feminism – Chasing Tales

Why Dowry Deaths Persist: Captive Supply Markets and the Price of Exit

NB: Hello! This essay argues that the distribution of bargaining power within relationships can follow the same structure as those seen in labour markets. That doesn’t mean there is no love in the relationships, and the latter is not the argument: there can be love, and also coercion, dependency, and obligation at the same time.

NB 2: I use ‘externality’ here somewhat more broadly than its strict textbook meaning, to describe costs displaced onto people whose constrained position prevents them from refusing them. Basically I want to understand WHY this issue persists.

A monopsony¹ (from the Greek for “single buyer”)² is a market where there is only one buyer, or so few buyers that sellers have almost nowhere else to go. The result of a monopsony is that the employer can pay as little as they can get away with. The wage is no longer determined by what the work is worth. It is determined by what the worker can be made to accept.³

In a competitive labour market, the mechanism that prevents this is called the exit option⁴: the credible threat a worker can leave and sell their labour elsewhere. The existence of this threat disciplines employers into treating workers reasonably. Rational employers therefore pay enough to retain people. The exit option is, in a very precise sense, the source of a worker’s bargaining power. It is the economic foundation of their dignity in a transaction.

The labour economist Alan Manning spent much of his career documenting that monopsony is not a rare edge case.⁵ ⁶ It is the normal condition of low-wage labour markets. Most workers who are paid badly have far fewer real alternatives than textbooks assume.⁷ They do not leave because leaving is costly: in time, in income disruption, in social upheaval, in the loss of benefits or seniority.⁸ The exit threat is technically available but practically weak, and employers know it.

However, Manning’s framework still treats monopsony as a matter of degree- workers have some options, just not enough.⁹ The more interesting question is what happens when the exit option is effectively nonexistent.

While workers in most of these situations are formally free, because no law prevents them from quitting, formal freedom to exit and the ability to actually leave are different things.¹⁰ A worker who is free to quit but will lose their housing, their immigration status, their children’s stability, or their community’s acceptance has both, a formal exit option and a non-credible one.¹¹ ¹² ¹³ That is, a formal right to leave is meaningless, because exercising it is catastrophically costly.

No practical exit
Economists Carl Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz formalised in 1984 why wages tend not to fall to the absolute minimum even in imperfect markets.¹⁴ Their argument: because employers cannot perfectly monitor workers, they must pay a wage high enough that losing the job is a genuine punishment- which means, workers perform because they have something real to lose. This is called the efficiency wage.¹⁵ In their model, the punishment for shirking is unemployment: if you are fired, you expect a spell without work before getting another job, so you value your wage enough to exert effort. If there is nowhere else to go, there is no need to pay that efficiency premium; the only constraint becomes how little can be paid without provoking refusal or collapse. Compensation trends downward toward what is called the reservation wage.¹⁶

The reservation wage is the minimum wage at which a person will remain in the arrangement rather than exit.¹⁷ In a free market, the reservation wage is set by the worker’s next best alternative, such as another job.¹⁸ In a captive supply market, the next best alternative is often poverty, homelessness, violence, or social exclusion.¹⁹ So, what the worker can be made to accept (the wage or non monetary compensation offered) is no longer determined by what their work is worth, but by how bad things would have to get before leaving becomes preferable to staying.²⁰

This is what I now think of as “captive” supply markets, which are situations where exit costs are high enough to eliminate the exit option as a real constraint on the buyer’s behaviour. The worker is not just poorly positioned in a negotiation: they are structurally trapped, and the compensation they receive reflects the entrapment more than it reflects anything about the work itself.

So, a captive supply market exists when all three conditions hold simultaneously:

The worker supplies economically valuable labour;
Exit is formally available but practically non-credible; and
The beneficiary captures value while offloading substantial costs onto the worker.

Clearly, coercion does not require chains. A captive supply market can be created purely by making exit expensive. While the barriers may vary (debt, legal precarity, social stigma, the threat of violence, the absence of financial independence, moral obligation to a dependent person), their economic function is identical: they all raise the cost of leaving until leaving is no longer a credible option, and the wage, in whatever form it takes, falls accordingly.

The externality²¹
An externality is an unintended cost or benefit that affects a third party who is not involved in the original transaction.²² Pollution is the textbook case²³: when a factory dumps waste into a river, and the cost of cleaning it falls on communities downstream who were never party to the factory’s transactions. The factory’s product appears cheaper than it really is because the true cost, which includes the cost of river cleanup, the loss of river-based life, healthcare cost of land-based life forms that depend on that river among others, was not included in the retail price.

The product appears artificially cheap because part of the real cost has been transferred to people outside the transaction.²⁴ In captive labour markets, the externality is not only financial but intertemporal and social: the costs are borne by future selves, children, public health systems, kinship networks, or subordinated dependents while remaining invisible to the immediate transaction.²⁵ ²⁶

Captive labour pricing works identically. The buyer captures the value of the work at a discounted price. The true cost of producing that work, such as the physical toll, the foreclosed opportunities, the psychological erosion, is transferred to whoever has the least power to refuse it. They absorb it in their bodies, in their shortened lives, in the disadvantages their children inherit.

Contemporary captive labour markets include unpaid care work²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹, caste-assigned sanitation labour³⁰, undocumented labour³¹ ³², and migrant domestic work under systems like kafala³³ ³⁴. Their surface forms differ, but their economic structure is similar: exit is formally available yet practically catastrophic, allowing labour to be priced according to the worker’s vulnerability rather than the value of the work performed.

What is work?
The standard definition of work in economics is human labour or purposeful activity that contributes to the production of goods and services.³⁵ ³⁶

Yet this definition becomes unstable once labour occurs outside ordinary market transactions. Many forms of economically necessary work, especially domestic, emotional, and care labour, are excluded from formal accounting not because they lack productive value, but because they are organised through obligation, intimacy, and social expectation rather than wages.³⁷ The fact that some work happens in offices and is invoiced, while some happens in homes and is treated as duty, changes its visibility and compensation, not its economic function.

My argument is that the cost of producing this work is the externality.

Here’s the flow: remove credible exit → bargaining power collapses → compensation disconnects from value → costs are externalised (that is, someone not part of the transaction bears it).

Gendered labour as the case study
Women’s unpaid and underpaid labour is perhaps the largest and most normalised instance of captive supply pricing in the world economy.³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³ ⁴⁴

Within households, the informal negotiation over who does what is structured by expectations about gender roles that precede any individual relationship and constrain choice long before any specific argument about doing dishes is had.⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷
Occupational segregation channels women into lower-paid sectors such as care, cleaning, administration, teaching.⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰
Women’s financial dependence on male partners in many parts of the world limits their exit options independent of any legal restriction.⁵¹ ⁵²

The result is a global pattern in which women produce an enormous share of economically essential work and are compensated for only a small fraction of it.

The undervaluation of girls and women is not irrational within the terms of the societies producing it. Four simultaneous mechanisms work to produce it, compounding each other across a lifetime and across generations. These are:

Underinvestment in Human Capital: Across societies where captive female labour is most entrenched, families invest less in daughters than in sons across nutrition, schooling, and access to mobility and opportunity outside the home.⁵³ ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ The economic logic of this, however brutal, is not irrational within the terms of the system producing it: the parents bear the cost of the investment; the returns flow elsewhere.⁵⁶ ⁵⁷
Employment Exclusion: Even a well-educated woman in many societies faces restrictions on where she can go, which jobs are culturally permissible for her, and whether her family and community will tolerate her working outside the home at all.⁵⁸ ⁵⁹ Harassment in public spaces, transportation that is unsafe or unavailable, workplaces that require mobility, long hours, or physical presence in male-dominated environments, all of these function as barriers not to her skills but to her ability to convert those skills into independent income.⁶⁰ ⁶¹ ⁶²
Cultural Conditioning: The third mechanism is the most durable: cultural conditioning. Girls are taught from early childhood to perform domestic and care work.⁶³ ⁶⁴ ⁶⁵ They are praised for doing it well, incorporated into household routines as junior labour, and given care responsibilities for younger siblings and elderly relatives as a matter of course. Over generations this becomes culture, meaning it no longer requires active enforcement because it has been internalised.⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ A woman who has internalised that care work is her duty and identity is less likely to name it as labour, less likely to expect compensation, and less likely to experience its absence as deprivation.⁶⁸ The externality becomes invisible even to the person absorbing it. Culture is how the captive supply market reproduces itself without requiring chains or contracts in every generation.
Penalty for Remaining Unmarried: The fourth mechanism enforces the system when the others are insufficient: the social penalty for being an unmarried woman. Unmarried women are a source of anxiety for their families, a subject of social judgment.⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷³ It functions as a threat that disciplines women into accepting whatever marriage terms are available rather than holding out for better ones or refusing marriage altogether because a woman who knows that the alternative to this marriage is social exclusion and family shame will accept conditions she might otherwise refuse.⁷⁴ ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶

None of these four mechanisms requires any individual act of malice. Each is self-reinforcing. Together they ensure that a woman arrives at marriage already holding a weak bargaining position, with few realistic outside options, in a body and mind that has been taught to expect limited compensation for substantial work, in a society that will punish her severely for leaving.

