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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

>The plough was heavier [...] it gave men an advantage over women. [...] Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses

And this is why North European countries, which used the heaviest plows [1], are the most backward in their treatment of women. Oh wait...

In any case, as anyone who has had a serious conversation with a farmer can attest, the bulk of the work in agriculture is by far in harvesting and not in plowing. Pretty much all traditional societies "allow" women to do that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carruca

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Also interesting is their assertion that society first changes very quickly after the introduction of the plow, but then has very long lasting effects. Why did the first change quickly but the second have long lasting effects?

That, exactly, was my thought also.

I don't understand your critique. Can you explain it more?

First they find support for the hypothesis that the place of women in society can change very quickly because their function in society changes.

Then they find support for the opposing hypothesis that such changes in society have long lasting effects, i.e., that the position of women in society does not change quickly.

Finally they place both opposing hypotheses in a single narrative.

To me, this is a major inconsistency, perhaps only due to the journalist rather than the scientists. Both hypotheses should be discarded since neither fits all the observations.

A) That's a straw man argument. North European countries are no longer agrarian societies. Compare pre-enlightenment northern europe to their counterparts and you'll have a more honest comparison.

B) The separation of work due to existential needs was not sexist. It's just the initial condition that created the asymmetry in gender roles. That's to say a more agrarian society isn't necessarily more sexist than a less agrarian one. It's all the other factors that mold this asymmetry.

Harvesting is a surge-activity that has to be completed in a very narrow timespan for maximal yield. Also, harvesting primarily requires stamina, not strength.

Tilling, on the other hand, is less time sensitive, and can better be the job of a smaller group spreading their effort over a longer period of time.

Also, the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold where men gain a physical advantage.

>the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold

So let's see, the research is about the relationship between two variables, both of them naturally continuous: weight of farming tools and degree of discrimination against women. The correlation doesn't quite hold for some sections of the graph, so what do you know: let's just separate the first variable into two arbitrary buckets, "light" and "heavy". Voila, case proved! Except if we happened to place the division at a "heavier" point, leaving only the Nordic countries in the "heavy" bucket, we'd obtain the exact inverse correlation.

Hoeing to ploughing is a discontinuous function. Either you scratch the ground with your hoe or you plough it. There is no middle ground where your hoe gradually gets heavier and turn into a plough.

Again, weight of farm tools is a naturally continuous variable. There are heavy hoes, light plows and lots of ground in between [1] [2]. Transforming weight into a binary variable with an arbitrary separation point is not sound statistical practice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattock

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ard_(plough)

>Transforming weight into a binary variable with an arbitrary separation point is not sound statistical practice

But the separation is not arbitrary. "Light enough to wield by women" is the important statistic here, so the value in question is binary by nature. Weight in isolation simply isn't what is being considered here.

The effectiveness of a tool as a function of its weight is not necessarily linear either.

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