Benji’s Reviews > The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution > Status Update

Rules for equal pay, even when they work, may not be enough to change gendered patterns of household coordination when conventions and norms are at play. Conventions have staying power.

Computer scientist Karen Petrie has pointed out that if men and women each make equal numbers of sexist remarks to the other gender, the number of remarks one man or woman receives scales exponentially with the gender ratio.

Besides the usual problems with bias that minority groups face, they are at further risk of disadvantage from solely dynamical effects.

Once actors are constrained to different types, we expect equilibria where actors get different payoffs. We can think of these type-based systems for coordination as having a trade-off in that they improve overall payoff, and often improve the payoff of each actor, but at the cost of equity and equality.

Remarkably little is needed to generate inequity via cultural selection. All we need is a group with two types, playing a complementary coordination game, and undergoing an adaptive process of cultural change. There is no bias in the model, no stereotype threat, not much psychology in general, but nonetheless we see group-level patterns that mimic inequitable conventions.