The full scale of what this produces is documented here.

Sealing the exit
A worker’s reservation wage (the minimum at which they will accept an arrangement rather than exit) is set by their next best alternative. For most people, the practical floor of that alternative is determined by assets: property, savings, collateral, a claim on family wealth that can be converted into housing, income, or the ability to start over. Assets are what make exit materially possible, as distinct from legally available.⁷⁷ ⁷⁸

In much of India, and across many societies, inheritance flows primarily through sons.⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ ⁸¹ This has a precise economic consequence: a son who inherits land, property, or a family business acquires fallback income, housing security, collateral against which to borrow, and an independent economic base that raises his reservation wage in any subsequent negotiation.⁸² ⁸³ He can afford to refuse bad terms because he has something to fall back on.

A daughter in the same family, whose notional share of family wealth is instead directed into her wedding, her jewellery, and her dowry^{(money and assets paid to a man to marry a woman)}, receives something categorically different: consumption expenditure rather than productive assets.⁸⁴ ⁸⁵ Jewellery transferred to the marital household is typically controlled by her in-laws, not by her.⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸ Wedding expenditure is gone the day after the wedding. Dowry is transferred to the woman’s husband and his family, not to the woman marrying.

The distinction matters because productive assets generate future bargaining power: they make exit materially survivable, even if not socially so.

Expenditure on marriage ceremonies does not create future bargaining power for either the woman or her family. A family that spends equivalent sums on a son’s inheritance and a daughter’s wedding has not treated them equally in any economically meaningful sense.⁸⁹ ⁹⁰ It has given one child the material foundation to survive exit from any future arrangement, and the other child a one-time transfer that strengthens the household receiving her while doing nothing to strengthen her position within it.⁹¹

Son preference is often treated as the root cause, or the cultural attitude from which everything else follows. But the evidence suggests the causal chain runs in the other direction. Families prefer sons not primarily because of irrational prejudice but because, under systems where sons inherit property, stay with aging parents, and provide old-age support while daughters leave and their income accrues to another household, sons are the genuinely better economic investment within the terms of that system.⁹² Son preference is the output of an incentive structure, not its origin.⁹³ Which matters because it means changing the attitude without changing the incentive structure will not work, as Duflo’s research makes explicit.⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ The attitude reproduces itself as long as the incentives that produced it remain intact.

To be noted, India’s Hindu Succession Act was amended in 2005 to give daughters equal inheritance rights to agricultural land.⁹⁶ ⁹⁷ Studies find significant gaps between legal entitlement and actual inheritance, particularly in rural areas, driven by social pressure on daughters to waive their claims in favour of brothers in exchange for ongoing family support.⁹⁸ ⁹⁹ ¹⁰⁰ ¹⁰¹

Dowry
In a normal labour market, even a severely monopsonistic one, the employer pays the worker something.¹⁰² The power asymmetry means the wage is suppressed below what the work is worth, but payment flows toward the worker.¹⁰³ In the dowry system, payment flows in the opposite direction.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶

In many environments where dowry remains prevalent, marriage functions not only as a personal relationship but also as a system of economic allocation and social risk management.¹⁰⁷ ¹⁰⁸ Transfers often scale with the groom’s education, earning potential, caste position, migration prospects, or family status, revealing that these arrangements are not treated purely as romantic unions. The groom’s household receives capital upfront, while the bride is expected to provide long-term domestic labour, reproductive labour, care work, and social continuity within the household.₁₀₉ ₁₁₀ ₁₁₁ ₁₁₂ Where exit for women is difficult, these arrangements can become structurally extractive even when they are socially normalised.

The sunk cost of the dowry becomes a trap with a second direction of force. The bride’s family, having transferred substantial wealth to make this marriage happen, has their own financial and reputational reasons not to help her leave.¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ Admitting the marriage has failed means admitting the investment has failed, potentially losing the access and social position the transferred wealth created, publicly acknowledging a failed arrangement, and in families with unmarried daughters, damaging those sisters’ own marriage prospects.¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶ ¹¹⁷ The people the woman might have turned to have been financially and reputationally conscripted into keeping her in place.

This is the structure that enables dowry harassment, including demands for additional transfers after the marriage, backed by the implicit threat that refusal will be punished through the woman.¹¹⁸ The demands follow a precise economic logic. The groom’s household has identified that the woman cannot leave and that her natal family cannot afford to let her.¹¹⁹ They extract accordingly.¹²⁰ The bride’s family faces a choice between paying more and conceding total loss.¹²¹ ¹²² At the extreme end of this chain of constrained choices are the deaths the National Crime Records Bureau records annually.¹²³ ¹²⁴

Markets are often described as self-correcting: if a transaction is unfair, one party walks away, and competition disciplines the other into offering better terms. This is how the exit option is supposed to work. And in markets where exit is genuinely available, it does work, imperfectly but directionally.

But captive supply markets do not self-correct, and the reason is the externality. The cost of the arrangement falls on the worker, not on the household extracting the labour. The household captures the benefit without paying the true cost. There is no transaction between the person who captures the benefit and the person who pays the cost. There is no price signal connecting them. The market cannot correct what it cannot see. And what it cannot see is everything absorbed by the person who cannot leave.

None of this means every household, or even most households, consciously behave this way, nor that affection and mutuality are absent from intimate life. The claim is narrower: where exit is materially difficult, bargaining power shifts accordingly, and social systems organised around constrained exit will tend to undervalue the labour of the less mobile party even when the individuals involved experience genuine attachment to one another.

That is why captive supply markets persist. And it is why we keep hearing about dowry deaths, followed by inconsolable natal families demanding justice for daughters they had earlier urged to “adjust” to the very conditions that eventually led to their deaths.

Sources

The Bill Comes Due

NB: This whole argument takes for granted that the objective is a sustainable, voluntary economic system with enough future workers and taxpayers. If a society’s real goal is simply to extract reproduction by force, then it has already stepped outside the world of incentives and into slavery, and economics can only describe the damage, not justify it.

NB 2: I’ve tried to make this as explanatory as I can, while still trying to not exasperate any passing economist.

Once, back in 2013, during an internship, I fainted at my desk from period pain. Luckily, I was seated, so my head just hit the table.

Nearly everyone who has ever menstruated has at least one horror story. Mine is relatively tame. Other people can tell you about bleeding through clothes, sitting examinations and meetings with cramps that feel like food poisoning, working full shifts in cramped factories without access to toilets, or being scolded for “unprofessionalism” because endometriosis made them miss a meeting. These stories are usually related as private misfortunes or personal failures of resilience. Economically, they are counted as nothing at all.

This is a mistake, and not just a moral one. It is a category error^{(a category error is when you count something in a category in which it does not belong, and therefore assign it characteristics it cannot possibly have)} in how we think about production.

What this essay argues is simple:

Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, and menopause are not “women’s issues”. They are the long production process through which societies manufacture their future workers and taxpayers.
That production process is economic work. It creates an economic good called “children”, which becomes (economically) tomorrow’s labour supply, consumer base, and tax base.
The current system does two things at once: it underprices this work and then actively charges girls and women for doing it, via health risks, lost earnings, and literal taxes. Economically, that’s a textbook (negative) externality^{(an externality is when someone not part of a transaction receives a gain or bears a cost that results from it- a negative externality is when the cost is borne by the unrelated party)}: private cost, social benefit, underpriced input^{(the input here being women’s fertility)}. When you treat a crucial input as free, rational producers under‑produce it.

If you follow that logic all the way through, fainting at your desk and falling fertility rates turn out to be points on the same curve.

