history of slave
#
raiding, we have this culture of distrust and animosity and ethnic divisions.
#
So what I think has happened is that if your ethnic identity is primary, you may prefer
#
to be represented by someone from your group, a Yoruba wants a Yoruba leader.
#
It doesn't matter for a Yoruba, hey, here's a woman and she's Hausa, but that's Hausa,
#
that's Northern Nigeria, that's a different religion, that's a different ethnicity.
#
So I think where ethnicity is primary, that may weaken the strong, sustained nationwide
#
feminist mobilization that is necessary for strong campaigns for women's political representation.
#
So as a result of that, as a result of arbitrary colonial borders and also slave raiding, I
#
think that's why West Africa and especially the Gulf of Guinea is so patriarchal.
#
Now for the rest of Africa, I think the impact of colonialism would have been more indirect.
#
So to the extent that colonialism exacerbated corruption, to the extent that colonialism
#
exacerbated authoritarianism or stunted development, all that stuff is bad for gender equality.
#
But I don't think the mechanism was that – so lots of gender scholars think that the mechanism
#
is the male bias in colonial institutions, like patriarchal colonizers go in there spreading
#
I don't think that's it.
#
I think it's slightly different mechanisms.
#
So that was the feminist actors.
#
So I think we've pretty much covered most regions.
#
So that's the big story.
#
The three main drivers of patriarchy are the Plough, nomadic pastoralism, and male-dominated
#
But their spread, that cultural evolution, is mediated by geography, and that story explains
#
why in some cultures male honor is contingent upon female chastity, and that explains why
#
in some places, like South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, female earnings need
#
to be sufficiently high to compensate for that loss of male honor.
#
And if the earnings remain low, if you have a situation of jobless growth or indeed no
#
growth at all, then women remain trapped in their homes, dependent on patriarchal guardians,
#
lacking the exposure or friendships to challenge some of those patriarchal ideologies.
#
So that, I think, is the story of the great gender divergence.
#
Wow, I feel like you just gave me such a masterclass, so thank you for that.
#
And by the way, on the point of the gender gap between chess players, I think today the
#
countries where the gender gap is the least is perhaps China.
#
But having said that, you know, the former Soviet countries are closed, India is closed,
#
and there are so few women who are above 2600 that it's really, you know, it's hard to tell
#
But certainly the gender gap has reduced in all of these places, and I'd say overall.
#
And by the way, we had a coffee break just before this, and I'm sure you know this, but
#
the coffee break happened because of a woman's labor movement.
#
So there's a video by Michael Pollan on this.
#
I think he came on the Joe Rogan Show, and it's about coffee.
#
And I'll share that in the show notes, and Pollan's essential point was that both the
#
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, as per him, were enabled by coffee because
#
caffeine helped people work longer hours and better.
#
So what happened, and I think this was perhaps in the 1860s or 1870s, whatever.
#
I'm sure I'll forget, get the details wrong, but the link is in the show notes.
#
You can see it there is that in that second half of the 19th century, there were factories
#
which were replacing male workers with female workers because the female workers were more
#
diligent and could focus on the work and so on and so forth, no surprise there.
#
But even they would run out of energy towards the middle of the day.
#
So then the female workers got together and they went on strike, and their union or whatever
#
it was, they had exactly one demand, and that demand was for a coffee break because they
#
felt correctly, as it turned out, that coffee would give them energy and they would be able
#
to work longer hours and therefore make more money.
#
So yeah, so that's where the coffee break comes.
#
So every man who ever takes a coffee break, you owe it to a woman.
#
So the interesting part of this entire history that you've shared and you've obviously, you
#
know, to make it fitable into this podcast, you've also sort of painted broad strokes
#
I'm sure you could, you know, break up the continents into countries and into regions
#
Yeah, so for example, if you wanted to, I could explain the difference between the USA
#
and Europe, for example, and the US recent restrictions on abortion, that's one thing
#
You can pick any country and I can talk about it really.
