Although one does not find a division of labor in other kinds of animals, all cultures take the tasks that need to be done to survive and divide them up into “men’s work” and “women’s work.” All cultures create a system in which some people do some jobs and other people do other jobs. This is partially because human beings are dependent on technology and it is more efficient to divide the work up so that not everyone has to learn to do everything.

Instead, some people can specialize in some tasks and other individuals can specialize in other tasks. Dividing the tasks up by sex is more efficient because you don’t have to wait until children are older and you can see whether or not individuals specialize in one thing over another.

Therefore, human beings create a situation in which men are helpless to do half the work and women are helpless to do half the work. This is essentially a situation in which you need a partner of the opposite sex, which artificially creates a way for people to need each other.

The two major factors that are considered in this situation are the “masculine advantage” and the “feminine advantage.” Tasks that have a masculine advantage means that the task will be assigned to males if it has features that are advantageous to males or disadvantageous to females in its performance. Similarly, tasks that have a feminine advantage are advantages to females or disadvantageous to males.

The rigidity of how much men are pushed into men’s work and how much women are pushed into women’s work is a function of population size. In smaller groups, you can’t have as rigid a sex role as when you have larger groups. There is a division of labor in part because of stereotypic ideas of what people are supposed to accomplish.

Teaching people men’s work and women’s work often begins at such an early age people tend to these things as almost nature but just because there has never been a time in conscious memory that this was not how it worked does not mean its not natural.

Today people have an idea that men are associated with machines. In the past, men were typists because typewriters were machines, so therefore men had to be secretaries. Today women are the ones that use the typewriters and it has become women’s work. The same thing occurred with sewing machines. This proves that you can shift these things back and forth not depending on any sort of reality but based on cultural constructions.

Ideas about what constitutes men and women’s work differ across cultures. Many activities that are sometimes attributed to men are at other times attributed to women include crop planting, tending, harvesting, gathering small land fauna (snails, little animals), gathering small aquatic fauna, care of small animals, milking, preservation of meat/fish, preparation of skins, manufacturing clothing, manufacturing leather products, loom weaving, and basket weaving. There are also tasks that are sometimes only assigned to men. Some of these include whale hunting.

Males supposedly have greater strength and a greater capacity to mobilize their energy in brief spurts. But are men really bigger and stronger than women? Men try to embrace their strength unlike women. Women are actively discouraged to gain strength. Men benefit from women being weak and women actually reinforce this within each other, competing to be more fragile or “feminine.”

It is difficult to determine the real difference between men and women in terms of physical strength because men and women are not encouraged to gain strength in the same way or in equal parts.

However, it can be argued that the feminine advantage lies with childcare. If tasks were assigned on the basis of size and strength, wouldn’t all work be men’s work? Size and strength are not the answer; these qualities have nothing to do with why one divides labor based on sex. The thing that men can’t do that women can do is lactate. Women are the only ones that can nurse a baby.

So, while women in some cultures do very physical work such as gathering fuel and fetching, they are still able to care for their children. If you are carrying 10 gallons of water on your head and the baby starts to cry you can stop and nurse the baby. When you are hunting you can’t stop to nurse the baby. Therefore, tasks that are assigned to women must be compatible with childcare. Also most tasks assigned to women do not take them away from home for a long time.

On the other hand, anything that can be fatal is usually assigned to men. Why is it that dangerous things are assigned to men? Reproductive symmetry. Because women have “expensive” eggs and men have “cheap” sperm, men are more replaceable. In other words, if you lose a woman, you also lose 25 years of potential children from her eggs. Also, her present children might also have a decline in their chances of survival, particularly infants. On the other hand, men are expendable.

In addition, highly specialized tasks, like becoming a doctor, require lots of training. Because the main goal women must achieve in their lives (in most cultures) is to reproduce, and this goal can be completed at an earlier age, this feeds into the division of labor between men and women.

Men can learn these specialized tasks because they do not attain the resources that they are supposed to contribute to society. They have more time to learn these tasks whereas women (at a younger age) are thrown right into marriage, motherhood, and adulthood.