Menarche to menopause
We usually talk about “having a baby” as if fertility were a single event. Economically, that’s like describing “building a car” as the moment a finished vehicle rolls off the assembly line, and ignoring every step before it. Women’s fertility does not begin with pregnancy and it does not end at childbirth. It begins at menarche and runs to menopause, a multi‑decade production line that converts biological capacity into actual future people. Every part of that line has costs attached:

Menarche and menstruation: Once bleeding starts, there are monthly expenditures on pads, cups, tampons, painkillers, clinic visits, iron supplements. There are also missed school days when products or toilets are unavailable,¹ and missed work days when the pain or blood loss is severe.² None of this is optional if the body is going to remain capable of a healthy pregnancy later.
Fertility management³ ⁴ ⁵: Contraception, abortions, miscarriages, and their follow‑up care all consume time, money, and physical resilience. This is the work of deciding when and whether reproduction will happen, which any economist will recognise as intertemporal optimisation^{(which is when you try to balance how you use your resources through time, such as balancing current consumption/investment against future goals}⁶⁾ with a body on the line.
Pregnancy and childbirth⁷ ⁸: Nine months of metabolic and bodily strain, often accompanied by nausea, gestational diabetes, hypertension, and anaemia, followed by a physically risky delivery. Even a “normal” pregnancy can force women out of certain jobs; a complicated one can remove them from the labour force- or life- entirely. There is also the plain fear associated with birth women are often expected to not talk about, and metabolise without complaint.
Postpartum and childrearing⁹: Months or years of sleep deprivation, breastfeeding, carrying, cleaning, managing illness, making appointments, supervising homework, and often postpartum depression¹⁰ ¹¹. This is “reproductive labour”: the daily work that keeps children alive long enough to become workers. The opportunity cost is foregone wages, stalled promotions, career shifts into “flexible” but lower‑paid jobs.
Perimenopause and menopause¹² ¹³: Hot flashes, insomnia, brain fog, joint pain, and mood changes can all interfere with work, but very few workplaces account for this as anything other than an individual performance issue.

There is no such thing as “children” that exist independently of this long chain. Every future worker and taxpayer is embodied evidence that at least one person has paid these costs. That means children are not just sentimental “blessings”. They are an economic good. They are the raw material for what the textbooks call human capital: the future labour that will show up in productivity statistics and fiscal projections. No children, no labour supply. No labour supply, no GDP. It is that blunt.¹⁴ ¹⁵

What makes this category slippery is that children are not only an economic good in the narrow sense. They are also a source of private value: people have children because they want them, love them, and derive meaning, identity, and security from them. In economic terms, children are both consumption goods (privately valued by families) and investment goods (inputs into the future labour force and tax base).¹⁶ ¹⁷ For economically weaker people, children may even be an old-age insurance product.¹⁸ ¹⁹

Once you state this clearly, the next step is unavoidable: the work that produces and maintains this good (periods, pregnancies, childrearing) is economic work. It is as structurally necessary as work on an assembly line or in a software firm. The problem is not that markets ignore the private value- they do not. The problem is that the public value of the work associated with fertility is systematically underpriced²⁰ ²¹, while a large share of the costs remains private²² ²³.

The hidden invoice
In theory, if something is essential to production, we expect to see it priced, paid for, and protected. That is not how reproduction is treated.

Start with menstruation. For years, India taxed sanitary pads at 12% under GST²⁴, treating them closer to a semi‑luxury than to a basic need. Activism eventually pushed the rate to zero, but research from other countries suggests that when “tampon taxes” are removed, manufacturers and retailers often adjust prices so that the full benefit does not reach consumers.²⁵ ²⁶ In other words: even when the formal tax disappears, the underlying reality remains the same- periods are expensive, and the person bleeding pays.²⁷ ²⁸

The same logic runs through pregnancy and childbirth. In systems without universal coverage, antenatal check‑ups, diagnostic tests, delivery, and emergency care often come with substantial out‑of‑pocket bills.²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ Even where public health care is nominally free, women pay with time spent queuing, with travel costs, with foregone daily wages.³² ³³ Nutrition during adolescence, pregnancy, and breastfeeding is a private line‑item in a household budget, not a public investment in the quality of the next generation.³⁴

Then there is the loss you cannot put on a receipt: days or years lost from school and work. Period pain and heavy bleeding are common reasons girls miss school, and lack of toilets or products turns discomfort into absence (“Period Poverty” is a real phrase that exists in our world). Women in manual or informal jobs such as factory lines, domestic work, agricultural labour, rarely have the option of calling in sick for their uterus.³⁵ ³⁶ They work through the pain, or they don’t work and lose pay, or they exit the labour market entirely.⁵

And then there are miscarriages. An estimated 23 million miscarriages occur every year worldwide, translating to roughly 44 pregnancy losses every minute.³⁷ In low- and middle-income countries like India, the risk is even more acute; longitudinal data from 2026 indicates a total pregnancy loss risk of approximately 103 per 1,000 pregnancies after the 8th week of gestation.³⁸ ³⁹ Economically, this represents a catastrophic failure, whose costs are nearly 100% borne by the mother.⁴⁰ ⁴¹

Also, in any other sector, a manufacturing defect or a workplace injury would be covered by insurance or a social safety net. In the reproductive economy, a miscarriage is treated as a private medical event. The woman or her family pay⁴² ⁴³ for the hospital stay, lost wages, nutritional requirement, product requirements, etc. while also experiencing psychological and physical pain.⁴⁴

All of this is the cost side of reproduction. It is spent in cash, in time, in health, in future earnings.

The benefit side is much more widely distributed. Everyone who relies on the future existence of workers and taxpayers gains: firms, governments, pension systems, future consumers. That is what makes this an externality.

In textbook microeconomics, when one economic agent bears costs that generate benefits for others who do not pay, markets underprice the activity.⁴⁵ That is what is happening here. The private cost of reproduction, like period products, health risks, lost earnings, is mostly borne by women and their families. The social benefit- a stable or growing population that can work, consume, and pay taxes, is captured by a large set of actors who are not paying the full bill.

Put differently, reproduction is a hybrid case. Part of the return accrues directly to the people raising the child. But a substantial share spills outward to employers, states, and future consumers who did not pay for the child’s upbringing. It is this gap, between private return and social return, that creates the distortion (that is, social benefit – private benefit = value of externality). The result is not that reproduction stops, but that it occurs under conditions of strain, inequality, and, increasingly, shortfall relative to what people say they actually want.

The logic is not mysterious; it is familiar. When polluters are allowed to dump waste into a river for free, they will pollute too much. Here, when the cost of producing the next generation is loaded onto one group while the payoff is spread across the entire economy, reproduction is pushed into the territory of “too costly to do safely, too necessary (or too desired) to abandon”.

The career penalty⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸
Sometimes this is described as a “motherhood penalty”⁴⁹, as though it were an unfortunate bug in the system. It isn’t. It is the mechanism by which the externality is enforced and accounted for monetarily. Men also do unpaid work, and that matters, but this argument is specifically about reproductive labour such as menstruation, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding-work that by biology cannot be split evenly, and the data on who takes the wage and pension hit from that work are not ambiguous.

Across many countries, women’s wages and employment trajectories look similar to men’s until the first child arrives.⁵⁰ ⁵¹ Then there are career interruptions for pregnancy and childbirth, reduced availability due to childcare, and discrimination, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. The outcome is lower annual wages, slower wage growth, and more part‑time or precarious work.

This does not stop at retirement. Smaller pay packets during working life mean smaller contributions to pensions and savings. Analyses from places like the UK repeatedly find that women’s pension pots are significantly smaller than men’s, with gaps widening in later life.⁵² ⁵³ The compounded effect over a lifetime is a pension gap and a wealth gap built directly on the scaffolding of reproductive labour.⁵⁴

Written as a flow: Fertility (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, menopause)→ monetary costs, lost school and work days, career interruptions, lower hours, discrimination→ lower wages and slower wage growth→ smaller lifetime earnings→ smaller pensions and assets→ higher risk of old‑age poverty for the people who produced the next generation.

A point to make here is to wonder, if reproductive labour is underpriced, shouldn’t competition eventually push wages up to compensate? The answer is structural, not incidental. The primary beneficiaries of reproductive labour, such as future employers, the state, pension systems, future consumers, are not party to any wage negotiation with the woman currently pregnant. There is no contracting party on the other side of the transaction who could, even in theory, offer higher pay in exchange for the output. The wage market operates between a woman and her current employer, who captures only a small fraction of the lifetime value of the child she is raising. The failure cannot be corrected through wages because the people who owe the payment are not in the room.

(There is a similar issue in climate discussions too- the work put into climate change mitigation and adaptation will benefit future generations, and not current ones. It leaves climate workers to negotiate with people who often cannot see any benefit to curbing their lifestyles or doing the work required now to prevent further climate damage.)

Also, reproduction sits awkwardly between a private decision, an externality, and a quasi-public good⁵⁵ ⁵⁶^{(a product or service that everyone can use, cannot be stopped from using, and whose use by one person does not reduce its availability to others, like clean air- and here, the benefits of more children in an economy – because while a specific child or pregnancy is not a public good in that narrow sense, but: the fiscal and social benefits of children—taxes that fund pensions, schools, hospitals do have public‑good‑like characteristics: they are widely shared and hard to exclude people from}.⁵⁷⁾. Not to mention, households are not firms, and fertility decisions are not made with spreadsheets alone.⁵⁸ Preferences, norms, uncertainty, and identity all play a role.