#
We'll come to the US, but my larger question first was that while we can look at the different
#
ways in which, you know, this divergence has taken place, we see a host of reasons that
#
are deeply complicated.
#
But when we speak about coming out of it, about women getting empowered, it seems that
#
there the story is fairly simple.
#
Job creating economic growth is a big part of the solution and structural transformations
#
are a big part of the solution in terms of getting rid of some of these incentives towards
#
female seclusion, as you point out, which are strong in some places and not so strong
#
And so broadly tell me about, you know, if we look at job creating economic growth and
#
the social changes that lead to a change of incentives, therefore being the way out of
#
this for everybody, then it seems to me that it's a cause for great hope that sooner or
#
Now, I know at the start of this episode, you said that no, no, you know, there is climate
#
change and there is automation and there are authoritarian dictatorships and all those
#
But assuming we get past those worries and there is, you know, growth, then, you know,
#
even if we regressed in different ways, we can progress in the same ways.
#
What are your thoughts?
#
Well, my model is if there's job creating economic growth, then we should anticipate
#
rising female labor force participation.
#
That's, that's the, it's as simple as that.
#
Let's talk about the US now.
#
Why is the US going backwards?
#
Why don't women own their own bodies anymore?
#
So I think my, so the US, so it was persecuted religious minorities who fled Europe and went
#
So people for whom religion was so important that they would travel across a massive ocean
#
at a time of incredible prosperity, those are the people who landed up in the USA.
#
And so those people then socialize their children to care much more about religion.
#
And we also know that the USA had a sort of more open marketplace for different religions.
#
That led to competition.
#
That led to innovation.
#
So, you know, the church is cultivating, attracting more members.
#
So one is we see greater religiosity and that's associated with far higher support for abortion
#
On top of that, the US is interest, the, another patriarchal aspect, patriarchals, patriarchal
#
so varies by class within the USA.
#
So because of the history of enslaving African-Americans, that ethnic diversity appears to be associated
#
with lower contributions to public goods.
#
And here I'm drawing on a paper by Bill Easterly and others, and they find that in ethnically
#
diverse places, people don't, people may not be as likely to associate with the other,
#
not wanting to share a pool resources.
#
So in that context, that might explain why Americans may be privately wealthy, but don't
#
have great public goods and don't have great public infrastructure.
#
And so that means that we see weaker protections and support for working, for families and
#
working class women struggle to get the support they need to manage work and employment.
#
So we see large gender wage gaps for working class women.
#
That said, in a more liberalized economy, we tend to see women doing better in managerial
#
So in the US it's the elite professional women who are thriving in a more liberalized environment.
#
So the gender, the USA also suffers from the majoritarian first post, the post system,
#
which India also shares.
#
Now that, and is inherited by the colonial English and that is associated with lower
#
rates of women's political representation.
#
So that I think is another thing Indians can blame the UK for in terms of colonialism,
#
that had they adopted proportional representation, like much of continental Europe and the Scandinavians,
#
then we'd expect higher rates of female political representation.
#
And when women are in positions of power, they're more able to assert and push for more
#
gender equal governance.
#
The other thing that I wanted to discuss in relation to India is fear of crime.
#
Should we talk about that?
#
Yeah, but about the US, my specific question was, why does it seem like we're going backwards
#
So I'm not looking at the broad swath of history and how, you know, the original immigrants
#
So I think this is, if you look at the data, there has been this persistent religiosity
#
in some communities and where that religiosity is higher, then we see the strongest support
#
We also see the rise of authoritarianism.
#
So where Republicans feel that they are under threat, they've increasingly restricted people's
#
right to vote, increasingly punishing and restricting people of color.
#
So that's the rise of authoritarianism to entrench their dominance.
#
There's a great book called Entrenchment.
#
So yes, it's part of that counter struggle to entrench the religious right, absolutely.
#
Let's go back to India and talk about fear of crime.
#
So we've agreed that job-creating economic growth is incredibly important for gender
#
Equally important is public safety for women and ending male impunity for violence, assault
#
And I explicitly want to center on ending men's impunity rather than women's safety
#
because it's absolutely about ending men's impunity for violence.
