Joseph Kilgallen
Globally, the wellbeing, rights and autonomy of women continue to be limited by cultural norms that assign power to men. Achieving gender equality fundamentally requires that men share power with women. Yet, we still know surprisingly little about what leads men to support such empowerment.
A new study, led by UC Santa Barbara anthropologists in collaboration with the Tanzanian National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), provides fresh insights and suggestions for policy-makers aiming to shift gender norms worldwide. Their findings are published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.
“A naive assumption would be that men are only interested in defending the status quo of patriarchal regimes,” said lead author David Lawson, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and director of the campus’s Applied Evolutionary Anthropology Lab. “Our investigation reveals much diversity in men’s viewpoints, with a clear tendency for certai