But prices still matter. When the financial, physical, and career costs of having children rise, they interact with those preferences, often suppressing outcomes below stated intentions. This is visible in the persistent gap between desired and actual fertility across many countries: people report wanting more children than they end up having, and cite cost, job insecurity, and unequal care burdens as the reasons.⁵⁹ That is not a cultural mystery; it is a constrained choice.

The “motherhood penalty” is the accounting system writing down, in money, what the externality looks like at the household level.

The state’s revealed preference
There is another piece of this that rarely gets said: the state is not neutral in this arrangement. It has a revealed preference^{(instead of asking people what they like, you watch what they actually choose to have or do}⁶⁰⁾.

Consider what it would cost a government to assume direct responsibility for raising children: full public childcare from infancy, universal meals, clothing, schooling, health care, and the equivalent of parental time in trained staff. Nordic countries get closest to this, with extensive parental leave and heavily subsidised childcare, and even there, the state does not pay for everything.⁶¹ ⁶² ⁶³ Those programmes are expensive, and they work partially by recognising reproduction as a public good that must be financed collectively.⁶⁴

Whether by design or by constraint, the pattern elsewhere is consistent. Building a fully public system of childrearing, including comprehensive childcare, income support, and care infrastructure, would require high taxes and visible redistribution.⁶⁵ Most states stop well short of that point. The gap is not empty; it is filled inside households, largely by women’s unpaid or underpaid labour.⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ The result functions like a policy choice even when it is not explicitly framed as one: reproduction is treated as a privately financed activity with selectively socialised benefits.

The state’s preference for private financing of reproduction is also visible in how legal systems allocate parental responsibility. Across most jurisdictions, the costs of raising a child are quickly and firmly assigned to the household rather than shared with the broader beneficiaries (employers, pension funds, the state itself).⁶⁸ ⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ Whatever the stated rationale in any individual jurisdiction, the pattern is widespread and its economic consequence is clear: the state acts to avoid becoming the payer of last resort for reproduction.

The state’s revealed preference is clear: enjoy the tax revenue, avoid the childrearing bill.

From tampon tax to hysterectomy⁷² ⁷³ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁵
At one end of this spectrum are policies that make reproduction incrementally more expensive: a tax on period products, the period products themselves being expensive, no sick leave for period pain, no maternity protection in informal work. At the other end are policies and labour regimes that make reproduction incompatible with survival.

In the sugarcane fields of Maharashtra, the externality stops being metaphorical and becomes surgical. Reports from Beed district, one of the poorest in India, document that thousands of women sugarcane cutters have undergone hysterectomies in their 20s and 30s, not because of health requirements, but because their work contracts and poverty made menstruation and pregnancy intolerable risks. Sugarcane cutting is backbreaking seasonal work. Couples are hired together, paid by the ton of cane they deliver. Missing a day for period pain, for heavy bleeding, for pregnancy complications, can mean fines of 500 to 1,000 rupees, often more than the day’s wage. For families already living on the edge, a week of lost income can mean debt or hunger. In that context, hysterectomy can be seen as a “solution”. Government and academic studies have found hysterectomy rates in Beed many times higher than the national average, concentrated among women who cut cane.

The line from a tax on menstrual products to mass hysterectomies is not a single mechanism, and it would be wrong to treat it as one. What links them is not identical policy design but a common direction of pressure: making the biological realities of reproduction economically costly to bear. At one end, that cost is marginal and dispersed^(marginal⁷⁶^{and dispersed}⁷⁷^{– in economics, “marginal” means additional, the cost of menstrual products is a marginal cost attached to each extra individual and each extra period, and dispersed- smaller spread out costs borne by the women or their families)}. At the other, it becomes so acute that removing the capacity to menstruate is treated as a form of labour discipline, and sometimes the only viable option when the other is chronic hunger.

From a cold economic perspective, what is happening in Beed is this: the labour market is sending a price signal^{(a price signal is information carried by prices that tells people how to behave in a market, so, for example, when price goes up, it signals that something is more in demand}⁷⁸⁾ that a menstruating, potentially pregnant body is too expensive. Removing the uterus reduces downtime. It also removes any future pregnancies and imposes long‑term health risks. But those future cost to the woman’s body and to her family’s fertility are not priced into the immediate wage contract. They are written off as collateral damage.

At one end of this spectrum, you are asked to pay a little extra for bleeding. At the other, you are asked to give up the organ that bleeds so you can keep your job.

The other hand
Now flip to another corner of the world. Nordic welfare states are often held up, as good places to be a mother.⁷⁹ The details matter, because they spell out what it looks like when a state tries, to internalise some of the externality. Countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland combine relatively high female employment with generous, earnings‑linked parental leave, job protection, and heavily subsidised childcare. Parents can take months of leave without losing their jobs; part of the leave is reserved for fathers to push men into the care side. Places in public daycare are widely available, and fees are capped or heavily subsidised.

Demographic research links these policies with two outcomes.

First, they raise mothers’ labour force participation and reduce the lifetime earnings penalty of having children.⁸⁰
Second, they are associated with higher and more stable fertility than in otherwise similar rich countries with weak family support; parents, especially mothers, are more likely to go on to have a second or third child when they can expect support and re‑entry into the work they want to do.⁸¹ ⁸²

What the Nordics are doing, in economic terms, is straightforward: they are socialising a slice of the cost of reproduction⁸³, and they are forcing men and employers to bear some of it.⁸⁴ Taxes are higher. Public spending is higher. The state writes cheques for a part of the reproductive bill rather than assuming that women will quietly pay it in unpaid hours and lost earnings. The Beed sugarcane worker and the Swedish software engineer inhabit different universes. One is asked to remove her uterus to remain employable. The other is given months of paid leave and a daycare place to remain employable. Between them lies the full spectrum of how an economy can choose to treat an input it depends on.

What the Nordic model does not resolve is also instructive. Even in Sweden and Finland, women still perform more unpaid care work than men⁸⁵ ⁸⁶, the pension gap persists⁸⁷, and fertility has continued to drift downward despite extensive state support⁸⁸. The partial correction produces a partial result.⁸⁹ This is not a failure of the Nordic model, it’s just that the distortion has not been fully priced out; it has been partially offset- and that personal preferences still apply to such decisions. To be noted, while India and the Nordics are not comparable economic systems, the contrasting realities reveal the range of how costs can be distributed.

What would correct pricing look like?
If this is a pricing problem, then the outline of a solution is not mysterious. Internalising the externality would mean shifting a larger share of the cost of reproduction onto the same broad base that captures its benefits. In practice, that implies some mix of publicly financed reproductive healthcare, income support around childbirth, accessible childcare, and labour market structures that do not permanently penalise time spent raising children. The details vary by country, but the principle is simple: when an activity generates wide social returns, its costs cannot be left almost entirely to the individuals performing it without distorting the outcome. This is not about charity for parents; it is about paying for the labour that keeps the system supplied with workers and taxpayers.

Rational collapse
This is where the externality argument completes its arc. We have an input (reproductive labour from menarche to menopause) that is essential to producing an economic good (children, i.e., future labour and taxpayers). We systematically underprice that input by treating most of the work as unpaid and most of the costs as “personal”. We then occasionally add explicit charges (taxes on menstrual products, unpaid maternity leave, fines for missed days) for good measure.

On the other side, we have beneficiaries: firms that rely on a steady supply of labour they did not pay to raise; states that rely on a steady supply of taxpayers and soldiers; pension systems that rely on young workers’ contributions; men whose own employment and pensions ride on someone else staying home with the kids (in fact, fathers often reap economic benefits from becoming fathers, the opposite of what happens to mothers⁹⁰ ⁹¹– even though they have not borne the physical and general career costs of reproduction). They capture the benefit of reproduction without bearing its full cost.

When the cost of producing children is high and rising, and the private return for the producer is lower than the social return, the aggregate result is under‑investment in reproduction (meaning people choose to have fewer kids). The UN and demographers are already documenting that people in many countries say they want more children than they end up having, citing the cost of living, insecure jobs, and unequal domestic labour as reasons. That gap between desired and actual fertility is the shadow of the externality. It’s the quantity response to cost under constraint (that is, the quantity produced is limited because resources are scarce).

A common counterargument holds that falling fertility is simply the consequence of rising female education and autonomy- that women with better options are rationally choosing smaller families, and that this is a success story, not a market failure. Yes. More education and autonomy for women are unambiguously good. In economic terms, though, they also raise the opportunity cost of childbearing: the better a woman’s career prospects, the more she stands to lose from stepping back for pregnancy and childcare. When women have better careers, the cost of interrupting those careers rises.⁹²That makes the pricing problem worse, not better. A higher opportunity cost with the same absent compensation means the gap between what it costs to have children and what you receive for having them grows wider.