#
And this works I think in four ways that restrict women's freedoms and restrict women's movements.
#
So one is fear of crime leads to tighter restrictions on women's mobility.
#
So when families are concerned that women may be assaulted or it's unsafe, they restrict
#
their girls from going out.
#
And I've had numerous interviews about this and there's also a bunch of papers about
#
how when women fear or anticipate crime, they choose worse colleges, that affects their
#
And let me also stress, there's a religious element to this.
#
So after the horrific riots in Gujarat, many Muslim women feared violence and so restricted
#
themselves to Muslim ghettos because they were so afraid.
#
So that inter-religious violence and intimidation actually thwarts gender equality because women
#
choose inferior, less good colleges and worsen their labor market options because they're
#
so fearful of violence.
#
So the inter-religious violence is absolutely going to suppress female labor force participation
#
So I wanted to stress that.
#
So female safety is really important there.
#
So the fear of violence and also media reports of violence may fuel these concerns about
#
So for example, I interviewed a woman recently, she has a job in Delhi, but her mother drives
#
her to and from work because she doesn't think the stations are safe.
#
Now this is also, this fear of crime is exacerbated by traditions of female seclusion.
#
So the more that women are kept closely to the home, the more that their freedoms are
#
restricted, the less they gain the capacity to independently navigate and explore the
#
And the more their families continue to be protective because they do not see women being
#
competent and exploring their cities for themselves.
#
And the more that women themselves may be fearful.
#
And here's one hypothesis that other researchers might test and it's come up in my own interviews.
#
I was talking to a woman from Bangalore and she was 17 at the time of the 2012 horrific
#
And at that time she did not want to come to Delhi because she perceived Delhi as violent.
#
So she chose to study in Bangalore because of her fear of crime.
#
And I think here's one area whereby, I mean, if you read any Indian newspaper at least
#
once a week, you'll be continually reading stories about horrific gang rapes, violence.
#
And I think that's partly a consequence of huge population debt, of huge population.
#
In a country of 1.3 billion, you're bound to hear something about horrific violence.
#
So it's partly about objective dangers.
#
But also the media is continually perpetrating this idea that streets are unsafe.
#
And also the way these stories are reported, and you're a journalist so you know this better
#
than me, but often the emphasis on the horrific violence against women.
#
The images themselves often are cartoons or sort of animations visualizing gang rape.
#
And often the perpetrator is still on the loose.
#
The story is not about, this man has been imprisoned, this man has been held to account,
#
this man is now behind bars.
#
The story is always, there are these horrific things happening in your neighborhood.
#
And so I think that itself may be inculcating fear among women.
#
So it's one, the fear of crime, exacerbated by this media reporting.
#
And the more that families fear that, the more they restrict women, the more that women
#
never gain those opportunities.
#
And we know those opportunities for independent mobility are so important.
#
So in my interviews here in India, when I talk to entrepreneurial go-getting independent
#
women, the way they've developed their autonomy and confidence is through iterative exploration.
#
The more that women travel independently, the more they explore different areas to realize
#
Indian women's story is just the same story that I told you, right?
#
It's about trying stuff out, seeing you can do it, and gaining confidence, and parents
#
gaining confidence in you.
#
And let me draw a comparison with a woman I interviewed in Marrakesh.
#
Her family was initially reluctant about her working in tourism because they perceived
#
this as unsafe for women because she had to deal with so many different men.
#
But she persuaded her father, and she said, you know, let me try this out.
#
And her father agreed, and she showed him that she could do it.
#
She showed him that she could independently navigate.
#
So she set up a shop selling argan oil, she set up a tour guide operation, and her father
#
saw that she could handle herself independently.
#
And he increasingly granted her more and more freedoms because he saw that she could manage.
#
So we do see this positive feedback loop.
#
The more the parents loosen those restrictions, the more they gain confidence in women's skills
#
So it's a matter of being shifting between two equilibrium.
