In many African countries agriculture is women's work, while wage labor is men's work. Agriculture is the backbone of the economy, but since it is so undervalued and underpaid, being feminized, folks end up starving.
Think of our own history, and the frontier women.
The pattern for development is: we start with an egalitarian society of hunter gathers --> tribal level --> chiefdom. During this process, power is taken from women and women are excluded from participation in the religion. The ones in power say they are in power by the right of God (or genes) and they say they were always in power. So, for example, when the books on evolution are written, women are in the cave with the kids, not out hunting small game just like the men were doing. How do these people know this? Are they clairvoyant? Doesn't it make more sense to say that men and women were more interested in finding the day's food rather than establishing dainty gender roles? Anyway, big game hunting came along much later. During the time when our brains enlarged we were hunter gatherers. So, it would be more parsimonious to say that we evolved a cooperative spirit rather than we evolved to practice S&M.
