Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction

Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction 

(with Ana Tur-Prats)

Eleonora Guarnieri (U. Bristol)

Abstract

Why do some cultures and their associated values go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male-dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats 2023), respectively, for a global sample of 4,750 languages. The negative relationship between male dominance and extinction holds after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level such as geography, climate variability, conflict exposure, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then leverage European colonization as a natural experiment to investigate how inter-group dynamics shape cultural extinction. In a dyadic framework, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are significantly more vulnerable to cultural extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms is a stronger predictor of extinction than linguistic distance, distance in pre-colonial institutions, or the characteristics of either the colonizer or the Indigenous group.

About the speaker

Dr. Guarnieri does research on topics related to political economy, development, gender and culture. Her recent publication, “Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict,” forthcoming in the American Economic Review, investigates how cultural disparities between ethnic groups and central governments can influence the likelihood of civil conflict. Another study she published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, examines the relationship between cultural distance and conflict-related sexual violence.