#
Added to this, I think there are two more important factors in how fear of crime comes
#
What's not just about fear of crime is the idea that if a sexual assault were to happen,
#
it would be the absolute worst thing in the world.
#
Her life would be over.
#
And this plays out both in terms of internalized ideologies of shame and the woman feeling
#
horrific and that this is the worst thing ever because purity is so important.
#
And also, what will others think?
#
And the idea that, you know, what was she wearing, the blame on the victim, the idea
#
that she is loose and then the entire family's name could be jeopardized.
#
Her sisters could be seen as unmarried.
#
So I think it's four mechanisms.
#
One, it's fear of crime.
#
Two, it's the belief that women are incapable of navigating alone and that's reinforced
#
and that follows a history of seclusion.
#
Three, it's the idea that sexual assault is a fate worse than death.
#
And four, it's the concern that what will other people think?
#
And the way that three and four work or the way that they can be overturned is absolutely
#
through feminist activism.
#
Feminist activism to challenge ideologies of shame, feminist ideologies because the
#
more that women speak out, you know, because you have to counter the shame.
#
You have to counter the social policing in order for women to even come forward.
#
So again, to give another example from JNU, so JNU has these boards against sexual harassment
#
with representation from NGOs and students.
#
But if women fear social condemnation from their own communities, they may not even report
#
You know, if you think your parents will be furious from you having any kind of altercation
#
or interaction with men, then you might not want to press a claim.
#
So no matter how good that institution is, women might not want to become public.
#
I mean, the same thing happened in Japan.
#
Japan had no Me Too movement because the vast majority of the women remained too ashamed,
#
too fearful to come out.
#
Let me add a further important point about fear of crime.
#
If Muslim women anticipate violence from Hindu men, like horrific rapes, and if the state
#
allows male impunity for that violence, as we've recently seen, then Muslim women may
#
be increasingly fearful, remaining increasingly close to their own communities, not seizing
#
educational or employment opportunities, and then remaining more dependent on patriarchal
#
So yeah, the best thing, so if the government really wants to support gender equality in
#
Muslim communities, then the main drivers are absolutely the same universally.
#
It's job creating economic growth, enabling communities to flourish, to seize economic
#
opportunities, to prosper, and also to ensure families of safety so that women can seize
#
these economic opportunities.
#
Lot of great points, and I'm especially struck by the tragic vicious cycle that women can
#
get trapped in, where they feel that, hey, it's not safe outside because there's so much
#
news of crimes and therefore they don't go out, and because they don't go out, they don't
#
develop the capacity to deal with whatever might be out there, nor the recognition that
#
perhaps what is out there is not quite as bad as the news makes it out to be, and they
#
just get stuck in that equilibrium, as you pointed out.
#
And also there is, when you speak of the media, I mean, that's again a dilemma, right?
#
Because as Steven Pinker has put it, we have a bias for bad news, right?
#
Man bites dog is always news, dog licks man isn't news.
#
Some horrific thing happened to a woman somewhere is news, and at the same time, millions of
#
women travel to and fro from office to home and nothing happened.
#
That's obviously not news.
#
But at the same time, I think it's also a responsibility of journalists to report this
#
That's why the outrage around Nirbhaya happened, that's why the laws got changed, that's why
#
there was a flip to the feminist movement around that time because the media made a
#
I think in this particular case, while I recognize the role that this kind of reporting can make
#
in giving people the impression that the world is more violent than it actually is, I still
#
think this kind of reporting is important because, hey, that's a journalist job.
#
You have to point out what's wrong with the world.
#
So I guess that's just one of those dilemmas in this kind of...
#
Yes, that's a great point.
#
Let me caveat, I don't want to give the impression that I think fear of crime is entirely in
#
What I want to say is how it leads to heightened restrictions on women and then fewer women
#
in the streets, then those streets feel increasingly unsafe.
#
So if you're the only woman in the street, then you feel much more frightened, then you're
#
much more afraid because you don't have that solidarity.
#
And that support from other women.
#
Now what's the best way for...
#
And they're also casing...
#
And I want to also give another example of why silence can be so...
