Evolved equity but inequity in the household? Reviewing evolutionary accounts of Fairness

Across the world, women routinely perform more household labour than men, and yet most women judge the arrangement fair. We review three evolutionary accounts of the human sense of fairness for their ability to explain such judgments. These accounts trace the human sense of fairness to evolved preferences for, respectively, norm abidance, equitable distributions, and equal distributions. They fall short, because they all assume that only impartial distributions can be judged fair. We argue instead that divisions of household labour are judged fair when they are justified by a shared ideology that specifies social roles and their associated tasks — in the case of household labour, a gender ideology. Such an ideology gains cultural currency by solving the complementary coordination problem that household members face: partners must perform complementary tasks that fit together. Among the ideologies that could solve this problem, however, only those whose prescribed distribution leaves no party worse off than their outside option achieve cultural success. Fairness judgments, we propose, arise from the interaction between two evolved preferences — an aversion to frustrating others' expectations and a concern for acting in ways one can justify — and a cultural history of ideologies that serve as coordination devices.