If you this year a book about the situation marriage today, make it new Stephanie Kuntz, For better and for worse (Viking, 2026).
This is an interesting way of human history matingfrom Stone Age marriage to the conflicting implications of democracy for heterosexual union, to the possibilities of creating satisfying marriages in today’s hetero-pessimistic world. Instead of presenting a summary of this monograph, I suggest you actually read it. Your investment of time will be rewarded with the pleasure of enjoying a well-told, important, and historically accurate story.
In this blog I write about it Gender questions, I want to point out how much Professor Koontz shows us that gender has indeed always mattered and still does today. Despite having read all of Koontz’s previous books, this book contained completely new gems that helped me understand gender inequality. I would like to share one of them with you here.
Gender Segregation in Egalitarian and Misogynistic Societies
I have always been struck by a paradox in contemporary research on gender inequality: gender segregation in the labor force is more exaggerated in egalitarian societies than in more disadvantaged societies. For example, Coontz writes that the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index shows that when societies have more gender equality laws and social programs, women are less likely to enter male-dominated, high-paying STEM occupations than in less egalitarian societies. Why does Saudi Arabia have more women scientists than Denmark?
The answer that social scientists often offer is rooted in biological essentialism, the belief that women and men are inherently different. In poor societies, women tend to ignore their priorities for economic security. Less gendered and egalitarian communities often have lower incomes and fewer safety nets. In such societies, women must enter higher-paid jobs to secure economic security for themselves and their families. In more egalitarian societies, especially in Nordic countries, there are safety nets. Women have a freer choice of careers and therefore can pursue their passions, their supposedly unique interests in people rather than things. In societies where their preferences are important, they choose occupations that are in demand to take care of and skills training. With fewer economic constraints, the argument goes, women’s “true” nature can assert itself, and they choose teachers, nurses, and social workers over engineers and scientists, money and reputation be damned.
What the historian Koontz teaches us is that there really is no set of universally “feminine” interests or abilities. Men and women in more misogynistic societies actually differ less in their identities, abilities, and self-identified preferences than those in more egalitarian, democratic societies. How can this be? As always, Koontz appeals to a nuanced view of history to explain this paradox.
The impact of industrialization and individual industries on gender roles
As Western societies became industrialized and economic work left the home and became wage labor in factories and offices, the ideology of individual industries took on a gendered dimension. The economic world has become competitive, compassionate and masculine. Women, as Christopher Lash wrote, remained the center of the family, which became “a refuge from a heartless world.” The social sphere, which required rational and effective skills, became masculinity. The private sphere, which was the province of women and mothers, became a place of warmth, care and concern emotional labor. Men were defined as people who have the necessary analytical thinking skills, including science, technology and mathematics. Women were seen as having the skills needed to care for, nurture and manage people. Before that, men took care of the family and took care of themselves, and women shared the responsibility of the economic labor of the household. But with separate fields, the belief in two types of human beings, men and women, appeared. The sexes were seen as complementary opposites.
And such beliefs are not outside of our own spirit! There is a lot of empirical research that shows that when you highlight gender, women in Western societies behave more feminine and men more masculine. And when you take gender stereotypes out of the equation, those differences shrink dramatically. For example, Coontz provides evidence from an interesting experiment in which people were randomly assigned a male or female online avatar in a virtual reality game. Then they entered the math game competitionwith avatars of the opposite sex. Participants assigned male avatars to compete with female avatars consistently performed better than those assigned female avatars. Even more convincingly, men assigned female avatars performed worse. They lived up to the stereotype of women not being good at math.
Unintelligible interaction of separate areas in modern life
Those who live in more egalitarian societies unconscious bias The ideology of a particular field is with us at every moment of our life, including career choices. Those from more amoral societies may have more gender struggles than we do, but not the legacy of the Western separate industry ideology from the early stages of the industrial revolution.
And why is all this important for marriage? Because those in post-industrial Western democracies continue to inherit separate industries in their psyches and therefore in their marriages. Even when husband and wife work full-time and want to share family labor equally, those old stereotypes often hold us back.
If you’d like some advice on how to move forward and overcome such irrational biases in your own marriage, let me read the last chapter. For better and for worse by Stephanie Koontz. But finish the rest of his book first. This is a summer beach read. Enjoy!