#
So for example, I was talking to one woman who grew up in Mumbai and she was telling
#
me that very frequently on the bus to school, when she was a school girl, in those crowded
#
buses, she was getting groped by much older men.
#
So this is absolutely a real phenomenon and in many ways it'll be under-reported.
#
Most victims of sexual assault do not tell anyone.
#
So sexual crimes are absolutely going to be under-reported.
#
And so I'm not saying they're over-reported.
#
My point is that there's this daily deluge.
#
Now the question is, if we want to challenge impunity for male violence, what's the most
#
effective way of doing that?
#
Now you're totally right that outrage around the 2012 attacks did lead to changes in legislation,
#
but it's not like fear of crime has radically reduced.
#
So the legislation was changed, yes, but given relatively weak state capacity and enforcement,
#
that hasn't actually made people perceive the streets as any safer.
#
At least that's not my impression.
#
And so I would be careful of celebrating that victory in itself.
#
What I think is much more important is sustained feminist activism.
#
So feminist activism is important, but not in itself because some of the women I interview
#
and also the men, they say, yes, we protested, but then nothing happened.
#
Really is still very unsafe.
#
And that itself can be dangerous because then people can become trapped in this despondency
#
To change the world, you need to have a sense of collective self-efficacy that if you invest
#
in mobilization, if you continually march and mobilize, then the state will respond
#
and enact better enforcement, better policing.
#
And for some, they don't think that's happened and they can even become disheartened.
#
So the question is, what can cultivate relentless mobilization?
#
And there I would actually say what's really important is that seeing that mobilization
#
results in better law enforcement and actually ends impunity for male violence.
#
And Gabby Crooks Wisner has done great work on this in Rajasthan, so for example, she
#
shows that people in rural Rajasthan are much more likely to mobilize for public goods when
#
they see and believe that the state will respond to their petitions.
#
And the same is true for domestic violence.
#
So I think it's that you can create a stronger positive feedback loop, but showing that feminist
#
activism leads to greater government responsiveness because then that can in itself encourage
#
more feminist activism.
#
So I think it's showing that activism works and results in impunity for male violence.
#
I think sending the message, it's incredibly important for organizations to publicize zero
#
tolerance because perpetrators will continue if they think they can get away with it.
#
And victims or survivors will be less likely to report if they think nothing will happen.
#
If they think that by, by, you know, many, very few victims tell anyone, let alone the
#
Many, and there's a wonderful book by Pallumi Roy Chowdhury called Capable Women, Incapable
#
And she talks about, you know, women may be fearful of going to the police or don't anticipate
#
any favors at all from going to the police.
#
I think, you know, the police may be reluctant, they may not even file the FRI.
#
So it's really about building state capacity and feminist activism.
#
The two need to work together to change, to build this ideology that people can end impunity
#
I think feminist activism is a solution to a different problem, the problem of the rule
#
And I agree that the post-Nirbihar laws haven't really made the streets of Delhi safer, but
#
that's an issue, as you put it, of the rule of law and of state capacity and the solutions
#
are deeply complicated and activism, feminist or otherwise, doesn't seem likely to change
#
It's a deep structural problem.
#
But what I would be wary of is shooting the messenger.
#
I think if the state of crime against women is bad, it's got to be reported as bad.
#
You know, there's sort of no way around that.
#
So all these to me are in different domains.
#
The journalists are doing what they must.
#
The rule of law is utterly broken and, you know, I've just come back from a conference
#
where a bunch of us, where a bunch of people rather spoke, I mean, it almost seems like
#
an unfixable problem on some margins.
#
Mayor activism isn't going to solve this particular issue.
#
But mayor, but activism, feminist activism, especially can make a huge dent when it comes
#
to the mindsets of people.
#
You know, I think some social change has to come from within society and then the state
#
You know, we happen to have a dysfunctional state and it is the way it is.
#
And that's a much deeper problem.
#
I mean, I think I do not know, and I'll be open and honest about this.
#
I do not know what would make Delhi safer.
#
But I remain skeptical.
