Bargaining between the sexes: outside options and leisure time in hunter-gatherer households

We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male and female partners bargain over labour inputs and resulting leisure time. We hypothesize that outside options - an individual’s fallback options for welfare outside their household, such as kin support - affects this bargaining process, providing those with greater outside options more leverage to bargain for leisure time. In two hunter-gatherer populations, the BaYaka and Agta, we take social capital as the determinant of outside options, using a generative model of the Nash bargaining problem and Bayesian multilevel logistic regression to test our hypothesis. We find no evidence for an association between social capital and division of leisure in either population. Instead, we find remarkable equality in the division of leisure time within households. We suggest the potential role of sex-egalitarian norms, non-substitutability of subsistence labour, bilocality and behaviors which maintain gender equality in immediate-return hunter-gatherers.