A new cross-cultural index for gender inequality correlates with social complexity, patrilineality and sexual stature dimorphism

Gender inequalities vary substantially across human societies. However, it remains unclear whether dimensions of it, such as gendered violence, kinship, sexual division of labor or economic and political power, covary in systematic ways. Reanalyzing a cross-cultural dataset of 52 women’s status measures across 93 pre-industrial societies, we identify a significant dimension in which multiple measures covary systematically. We then use this dimension to show that women’s status is negatively associated with social complexity and positively associated with matrilineality and matrilocality. Higher gender inequality further predicts greater sexual dimorphism of stature. These findings suggest that some aspects of gender inequality show coherent cross-cultural variation related to broader features of social organization, laying the groundwork for more integrative studies of the cultural evolution of gender inequalities. Our results further open up the possibility of reconstructing gender inequalities in human prehistory using morphological proxies such as sexual dimorphism of stature.