#
And I want to say that I don't know if just repeating that sexual assaults happen necessarily
#
cultivates activism in a context of relatively low rates of female employment where women
#
might not be gathering together because instead you might just be cultivating hopelessness,
#
learned hopelessness that all these bad things are happening and nothing's changing and nothing
#
So I don't know the solution.
#
I'm not saying the media shouldn't report.
#
All I'm saying is this deluge, the reality of violence may just, you know, if it's on
#
the forefront, if a father is coming to breakfast and he's reading the newspaper and he reads
#
about the gang rape and then his daughter asks if she can have a sleepover at a friend's
#
Now, so that's the only thing I'm trying to highlight.
#
I don't have any, I don't have the solution.
#
I don't know, you know, there's so, I don't know what would be the better way of doing
#
I mean, I don't think a journalist's job is to make society feel this way or that way.
#
A journalist's job is just to report the news as a journalist sees it.
#
So the fact of the matter is Delhi is an unsafe place for women.
#
I mean, it is what it is.
#
But I think we're both in agreement about that.
#
This is just a deeply sort of complicated problem.
#
So you've kind of given me so much of your time and I'm deeply grateful for that.
#
And I will of course be listening to the episode for once at half speed so I can kind of absorb
#
all the useful lessons you've shared with me and all my listeners.
#
Some closing questions.
#
Then in the course of all the work that you've done, and this is particularly a relevant
#
question because you came into this work questioning your priors, happy to rock your priors as
#
So in the course of all your work, what is the biggest thing that you learned that really
#
I think the importance of culture, the importance of ideology and how that shapes what we do.
#
And I underestimated that, I underestimated the importance of religion.
#
And as I've written about before, me coming in with my sort of atheist, secular, empiricist
#
mindset, I didn't appreciate how much people might be fearful of eternal damnation, how
#
much people might buy into certain ideologies, and how those beliefs and desires shape how
#
they respond to economic opportunities.
#
And that's really key to the great gender divergence.
#
Okay, so I understand why religion can be a negative force in terms of codifying social
#
norms that keep women back.
#
But fear of eternal damnation, I'm not so sure.
#
The economist Stephen Landsberg had a great book called Big Questions.
#
And one of the questions in that, which was quite provocative, and fans of Landsberg will
#
forgive me if I don't articulate it properly, because I don't remember the exact sort of
#
terms in which he put it.
#
But his point was no one believes in God, that people say they believe in God.
#
But when push comes to shove, they reveal preferences will show that they don't really
#
So my belief in that sense from what I see, and I'm of course an atheist, but from what
#
I see of religious people around me is that they don't really believe either, that they
#
might follow certain customs and social mores and so on and so forth.
#
But you know, ultimately, if they are in an incredibly sort of drastic spot, they won't
#
They'll be going to a doctor or trying to figure out another way to solve whatever other
#
And they have blind faith in other domains.
#
For example, some people believe in homeopathy and try to cure themselves with it, which
#
is a different kind of blind faith and a different kind of false God.
#
But the toxic thing that religion does is it codifies many of these backward values.
#
And that's why it's a danger.
#
But does fear of eternal damnation really come into it?
#
Yeah, I believe that it does.
#
So there's a nice book called Honor and Shame in Iraq.
#
And it's about how women might acquiesce to their husband's demands and try to please
#
them and do everything, even if their husbands are incredibly abusive, even if their husbands
#
are violent, even if they force sex or rape their wives.
#
Many of these women genuinely believe, according to this excellent ethnography, that if they
#
don't have sex with their husbands, then they will be punished by angels.
#
And even in Christianity, also in early Christianity, there were these tours of hell where people
#
talked about the torment, the way that sinners would be tormented in the afterlife.
#
And if you look at data, there's a great variety.
#
There's far stronger belief in eternal damnation in Egypt, for example.
#
People are more likely to believe in hell, actually, than God.
#
There's much stronger belief in hell.
#
The belief that if you do wrong, then that will affect what happens to you in the afterlife,
#
I think, is quite powerful.