Falling fertility rates are often described as a cultural crisis: young people are selfish; women are too educated; nobody wants families anymore. That story is tidy, and wrong. It treats the collapse in output as a moral failure instead of as a predictable response to a price signal.

However, when an essential input is persistently underpriced, economists do not reach for moral explanations. They look for who is paying, who is free‑riding, and how incentives are misaligned. Reproduction is no different. The difficulty is not that the logic is obscure. It is that applying it requires admitting that a large share of the economy has been quietly subsidised by work that is unpaid, underpaid, and treated as natural.

Falling fertility is not a just a ‘lifestyle choice’ (it can be for some people, it is just not that for everyone); it is the market finally reflecting the fact that the producers can no longer afford to subsidize the rest of the world’s ‘free’ labor supply. The fertility bill has come due.

Sources

An acceptable genocide

The past
In Karachi, the Edhi Foundation— Pakistan’s largest social welfare organisation — installed cradles outside the gates of its orphanage with a sign reading: Don’t kill the baby, leave the baby alive in the cradle. A newborn girl was found in one of those cradles. Her entire body was blackened. She had been burnt alive, umbilical cord still attached.¹

Of the babies recovered from those cradles, more than 90% are girls.²

In 1990, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books titled “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” The phrase was new. The practice was ancient.³

Sen had noticed something in the census data: across Asia, there were far fewer women than there should be. Women who should have existed did not exist. They had been removed. Female infants are more resilient than male infants, and women outlive men on a level biological playing field.³ Sen called this “missing”. By his original estimate: 100 million. Later research revised the figure upward.

In Classical Greece, fewer than 1% of families documented at Delphi around 200 BCE had two or more daughters.⁴ Daughters were exposed — left outside, on hillsides and in public places, to die of cold and hunger.⁵

In ancient Rome, the practice was routine and documented without shame. In 1 BCE, a Roman man named Hilarion wrote a letter from Alexandria to his pregnant wife Alis. The letter was found on papyrus in Egypt, preserved by dry sand for two thousand years. It reads: if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.⁶

In China, Christian missionaries in the sixteenth century documented newborn girls thrown into rivers. In Qing dynasty texts, the term ni nü — “to drown girls” — appears as a routine domestic description.⁷ Drowning, suffocation, starvation, and exposure in baskets placed in trees were all documented methods of eliminating female newborns (A caveat: western missionary accounts, particularly Gabriel Palatre’s widely reproduced 1878 statistics, have been shown to be significantly erroneous — shaped partly by an exoticizing Western gaze that made female infanticide into a “totemic marker of Chinese society.”⁸

The Quran explicitly prohibits female infanticide. It prohibits it perhaps because it was common enough in pre-Islamic Arabia to require prohibition?⁹ The Vedic and ancient Hindu texts of India reference son preference.¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Roman law referenced it (it went from a father’s right to capital crime).¹³ ¹⁴ The practice predates every modern state, every modern religion in its current form, and every technology we associate with it.

Sex-selective abortion leaves a specific statistical signature that makes it distinguishable from random variation. In families practising sex selection, ratios at first and second births tend to be close to normal. The distortion appears and amplifies at third and fourth births — specifically in families that have not yet produced a son.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

A five-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹⁵ in 2019 compiled 10,835 observations across 202 countries and identified twelve countries with statistically significant sex ratio distortions attributable specifically to sex-selective abortion: China, India, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Montenegro, Taiwan, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Of 23 million¹⁸ girls selectively aborted since 1970, 11.9 million were in China and 10.6 million in India. In 2017 alone, 800,000 girls were aborted in China and 671,000 in India. The most recent count, tracking the accumulation since 1970 across twelve countries, is an estimated 142 million “missing” girls and women.¹⁹

Across centuries and cultures, societies have eliminated girls and women.

The logic
In research from 2008, the economist Nancy Qian studied what happened in rural China when the market price of tea rose — because tea-picking rewards the fine motor skills at which women are thought to excel. When female income increased by US$7.70 — roughly ten per cent of average rural household income — the survival rate of girls rose by a full percentage point. When orchard fruit values rose in regions where men dominate the labour, no equivalent improvement occurred.²⁰

Esther Duflo, in her 2012 survey of the relationship between women’s empowerment and economic development published in the Journal of Economic Literature, documented the same mechanism from the other direction in research which also synthesised from Elaina Rose’s 1999 paper “Consumption Smoothing and Excess Female Mortality in Rural India”.²¹ ²² In India, excess female child mortality — deaths of girls that would not have occurred if girls received care equal to boys — spikes during droughts.²³ When a household faces an income shock, girls are the first to be deprioritised.

Most of the 142 million were not aborted. They were neglected into death after they were born — fed less, treated less, counted less.

Abhijit Banerjee and Duflo’s research on how poor households actually make decisions — rather than how economists assume they do — found that the logic driving these outcomes is not irrational within the terms of the society producing it.²⁴ A son carries the family name, inherits property, provides old-age support, and stays. A daughter, under the systems of inheritance and marriage that govern the societies where missing women cluster most densely, functionally becomes the property of her husband’s family upon marriage.²⁴ The parents who fed and educated her receive nothing.²⁴

Their conclusion, after reviewing decades of evidence, is that economic development alone does not fix this. Economic growth does not automatically raise the value of girls. In India, the sex ratio distortion has been worst in the wealthiest states. Punjab and Haryana — India’s richest agricultural states — have among the lowest sex ratios in the country.²⁵ Ultrasound arrived with prosperity, and prosperity enabled families who previously killed girls after birth to instead eliminate them before. Sen called it “high-tech sexism”.²⁶ Duflo characterises it as a market failure that requires “continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake,”²⁷ because no invisible hand will correct it.

The numbers are not abstract.

In India — where Duflo documented girls being deprioritised first in every household income shock — the national sex ratio is 900 girls per 1,000 boys;²⁸ in Haryana, India’s wealthiest agricultural state, it is 831;²⁸ India’s own Economic Survey counts 63 million missing women,²⁹ and every year 239,000 girls under five die because of their gender (2000-2005).³⁰
In China, the one-child policy combined with ultrasound produced sex ratios of 117 males per 100 females in 2001;³¹ an estimated 11.9 million girls were selectively aborted between 1970 and 2020;¹⁵ the total missing across all causes is 40 million; and the demographic surplus of men left behind has a name — guang gun, “bare branches,” men who will never find wives because their generation’s women were removed before birth.³²³³
In Pakistan, 18% of survey respondents said they did not want even one daughter; the average desired number of sons was 3.05, the average desired number of daughters was 1.15.³⁴ ³⁵
Vietnam’s sex ratio reached 112 in 2006, rising from a natural baseline of 105 in just five years — faster than China or South Korea at their peaks.³⁶
Azerbaijan reached 116 males per 100 females. Twelve countries across five continents, four major religions, every income bracket.³⁷ ³⁸

The variable they share is not poverty, not religion, not geography. It is the uncorrected price of a girl.

In October 2023, the UK Office for National Statistics published data analysed by the Department of Health and Social Care.³⁹ Other research found a statistically significant imbalance in births to Indian mothers in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2025: 118 boys born for every 100 girls, against a national average of 105. At third births specifically, the ratio reached 118:100 in both 2023–24 and 2024–25.⁴⁰ Researchers estimate approximately 400 sex-selective abortions occurred in the UK between 2017 and 2021,³⁹ a statistically significant imbalance consistent with patterns of sex selection.

The present
South Korea is the one country in the twelve that has demonstrably reversed the trend.⁴¹ A sustained government campaign, legal enforcement against illegal sex determination, and a genuine cultural shift in women’s economic participation produced a measurable normalisation of its sex ratio.⁴² It is the evidence that this is reversible.

The burnt girl in Karachi was the inheritor of her foremother’s legacy of being burnt for being women- whether at the stake, or on their dead husbands’ pyres. But something new happened in South Korea. The women who were not eliminated made a decision: They called it the 4B movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu — no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, no sex.⁴³ South Korea’s total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded by any country on earth.⁴⁴ The UN projects its population of 51 million will halve by the end of this century.⁴⁵ The government has spent over $200 billion in sixteen years on pro-natalist policies — childcare subsidies, mortgages for newlywed couples, extended parental leave.⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ The women are not interested.

Sources

The Finrod-Eöl scale

As any Tolkien nerd knows, first age Tolkien characters (and storylines) are a goldmine of layered characters, events, and rich psychology. One never knows what they’ll discover in the books themselves, and what that will change in the reader as an individual. Here are a couple of things I’ve come up with.

