The article challenges traditional gender roles, particularly the notion that women should primarily raise children while men act as providers. Popular sentiments voiced by figures like Joe Rogan suggest an evolutionary basis for these roles, promoting the stereotype of men as breadwinners. However, anthropologists like Sarah Hrdy argue that historically, men were not consistently the sole providers, and women played significant roles in both hunting and gathering, contradicting the simplistic male-female division of labor. Current studies reveal that the binary mother-caregiver and father-provider dynamic is a historical anomaly rather than a natural norm.
"Just to be sexist, and put it in sexist terms, women think of a man as a provider," Joe Rogan said on his wildly popular podcast in 2023. "There's this, like, evolutionary aspect."
Even now, globally, "the male breadwinner-female homemaker division of labour is unusual," writes evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear.
As the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy put it to me, "Except for blips in history, men have never really been breadwinners, supporting a woman at home."
The idea of "man the hunter, woman the caregiver," widely popularized by (male) anthropologists in the 1960s, is, Hrdy notes, a massively "mistaken trope."
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