#
And so one, I think, is the fear of hell, that you're doing something terrible and there
#
And we see that across the world, not just in Europe, not just in Southern Mesopotamia,
#
also in Chinese literature, how disobedient women were upset in cosmic harmony, and then
#
they were challenged and chastised.
#
And then we have also seen the element of social policing, right?
#
So the social policing, the institutions are important.
#
The other way in which I think religion can be a major blockage and bottleneck to critical
#
debate if people, because religion can be elevated to a specific plane that people want
#
to be a good person, they want to be the good and beautiful person, especially the ideologies
#
of shame and stigma around female chastity and virginity.
#
The idea that these are the pure, these are the ideals that which we must strive for.
#
I think ethnographies do point to that being incredibly important and incredibly powerful
#
I stay, I stress drawing on, and I would say, let me caveat it, it's not just religion
#
per se, but it's this male dominated religions that have been incredibly patriarchal.
#
I would imagine that women who are in that situation and who do whatever their husband
#
wants to do it because they feel they just don't have a choice, they're just trapped
#
in a terrible situation.
#
But yeah, I mean, and that could be one way of rationalizing it, but at the same time
#
I do have a bit of a rational bias.
#
So maybe I am wrong here and maybe people do fear literal eternal damnation, who is
#
My next closing question is what broad consensus narrative do you disagree with or is wrong?
#
Like what broad conventional belief is there, which you feel is wrong?
#
How controversial do I want to be on your podcast?
#
I just want you to be honest.
#
You know, the toxic internet trolls haven't gotten so far.
#
Will you protect me from the trolls?
#
Though you don't need protection, but I will protect you.
#
You promise you'll protect me on this one?
#
You don't need protection.
#
I want you to say you'll protect me.
#
How can I protect you from the trolls?
#
I mean, I can take your phone away.
#
So I have argued that the major drivers of gender equality are job creating growth and
#
Some people push for an alternative and we see social policing of discourse, that it
#
matters what we say, like how we refer to each other people.
#
So this might be referred to in pejorative terms as woke.
#
So using the right inclusive terminology.
#
And I think the importance of discourse there is overrated.
#
And we actually don't have strong empirical evidence to say that if people use slightly
#
different terminology, then we would see greater gender equality.
#
So that I think would be, and I think it's mainly that we see that in, so we see a lot
#
of self-righteous social policing in the USA, for example.
#
These people absolutely committed to equality.
#
They believe, and many of them believe the best way to do that is by changing discourse,
#
And I don't think that's empirically supported.
#
So I think that would be the major way in which I disagree with something that's quite
#
popular in that environment.
#
And I think I agree with you.
#
Will you protect me if people attack me on that point?
#
Why do you need protection?
#
This is such a non-feminist thing to say.
#
I'm asking for the rocky thread.
#
You should be promising to protect me if I get into trouble because of what you said.
#
I didn't expect this from you.
#
So the final question, and you probably would expect this by now, but you know, one of the
#
things that sort of awes me when I read your work and something that I deeply love is how
#
many rabbit holes you provide to all of us to go down on in terms of all the links, all
#
And today you're on Twitter posting about three or four or eight or nine different books
#
depending on what the day is.
#
And that's fantastic because I've picked up a whole bunch of books just reading about
#
it on your Twitter thread and it's been an education.
#
So what are the books that have meant the most to you?
#
And you know, I asked this question about films, music, so if you want, talk about that
#
But what would you take with you to a desert island?
#
What is, you know, really, really dear to you?
#
And it doesn't even have to be something to do with your work or your research or whatever,
#
but whatever means the most to you and that you absolutely love.
#
What I would take to a desert island would be a motorboat.
#
I asked you to recommend books for my readers and you've just said what I will take to a
#
desert island will be a motorboat.
#
I don't want to be trapped on the desert island where I'll die.
#
I don't want to be trapped on your desert island.
#
What's the last good book you read?
#
The last excellent book I read, I really liked Shrayana's book, Desperately Seeking Shahrukh.
#
I think it's fantastic.