The Finrod-Eöl scale of male behaviour
The golden Finrod Felagund represents the idealized “good man” archetype in Tolkien’s legendarium. He’s the eldest son of Finarfin, the King of Nargothrond, and exemplifies noble masculinity: he is described as wise, generous, and uniquely disposed toward friendship with humans. His story culminates in ultimate self-sacrifice when he dies protecting Beren from a werewolf, using only his bare hands, fulfilling an oath he had made. Finrod embodies compassion, cross-species alliance-building, emotional depth, and willingness to sacrifice power for ethical principles. He is frequently characterised as saintly, keeping his oaths no matter the cost and loving those around him even when they were undeserving. His actions demonstrate a form of manhood that resists some aspects of patriarchal dominance. He’s even Galadriel’s big brother.

Eöl the Dark Elf is the other pole of the scale, and is characterised by isolation, misogyny, control, and violence. He traps the lovely Aredhel in the forest of Nan Elmoth and “marries” her in what multiple scholars have interpreted as a relationship founded on coercion and violation. He attempts to control every aspect of Aredhel’s life, forbidding her contact with her kin and the Noldor. When Aredhel and their son Maeglin, born of her rape by Eöl, escape to Gondolin, Eöl pursues them with murderous intent, throwing a poisoned javelin that kills Aredhel when she shields their son. Before his execution, he curses Maeglin, demonstrating profound vindictiveness even in death, even against his own child. He represents violent, controlling, possessive masculinity that views women as property.

In the Finrod-Eöl scale of male behaviour, I posit that Earthly male behaviour is distributed across this spectrum, with most behaviours occupying positions between these extremes. Men’s behaviour isn’t stuck in one place. Each action, each relationship, each choice lands somewhere on this spectrum, with most actions and indeed most men falling between the two poles like any normal distribution. This reflects Raewyn Connell observation that hegemonic masculinity—the culturally idealised form that legitimises patriarchy—is not “normative in the numerical sense, as only a small minority of men may enact it”: few men fully embody either Finrod’s exceptional virtue or Eöl’s extreme toxicity.¹ ²

I want to reiterate this is explicitly about male behaviours, not about male identity or being. This is not about fixing men in permanent positions on the scale. Rather, each behaviour or act can land at a different point on the scale, and whilst each man will find himself at a particular position, this is due to their personal actions overall clustering around that part of the scale. This conceptual scale is supported by both the existence of multiple concepts of masculinities,³ such as hegemonic, complicit, subordinate, and marginalised, as well as by research on masculinity norms.

Besides, identity is fluid.

This is demonstrated by the “Man Box” study, which found that young Australian men who endorsed dominant masculinity norms (inside the “Man Box”) were significantly more likely to perpetrate violence: 47% had perpetrated physical bullying in the past month compared to 7% of those outside the Man Box, and 46% had made sexual comments to unknown women compared to 7%.⁴ That is to say, masculinity is a scale. Most men practise what Connell terms “complicit masculinity,” in which they do not fully embody hegemonic ideals but “still benefit from the ‘patriarchal dividend’ that advantages men in general through the subordination of women”. These are men who may not personally engage in the most extreme forms of masculine domination but who tacitly support the system that enables it.⁵

The Core Thesis: How “Finrods” Benefit from “Eöls”
My central argument is that men positioned toward the Finrod end of the scale—those who exhibit more prosocial, egalitarian, or feminist behaviours—derive systematic benefits from the existence of men at the Eöl end. Relative comparison (moral and social) becomes a mechanism that sustains patriarchy, even among men who see themselves as “progressive”. This operates through several mechanisms:

The Relativity Advantage:⁶ Egregiously bad actors make average male behaviour seem exceptional by comparison, granting unearned credit to men who are merely ‘not-Eöl.’
The Deflection Function: The existence of extreme cases allows men across most of the spectrum to deflect responsibility for systemic gender oppression. That is, by pointing to Eöls, men on the Finrod side of the scale, and those in between the poles, can maintain that they are fundamentally different, obscuring the ways they may still benefit from and participate in patriarchal systems.
The Patriarchal Dividend:⁷ ⁸ ⁹ Another of Connell’s theories, which says that “men benefit from the overall subordination of women” regardless of their individual beliefs or behaviors. In patriarchal systems, “all men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy”. Even men who genuinely oppose gender inequality receive material advantages—higher wages, freedom from fear of sexual violence, presumed competence in professional settings—that flow from systemic structures maintained by the more overtly oppressive behaviors of men further along the scale toward Eöl.
The Protection Racket:¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Men who present as “good” often receive trust, access, and emotional labour from women specifically because they are perceived as safe in contrast to dangerous men. The fear women experience from the Eöls of the world makes them grateful for and dependent on the Finrods. This manifests in what scholars call “protector masculinity,” where men gain status by positioning themselves as guardians against other men’s violence, which “affirms femininity as subordinate and lacking in agency”.
Structural Complicity:¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ All men benefit from economic, sexual, emotional, and/or psychological benefits from the overall subordination of women regardless of their individual beliefs or behaviors. Even men who genuinely oppose gender inequality receive material advantages—higher wages, freedom from fear of sexual violence, presumed competence in professional settings—that flow from systemic structures maintained by the more overtly oppressive behaviors of men further along the scale toward Eöl.
Male solidarity: Men across the scale often maintain solidarity with one another through silence about other men’s problematic behaviors. This silence remains common because it preserves male homosocial bonds. The “good guys” benefit from not disrupting male solidarity, even as this silence enables the “bad guys” to continue harmful behaviors (you may have heard that German saying about how if there is 1 Nazi at the table and 9 other people not refuting the Nazi, there are actually 10 Nazis at the table. The male solidarity I’m talking about is something like that).
Reputation Without Transformation: The scale creates a reputational economy in which men can gain feminist credibility through relatively minimal actions. The bar for male allyship is lowered by the existence of egregious actors, such that basic respect for women’s autonomy or basic emotional competence becomes praiseworthy rather than normal.

Patriarchy: the Money-Labour-Violence Pyramid
But first: does the patriarchy even exist? I’ll prove that it does in three points. But first, is there a widely agreed definition of this patriarchy?

Patriarchy is defined by the United Nations and international organizations as a social structure in which men and boys hold primary power and privilege in families, governments, and social organization, while women and marginalized genders are subordinated and structurally disadvantaged. Sociologist Sylvia Walby characterizes it as “a system of social structures and practises in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women”.²⁰ ²¹

So now, about the proof. According to this widely accepted definition, patriarchy is a pervasive social power structure. Now let’s analyse whether the evidence supports the existence of such a system by looking at three key dimensions:
1. Money is power: who controls wealth and property;
2. What is paid: who performs labour that sustains the system; and
3. Power is power: how that power is protected.

If money is power, then the global distribution of wealth reveals who holds structural power:

Men globally own $105 trillion more in wealth than women—a gap equivalent to more than four times the size of the entire US economy.²² ²³
Women own less than 20% of the world’s land globally, with this figure dropping to as low as 10% in some regions.²⁴²⁵
Only 15% of agricultural landholders worldwide are women; 85% are men.²⁵
In India, despite progressive legal reforms, women constitute only 14% of landowners and own just 11% of agricultural land in rural landowning households.²⁵
Only 15% of the world’s 100 richest billionaires are women, and most inherited their wealth rather than creating it themselves.²⁶
The 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa combined.²⁷

Even among the poorest populations (bottom 25% of wealth distribution), the gender gap persists:²⁷

Poorest men hold median wealth of €1,755.92
Poorest women hold median wealth of €171.11
This means poorest men have approximately 10 times the wealth of poorest women.
Among the extremely poor living on less than $1.90/day, there are 122 poor women for every 100 poor men in peak working years (ages 25-34). This proves patriarchy isn’t just a “rich woman’s problem”—it’s a structural feature that disadvantages women at every economic level.²⁸ ²⁹

The concentration of wealth in male hands isn’t accidental—it’s the result of centuries of legal restrictions that prevented women from accessing, owning, and controlling economic resources:

United States:³⁰

Until the 1960s, women could not open bank accounts in their own names.
Until 1974 (Equal Credit Opportunity Act), single women almost always needed a male co-signer to obtain credit, and married women were routinely denied credit cards and loans.³¹
Before 1848 (Married Women’s Property Act in New York), a married woman’s property automatically became her husband’s property upon marriage.
1839: Mississippi became the first US state to allow women to legally own property in their own names.

