Is Gender Discrimination a Universal Phenomenon? Insights from Anthropology

Walk into almost any society on Earth and you will find that men and women are not treated the same. The pay gap, the unpaid housework, the missing women in parliaments, the violence behind closed doors – these patterns repeat across continents with stubborn regularity. This near-uniformity has led many scholars to argue that gender discrimination is a universal phenomenon. But is it really? Anthropology, the science that compares human societies across time and space, gives us a more textured answer. Some communities have organised gender so differently that they unsettle the idea of inevitable male dominance – even as most of the world remains firmly patriarchal.

Global patterns of gender inequality 🔗

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2025, no country has yet achieved full gender parity, and India ranks 131 out of 148 countries with about 64.1% of the gap closed. The UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index similarly shows that women across nearly every region face systematic disadvantages in health, education, political voice, and economic opportunity.

What anthropologists and feminist scholars point out is that these disparities are not random. They follow a recognisable architecture called patriarchy – a social system in which men hold primary authority in the family, the economy, religion, and the state. One of the clearest features of patriarchal societies is the sharp separation between what scholars call the public sphere and the domestic sphere.

The public-domestic divide 🔗

The public sphere covers paid work, politics, religious leadership, and decision-making for the wider community. The domestic sphere covers the home, childcare, cooking, eldercare, and emotional labour. In most societies, men are associated with the public and women with the domestic. The public sphere is treated as more prestigious and is rewarded with money, status, and authority. The domestic sphere is treated as natural, expected, and largely invisible.

This division is not just symbolic. The Patriarchy Index developed for Asian countries shows that family-level arrangements like patrilocal residence, age-based authority, and early marriage are tightly linked with lower female labour force participation, even after controlling for income levels and urbanisation. In other words, when men control the household, women’s presence in the public sphere shrinks.

Why patriarchy feels universal 🔗

Anthropologists have long debated why male dominance is so widespread. Some argue that pregnancy and childcare historically tied women to the home while men were free to participate in technologies, warfare, and political institutions. Others suggest patriarchy emerged as a way to control women’s reproductive power, which men found threatening. A third strand, drawing on Marxist and feminist thought, links the rise of male dominance to the emergence of private property, settled agriculture, and class society – roughly the last 10,000 to 12,000 years of human history.

Whichever explanation one prefers, the takeaway is the same: patriarchy is widespread, but it is not a biological destiny. It has a history, and where there is history, there are exceptions.

Anthropological exceptions that complicate the universal claim 🔗

Some of the most important challenges to the idea of universal male dominance come from ethnographic studies of Indigenous societies in North America. Two examples are especially well-documented: the Iroquois of present-day New York State and the Montagnais-Naskapi (now called the Innu) of the Labrador Peninsula in Canada.

The Iroquois: women at the centre of governance 🔗

The Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee, was a powerful alliance of six nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later Tuscarora. Their society was matrilineal: descent, clan membership, and inheritance passed through the mother. But what makes the Iroquois remarkable is that this kinship principle translated into real political power for women.

Iroquois clan mothers selected the male chiefs who represented their clans in the governing council, and they had the authority to remove chiefs who failed to serve the people. Women controlled the longhouses, owned the agricultural fields, and had a decisive voice in decisions about war and peace. Marriage did not transfer a woman’s property to her husband, and divorce was easily available.

This system was so striking to nineteenth-century American feminists that it directly shaped the early women’s rights movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage explicitly cited Iroquois women’s status as proof that the subordination of white American women was neither natural nor divinely ordained. The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, often called the birthplace of American feminism, took place in the heart of Iroquois country, and that geography was not a coincidence.

The Montagnais-Naskapi: equality among hunter-gatherers 🔗

The anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock did pathbreaking fieldwork among the Montagnais-Naskapi (Innu) of Labrador. Drawing on her ethnographic research and on seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary diaries, she argued that precolonial Innu society was genuinely egalitarian. Men and women shared in hunting decisions, tent-making, and child-rearing. There was a division of labour, but the different domains carried equal status.