#
And I think that adds another element that we haven't really discussed is about love
#
and how women's desire for love, and especially from one person, especially in places where
#
monogamous marriage is highly valorized as we discussed earlier, can trap them in abusive
#
relationships because they're constantly trying to please that person and cultivate
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And this goes back to our earlier conversation.
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If the desire for love and the desire to be loved is the primary thing and there are fewer
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alternative ways in which women can flourish and be rewarded and respected, then they can
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be trapped in very abusive relationships.
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So love has the potential to trap women in patriarchal relationships.
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And I think Shrayana's book is so fantastic because it explores Indian gender relations
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through another lens, and it's saying all these women navigating elements of patriarchy,
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they see in Shahrukh Khan this idea of this gentle, nurturing, appreciating, affectionate
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care, compassion, listening to women.
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And I think that's such an amazing way of understanding gender relations, then that
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that's what people might aspire for but not getting.
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And I think that's a fantastic way of understanding gender relations, distinguishing between our
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internalized ideologies, our non-perceptions, and the idea is that many women would like
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to be appreciated, they would like all their care labor.
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So there's an interesting excerpt in that book where they talk about in one of Shahrukh's
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films where he sings in appreciation of the tiffin, he sings in appreciation of his wife's
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care work, and that so often across the world, and this is not unique to India, women's care
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work is neglected and devalued, and here he appreciates her labor, and one woman talks
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about how nice and how wonderful that might be, just to be appreciated.
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And so yeah, I'd really recommend Shrayana's book, it's really wonderful.
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Yeah, and she's my most downloaded episode, in fact, is which Shrayana has called The
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Loneliness of the Indian Women, we'll link it from the show notes.
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And since you mentioned the element of love, sort of a final, final question for you, which
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is, while what you're studying is really social norms, social currents, so on and so forth,
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and on the surface it can seem dry, but at the same time, you've spent a lot of time
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talking to people, living with people, being a witness to their experiences, being a confidant
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for, you know, whatever is happening in their lives, and you've had sort of a unique glimpse
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of their interior lives as well, and sort of their lives as people, and at some level
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does it also make a part of your research, not just the intellectual work that you put
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into it, but also a certain emotional work?
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You know, how do you sort of then kind of navigate that?
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Because you go in with these people as your subjects, in a sense, they've been kind enough
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to offer you the friendship, but as you come out, it's obviously more than that.
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So tell me a little bit about that aspect of things, that human aspect of connecting.
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Yeah, that's such a great question, because in the process of getting to know people,
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in the process of understanding their stories, their aspirations, their struggles, we do
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form these wonderful friendships.
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Yeah, you know, maybe this will sound insincere and fake, but I really do connect.
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You know, I have such strong emotional ties, really great bonds of friendship with so many
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people who've looked after me, who've welcomed me into their homes, and I stay in touch with
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so many of them, whether it's through WhatsApp or Instagram, you know, the Bember mother
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who I stayed with, she often chats with me on Facebook or Instagram in Bember, of course,
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whereas Moroccan women follow me on Instagram.
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And it's fun because on Instagram, they can see me traveling through each different country.
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So the Moroccan men and women see that I go to Italy and interview people there, etc.
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So they get to follow my travels, and that's a really nice way that I'm able to stay in
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touch with these people that are incredibly dear to my heart, really and truly.
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I have, you know, friendships all over the world that are incredibly important to me,
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and I'm so grateful for learning about their lives, understanding each individual struggle,
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their story, their perspectives, their individuality, and that goes back to your question on depth
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And I think that, yeah, I really appreciate it.
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I really, really enjoy what I do.
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That's I think a wonderful note to end on, because even if the world doesn't change,
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you'll always have that.
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So thank you so much for your time today.
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Honestly, I have been listening to you for forever, and I've always been a fan, and this
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is the greatest honor and privilege, I'm very, very happy to be here.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to the show notes, enter RabbitHoles
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You can follow Alice on Twitter at underscore Alice underscore Evans, this will also be
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linked from the show notes.
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You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