Europe:

France: Women were not allowed to open bank accounts in their own name until 1881.³² ³³
United Kingdom: The Married Women’s Property Act allowing women to control their own earnings was passed in 1870.³⁴

Current Global Restrictions (as of 2024):

In 34 countries, daughters do not have equal inheritance rights to sons.³⁵
In more than 30 countries, women do not have the right to inherit land, either because laws specifically prohibit it or customary practises override legal protections.³⁶
In 38 countries, inheritance laws for daughters and sons are unequal.³⁷
In 18 countries, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working.³⁸
In 17 countries, including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, laws restrict women’s ability to travel outside the home.³⁸
In 32 countries, including Jordan, Haiti, and the Philippines, women cannot obtain a passport without male permission.³⁸
In 104 countries, women are prevented from working in the same occupations as men.³⁹
167 countries (88% of all countries surveyed) have at least one law restricting women’s economic opportunity.³⁹

So that’s the first part of my proof that the patriarchy exists. Now let’s talk about how this power structure is protected. Sociological theory establishes that social power structures are maintained through the monopoly and strategic deployment of violence. The state maintains its power through the “legitimate monopoly on violence”, and hierarchical social systems are similarly sustained through the threat and use of force.

Crucially: There are NO jurisdictions where men face equivalent legal restrictions on property ownership, banking access, or economic participation.

Inheritance laws are among the strongest structural evidence of patriarchy (because they document how wealth and property are systematically transferred through male lineages across generations):

Islamic Inheritance Law:

Under Islamic law, which governs inheritance for 1.8 billion people globally:
Sons receive twice the share of daughters (Surah An-Nisa 4:11: “to the male, a portion equal to that of two females.”).⁴⁰ ⁴¹
If a Muslim man dies, his wife receives:⁴² ⁴³ ⁴⁴
1/4 of his estate if he has no children
1/8 of his estate if he has children
The remainder goes primarily to his children and male relatives.
If a Muslim woman dies, her husband receives:⁴⁵ ⁴⁶
1/2 of her estate if she has no children
1/4 of her estate if she has children
Notably, her property can revert to her husband and his family, rather than to her natal family, however there is no blanket rule that her entire estate “reverts” to her husband and his family—her natal family (parents, siblings, etc.) can inherit if they are eligible heirs under Islamic law.⁴⁷
A Muslim’s will can only dispose of up to one-third of their property beyond these fixed shares; the rest is strictly governed by Islamic inheritance laws.⁴⁸
This legal structure ensures that wealth remains concentrated in male hands across generations, as women inherit less and their property flows back into male-controlled family lines (because sons receive double and husbands get a significant fixed share, it is often the case that more property flows back into the husband’s lineage or remains concentrated in the hands of male relatives across generations).⁴⁹

Hindu Succession Act (India), that is applicable to at least 1 billion people:

According to Section 15(1) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, when a Hindu woman dies without a will, her property (including self-acquired property) devolves in the following order:⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²⁵³
- First: To her sons, daughters, and husband
- Second: To the heirs of the husband (not her own parents)
- Third: To her mother and father
- Fourth: To the heirs of the father
- Fifth: To the heirs of the mother
- This means even property a woman earns herself is legally structured to flow back into her husband’s family or her father’s family—not through her maternal lineage. As expected, property she inherited from her father or husband automatically returns to those male lineages if she has no children.⁵⁴
- Since amendments in 2005, Hindu women have equal rights to inherit property, but upon their death, the succession order dictated by Section 15 preserves a male lineage priority, especially for self-acquired property.⁵⁵ ⁵⁶

Global Pattern:57

Men inherit earlier in life than women, giving them critical time to invest and grow wealth.⁵⁸
Men receive larger inheritances and more valuable assets (businesses, real estate) while women receive cash.
In families of large business owners, daughters are 18 percentage points less likely to receive business or financial assets than sons.

This systematic pattern of inheritance laws globally ensures that wealth, property, and economic power remain concentrated in male hands across generations—the operational definition of a patriarchal economic structure.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” explains how power structures are maintained not only through physical force but through normalized domination. However, physical violence remains the ultimate enforcement mechanism:⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ ⁶¹ patriarchal theory sees violence as an extension of authority, control, and maintenance of the social order—especially when boys and men are socialised to see violence as a legitimate tool of power and when male-headed households wield disproportionate control over women and children. Sociological studies and UN definitions argue that “patriarchal violence is all violence that creates or maintains men’s power and dominance … the enforcement tool that sustains patriarchy”.⁶² ⁶³ ⁶⁴ ⁶⁵

If patriarchy is a real power structure, we should expect to see:

Men disproportionately committing violence to establish and maintain dominance
Women disproportionately targeted for control, especially in contexts related to sexuality, reproduction, and family
Consistent patterns across all cultures and jurisdictions, indicating structural rather than individual causes

The evidence overwhelmingly confirms this:

Defining Violent Crime and Crimes of Power/Dominance: Violent crimes include: homicide, assault, rape, sexual assault, robbery, kidnapping, and domestic violence—crimes involving the use or threat of force against others.⁶⁶
Crimes of power/dominance include: violent crimes committed to establish hierarchical control, assert authority, control resources or people, or subordinate victims. These include sexual violence, intimate partner violence, human trafficking, and gang/territorial violence.⁶⁷ ⁶⁸

Global Statistics: Male Perpetration of Violent Crime
Homicide (Murder):⁶⁶ ⁶⁹

90-95% of all homicide suspects globally are male, based on data from 193 countries.
80% of all homicide victims are male—but this reflects male-on-male violence to establish dominance and status in public contexts.
However, 82% of intimate partner/family homicide victims are female, while only 18% are male. Women are killed by intimate partners; men are killed by other men in public/gang violence.⁷⁰
In the US, recent data shows 51% of child maltreatment perpetrators are women, and 49% are men, largely because mothers are overwhelmingly primary caregivers. However, when looking at severe violence (serious physical and sexual abuse), men are overrepresented as perpetrators.⁷¹ ⁷²
Male non-parents (stepfathers, adoptive fathers, boyfriends, unrelated men) are much more likely to maltreat girls as compared to women perpetrators. Additionally, male offenders acting alone are more likely to target girls than boys.⁷¹

Rape and Sexual Violence:

99% of rapists worldwide are male.⁷² ⁷³
91% of rape victims are female.⁷²
The WHO confirms: “Intimate partner and sexual violence are mostly perpetrated by men against women” across 161 countries.⁷⁴
Victims span all identities—men, women, children, trans people—but the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male regardless of victim identity.⁷² ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶
Globally, about 90% of sexual abuse against children is perpetrated by men or male adolescents, and only around 10% by women or female adolescents. This pattern holds across institutional, intrafamilial, and online environments.⁷⁷ ⁷⁸
Key government reports in places like Australia found that 93.9% of institutional child sexual abuse was perpetrated by adult men.⁷⁸
Both male and female perpetrators victimize boys and girls, but men are more likely to target girls, while women (in rare cases) are more likely to target boys.⁷⁷
Studies consistently show that even when accounting for underreporting of female perpetrators, the vast majority of detected offenders are male.⁷⁷

Human Trafficking:⁷⁸ ⁷⁹

70-75% of all convicted human traffickers worldwide are men.
61% of detected trafficking victims globally are women and girls (39% women, 22% girls).
For sexual exploitation specifically: 98% of trafficking victims are women and girls.⁸¹

Sex Work and Commercial Sexual Exploitation:⁸² ⁸³

85-95% of customers/buyers of sex workers and trafficking victims are men.
In regions where sex work is criminalized, men comprise the overwhelming majority of buyers.
80-90% of prostitutes/sex workers globally are female, with an average starting age of 14.⁸⁴
Approximately 99% of forced prostitution or sex trafficking victims are female.⁸¹

These patterns demonstrate that:

Men systematically use violence to establish and maintain dominance—over other men (public violence, gang violence) and over women (intimate partner violence, sexual violence, trafficking).
Women are disproportionately targeted for violence in contexts of control—especially sexual and reproductive control.
The pattern is global and consistent, appearing across all 193 countries measured, all cultures, and all legal systems.

This is not about “men being bad by nature”—it’s about a structural system that allocates to men the role of using force to maintain hierarchies, and positions women as targets of control, particularly regarding sexuality and reproduction. Violence is not peripheral to patriarchy—it is the enforcement mechanism through which male dominance is maintained.

And now onto the backbone that sustains the pay and inheritance disparity, and feeds male violence: girls’ and women’s unpaid labour, or the systematic extraction of unpaid labour from women, which subsidizes the entire economic system while keeping women economically dependent and disadvantaged.

