Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction

Abstract

Why do some cultures and their associated values go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male-dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023), respectively, for a global sample of 4,750 languages. The negative relationship between male dominance and extinction holds after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level such as geography, climate variability, conflict exposure, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then leverage European colonization as a natural experiment to investigate how inter-group dynamics shape cultural extinction. In a dyadic framework, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are significantly more vulnerable to cultural extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms is a stronger predictor of extinction than linguistic distance, distance in pre-colonial institutions, or the characteristics of either the colonizer or the Indigenous group. Joint paper with Ana Tur-Prats.