Crucially, Leacock showed that the male dominance she observed during her twentieth-century fieldwork was not original to Innu culture. It had been produced by colonial contact – specifically by the fur trade, which introduced private property, commodity production, and European norms about marriage and the family. Her work was a direct challenge to the assumption that patriarchy is a timeless, universal feature of human society. Instead, she insisted that women’s subordination has a history tied to the rise of class society.

The implication is profound. If male dominance is historically produced, it can also be historically undone.

The limitations of matrilineal societies 🔗

At this point a reader might think: if we want gender equality, the answer is matrilineality. But anthropology cautions us against this leap. Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal. A society can trace descent through women while still placing political power in men’s hands. India’s own Khasi community in Meghalaya is a textbook case.

The Khasi paradox 🔗

The Khasi, along with the Garo and Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya, follow one of the world’s best-known matrilineal systems. Children take their mother’s clan name. The youngest daughter, called the khadduh, inherits the ancestral property and keeps the household. After marriage, a husband typically moves into his wife’s home.

Yet, as the Wikipedia entry on Meghalaya’s matrilineal society notes, Khasi society is matrilineal but not matriarchal. Even today, representation of women in the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly, village councils, and panchayats remains minimal. The traditional village councils – the dorbar shnong and the dorbar hima – have historically been all-male institutions where men predominantly hold decision-making power.

Within the family itself, the maternal uncle – the kñi – often plays the role of the principal decision-maker, especially in matters concerning clan property, ritual, and major social choices. As one scholar put it, women hold the reins of family power and property, but males have continued to hold the reins of political power. The result is a striking paradox of gendered authority: women are central to lineage and property, yet largely peripheral to formal politics.

Why even matriliny falls short 🔗

Several forces explain this gap. Colonial administrators under British rule misread Khasi customs and codified property and political rules in ways that strengthened male authority. Christian missionary influence brought in patriarchal family ideals from Europe. More recently, urbanisation, mainstream Indian media, and migration have spread patriarchal expectations into Khasi households. Some Khasi men’s groups now openly campaign for a shift to patrilineal customs, arguing that the traditional system disadvantages them.

The Khasi case shows that controlling property and lineage is not the same as controlling political power. A society can give women important roles in the home while still excluding them from the council, the legislature, and the courtroom. True gender equality requires both spheres – the public and the domestic – to be shared.

What anthropology really tells us 🔗

So is gender discrimination universal? The honest answer is: almost, but not quite. Patriarchy is the dominant pattern across the contemporary world, and its grip on the public-domestic divide is remarkably consistent. But anthropology has documented enough exceptions – the Iroquois, the precolonial Innu, and others – to show that male dominance is not biologically scripted. It is built and maintained through specific historical processes like the rise of private property, colonial intervention, and the codification of patriarchal law.

At the same time, the Khasi example warns us against romanticising any single solution. Tracing descent through women, or even giving women ownership of property, does not automatically translate into political power. Gender discrimination operates at multiple levels – in households, in workplaces, in courts, and in legislatures – and each level needs its own correction.

Anthropology, in other words, gives us both hope and humility. Hope, because egalitarian gender relations have existed and can exist again. Humility, because dismantling patriarchy is more complicated than reversing one rule of kinship.

What do you think? If matriliny alone does not guarantee gender equality, what combination of cultural, legal, and economic changes would actually shift power in the public sphere? And looking at your own community, where does the line between the public and the domestic still fall most sharply?

References

1. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2025/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12774345/
3. https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/12-3-the-power-of-gender-patriarchy-and-matriarchy
4. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1998/07/iroquois-women-influenced-early-feminists
5. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/legacies-and-genealogies-in-feminist-anthropology/eleanor-burke-leacock-and-historical-transformations-of-gender-beyond-timeless-patriarchy/
6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-025-09789-5
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya
8. https://theprint.in/india/power-property-and-patriarchy-plague-meghalayas-khasi-matrilineal-society/2539453/
9. https://southasiajournal.net/matrilineal-society-of-meghalaya-historical-roots-and-contemporary-challenges