Globally, women spend 2.8 more hours per day than men on unpaid care and domestic work.⁸⁶
By age 29, women do over 3 times more unpaid care work than men: women spend 5.3 hours more per day on unpaid care work in Ethiopia and India, and 4.5 hours more per day in Peru.⁸⁷
Girls aged 17-18 spend an average of 5 hours and 15 minutes per day on unpaid care work—more than double the time spent on homework, and nearly 1 hour more than adult women globally.⁸⁸
When combining paid work + unpaid care work, women do more total work than men in every country measured.⁸⁷

Labour Force Exclusion:⁸⁹

708 million women worldwide are outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities, compared to only 40 million men.
45% of all women outside the labour force cite care responsibilities as the reason, compared to only 5% of men.
This means unpaid care work prevents nearly three-quarters of a billion women from participating in paid employment.

If valued at minimum wage rates, women’s unpaid care work would contribute trillions of dollars annually to the global economy—work that is currently invisible in GDP calculations.⁸⁷ ⁸⁹

The gendered division of unpaid labour is not a natural outcome of preferences—it is a systematic pattern that:

Concentrates wealth in male hands: Men’s work is paid; women’s work is unpaid. This directly creates and maintains the gender wealth gap.⁹⁰ ⁸⁹
Restricts women’s economic independence: 708 million women cannot participate in the paid labour force because they’re doing unpaid care work, making them economically dependent.⁸⁹
Benefits men as a class: Men’s participation in the paid labour force is subsidized by women’s unpaid labour at home (cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare).⁸⁷ ⁸⁸
Is enforced through social norms and lack of alternatives: Women don’t “choose” to do 5.3 more hours of unpaid work per day—structural factors (lack of affordable childcare, social expectations, lack of parental leave for men) enforce this division.⁸⁷ ⁸⁸
Research consistently shows that mothers earn lower hourly wages than women without children. Nationally in the United States, employed mothers are paid just 62.5 cents per dollar paid to fathers. Mothers who work full-time year-round earn 71.4 cents per dollar compared to fathers. The motherhood penalty is responsible for nearly 80 percent of the gender pay gap, and each child under five years old is projected to reduce the earnings of a typical mother by 15 percent.⁹¹ (of course, for this society will have to first acknowledge that pregnancy and delivery is labour, parenthood is labour and of this latter form most of the labour is performed by mothers, not fathers).

Crucially, this pattern is consistent across cultures, religions, and economic systems, appearing in rich and poor countries, capitalist and socialist economies, individualist and collectivist cultures. This universality indicates a structural system, not individual choice.

Therefore, if patriarchy is defined as a social structure that perpetuates the dominance of one gender (men) over all others, and if we accept that:

Money is power, and
Power is maintained through violence and the threat of violence, and
Power is born and sustained through the extraction of unpaid labour.

Then the evidence is irrefutable:

We live in a patriarchy because:
Economic Power Is Concentrated in Male Hands.
This Power Is Protected Through Violence.
This power is sustained through systematically devalued and unpaid work done primarily by women, and women do more total work (paid + unpaid) than men in every country measured

These are documented facts from UN agencies, World Bank, WHO, UNODC, and national legal codes—not interpretations or opinions. The patterns are consistent across all 193 countries, all cultures, all legal systems, and all economic levels, from the richest to the poorest.

Empirical Support for Universal Male Benefit
Now back to my scale.

The proposition that all men benefit from patriarchy, regardless of their position on the Finrod-Eöl scale, finds support across feminist scholarship. Studies examining men’s attitudes toward gender equality reveal that men often recognize these benefits. One analysis notes that even men who intellectually support feminism may resist it because “men as a group are removed from their privileged position” under more egalitarian systems, which “does appear to be a net decrease” in their advantages. The research also demonstrates that patriarchy benefits men “more than it harms them,” creating rational incentives for men across the spectrum to maintain the system even when it also imposes costs.⁹² The idea is that masculinity as a whole conspires and works to maintain its empire.

We’re all caterpillars
Now here comes my second theory: all of us live in a cocoon of patriarchy- some of us more sheltered than others, men definitely more advantaged than women, but all of us inside the same social chrysalis.

No one is free.

In her 1993 book The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood says “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. But I’d like to extend this and say, not even men are free from the male gaze: a Reddit discussion⁹³^{(I’m using Reddit as proof of culture, not as an academic source)}on whether men internalise the male gaze notes that “the idealized gym physique often appeals to men more than to women. The tough, muscular archetype they idolise tends to be more attractive to their male peers”. This observation is supported by research showing that men experience body-objectification, body shame, and self-surveillance when their physical appearance fails to fit unrealistic body ideals.⁹⁴

Men must constantly perform strength, emotional suppression, aggression, competitiveness, and other qualities appreciated by other men, not women, to maintain their position within masculine hierarchies and justify their own masculinity to other men, including, maybe, their own internalised male gaze that tells them what is or isn’t masculine. Even men who occupy the “Finrod” position on the scale remain trapped within these structures, performing “good masculinity” in ways that are still legible within patriarchal frameworks.

The panopticism is real.

Our circus and our monkeys
If we accept that the male gaze entraps everyone—women internalising surveillance from imagined male audiences, men performing for the approval of other men—then we must confront an uncomfortable truth: all of us are living in different layers of patriarchal cocoons. These cocoons are not uniform; they vary by gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and other intersecting identities. As intersectional feminist theory teaches us, oppression is not “a one-size-fits-all scheme”. Different groups experience oppression differently, and these experiences are compounded by the “interlocking oppressions” of multiple systems of domination: women exist within patriarchal cocoons that constrain their movement, economic participation, self-perception, and bodily autonomy, and men exist within patriarchal cocoons that demand constant performance of masculinity, suppression of vulnerability, and adherence to hierarchical dominance structures. The cocoon that constrains men may offer more privileges and freedoms than those constraining women, but it is a cocoon nonetheless.

These cocoons are further layered by other axes of identity. Dalit women in India face oppression “differently” than upper-caste women, fighting not only sexism but “casteism and fetishisation of minorities”. Muslim women navigate “sexism in their community and outside the community, objectification of their Muslim identity”. Black women in the United States experience discrimination at “the intersection of two aspects of their identity; their race and their gender,” creating “a unique lived experience” that cannot be reduced to the simple addition of racism and sexism. LGBTQ+ individuals face subordination within masculine hierarchies that privilege heterosexuality.

Similarly, a wealthy white “Finrod” benefits far more from the patriarchal dividend than a poor Black “Finrod”, a Dalit man may be subordinated within caste hierarchy but still benefits from patriarchy within his community, and gay men face subordination within traditional heteronormative masculinity hierarchies but may still receive economic benefits if they’re white and middle-class, and certainly they will receive more “blind” privilege (that is, privilege for just being men when those they are interacting with are unaware of their sexual orientation) than women of the same or lower socio-economic classes, and sometimes even in comparison to women of comparatively higher SECs.

All this just means that privilege and disadvantages exist in complex webs of identity: A heterosexual upper-caste man may benefit enormously from patriarchy and caste hierarchy while still being constrained by the demands of his own internalised male gaze. A white feminist woman may fight gender oppression while benefiting from racial privilege that shields her from experiences faced by women of colour. “Privilege and oppression can exist at the same time”, creating what scholars call “intersectional” or “multiply marginalised” positions.

This also means that acknowledging the existence, protection and oppression of this patriarchal cocoon is the first step to liberation: after all, only those who recognise their own entrapment can free themselves of it. The cocoon cannot be pierced unless people can acknowledge it exists at all.

Madonnas and non-madonnas
The Madonna-Whore complex, first formally described by Sigmund Freud (though present in cultural thinking long before), describes a psychological splitting in which women are categorised into two mutually exclusive categories: the Madonna (pure, nurturing, asexual, maternal) and the Whore (sexual, promiscuous, degraded, dangerous). There is no middle ground. A woman cannot be both nurturing and sexual, both respectable and sexually expressive, both Madonna and autonomous agent. She is one or the other, and the split serves patriarchal interests.

So how do these fictional women compare with our fictional men? Well they don’t because first of all there is no scale, and my theory posits a scale. Secondly, and importantly, according to patriarchy women are either inherently Madonnas or Prostitutes, and are characterised so by men themselves based on how men feel about them (ever seen men turn on women they are pursuing and call them either unattractive or whores or both when those women reject sexual advances by these men?) The Finrod-Eöl scale is about male behaviour, not their inherent worth has humans, not their beauty, nor even their availability to female fantasies.

Patriarchy insists on creating splits- you as a person fit either one description, or it’s opposite- a forced bifurcation into nonexistent extremes. The Madonna-Whore split tells women: “You can be respected or sexual, but not both. Choose.” This constrains women’s freedom and keeps them divided (respectable women blame “sluts,” and vice versa). But the Finrod-Eöl scale says you can choose to behave in any way you like, and that behaviour will fall on a spectrum- but still be constrained within the patriarchy unless you work to dismantle it.

Sources (I’ve duplicated one somewhere, cannot find which one, apologies)

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: