gender – 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

Risk VI – How Disasters Amplify Systemic Injustice

The previous pieces in this series looked at how risk is priced, transferred, and hedged. This one looks at who absorbs it when none of those mechanisms work, and why that’s never random.

When devastating floods hit Kerala in 2018, a Dalit family walked three kilometres to the nearest relief centre at a temple, only to be told they were not allowed to enter.¹ A year later, when Cyclone Fani ravaged Odisha, another Dalit family walked to a relief shelter and was also turned away.¹ ²

Both were excluded by caste.

As activist Sangram Mallick put it: “Your caste determines what kind of treatment you will get during a disaster.”¹

These are often described as failures of disaster response. They are not. They are examples of how disaster response works.

Environmental stress (floods, heatwaves, droughts, cyclones, etc.) appears neutral, but its effects are not. Repeatedly, across countries and across hazards, harm clusters along pre-existing social lines: caste, race, gender, income, disability, age. The World Meteorological Organization puts it plainly:³ inequality and disaster vulnerability are “two sides of the same coin.” Climate change, in this sense, is not an external shock landing on a functioning system. It is a multiplier applied to a system that is already unequal.

To understand how that multiplication works, it helps to look at disasters not as singular events, but as a process, one that unfolds in three stages:

Who is exposed before the event.
Who is able to survive during it.
And who is able to recover after it.

I. Pre-Event: Who is placed in harm’s way
Across contexts, marginalised groups are systematically pushed into what are, in effect, sacrifice zones- places that are cheaper precisely because they are more dangerous.

In India, research published in the journal Demography found that marginalised caste groups experience 25–150% higher heat exposure at work than dominant caste groups, even after controlling for income, education, and geography, a pattern the authors described as “thermal injustice.”⁴ Separately, a 19-year study published in the journal Temperature found that India recorded nearly 20,000 heatstroke deaths between 2001 and 2019, a figure researchers say is an undercount given systemic underreporting.⁵

The same structural logic appears elsewhere. In the United States, racially segregated housing patterns have concentrated Black communities in urban heat islands with less tree cover and higher exposure to extreme temperatures.⁶ ⁷ Indigenous communities, displaced from ancestral land through colonial processes, are now disproportionately located in areas more exposed to climate hazards such as drought, wildfire, and extreme heat.⁸

Income reinforces this exposure. A global study of 573 flood events found that higher inequality within a country correlates with higher flood mortality, and that the protective effect of economic growth disappears once inequality is accounted for.⁹ So GDP growth appears protective in simple models but that effect vanishes when inequality is held constant: for the more than 80% of workers in low- and lower-middle-income countries employed in the informal sector, exposure is not just about where they live, but how they work.¹⁰ In Delhi, daily surveys of informal workers during peak summer showed that each 1°C increase in wet-bulb^{(Wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature air can reach by evaporating water into it. It measures how effectively sweat evaporates to cool bodies, thus accounting for both heat and humidity. Unlike standard temperature, high wet bulb temperatures mean sweat cannot evaporate, making it difficult for the body to cool down, because high humidity means sweat cannot evaporate as easily.)}¹¹ temperature reduced earnings by 19%, with losses reaching 40% during heatwaves.¹² Medical expenses also rose 14% per degree, reaching 25% on heatwave days.¹² For them, heat is not a background condition, it is a direct constraint on survival.

II. During the Event: Who absorbs the shock
When a disaster hits, it does not affect everyone equally. It interacts with existing vulnerabilities, whether physiological, social, and/ or economic, and amplifies them.

For many women, the danger is not only environmental but social. A systematic review across 15 countries found that disasters increase violence against women through three pathways: economic entrapment, unsafe displacement environments, and shifts in household power dynamics.¹³ After Hurricane Katrina, intimate partner violence among displaced women in Mississippi nearly tripled within two years (went from 12.5% to 34.4%).¹³

Displacement itself often creates conditions where harm becomes easier. Camps without lighting, locks, or private sanitation are not just inadequate—they are enabling environments.¹³

For people with disabilities, the barriers are more immediate. In the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, persons with disabilities were twice as likely to die.¹⁴ Across disaster types globally, this ratio ranges from two to four times.¹⁵ The reasons are rarely mysterious: evacuation systems that assume mobility, communication systems that assume visibility or hearing, shelters that assume independence.¹⁵

Age compounds vulnerability in different ways. During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave (United States), a majority of those who died were over 65¹⁶: in Oregon alone, approximately two-thirds of the 107 confirmed heat deaths were over that age.¹⁷ Physiological factors, such as reduced thermoregulation, chronic illness, play a role, but so do structural ones: isolation, dependence on caregivers, limited access to timely information.

For informal workers, the choice during a disaster is often binary: stop working and lose income, or continue working and risk physical collapse. A salaried worker may retreat indoors. A day labourer cannot.¹²

The disaster, in other words, does not create vulnerability in the moment. It exposes how unevenly the capacity to withstand shock is distributed.

III. Post-Event: Who is able to recover
If the disaster itself reveals inequality, recovery is where it becomes entrenched.

A 2023 IMF working paper found that income inequality increases after severe disasters across both advanced and developing economies, particularly when shocks are repeated or coincide with downturns.¹⁸ Recovery is not a reset to equality, it is an underlining of pre-existing societal furrows.

This underlining, in the form of aid, often follows the logic of the market. Systems designed to restore property values tend to benefit those who already have property, while offering little to those who do not.¹⁹ The result is that those with assets recover faster and more fully, while those without fall further behind.

At this point it is important to ask what allowed the wealthy asset-owner to build their initial wealth? There are many who truly come from nothing- including no social status, but there are many who do benefit from at least their social background, such as a poor person who nevertheless benefits from a high caste status, or a person who has exactly the same background and qualifications as another, but benefits from their gender or sexual identity.

Migration is one of the clearest outcomes of this gap. Research has shown that marginalised caste groups in India are significantly more likely to be displaced by climate impacts, with many becoming vulnerable to trafficking and forced labour during that process.²⁰ Globally, climate change is expected to displace tens of millions by mid-century, with the most vulnerable populations facing the highest risks during movement and resettlement.²¹

Food security follows a similar pattern. Global assessments show that the majority of the world’s population already lives in countries below the average food security threshold, and warming scenarios are expected to push hundreds of millions more below it.²² Economic growth offers only limited protection, because it raises income (usually along socially-accepted lines⁹) without fundamentally strengthening resilience.²³

Recovery, then, is not simply about rebuilding what was lost. It determines who has the resources to face the next disaster—and who does not.

Isn’t disaster indiscriminate?
It is often said that disasters do not discriminate.

If that were true, their impacts would be randomly distributed.

They are not.

Across countries, across hazards, and across time, the same pattern repeats: those who are already marginalised face greater exposure, suffer greater harm, and recover more slowly. Even major risk models have historically failed to account for these differences, despite extensive evidence that social inequality drives disaster outcomes.²⁴

This consistency is the point. The pattern is not incidental, it is structural. The cycle is Inequality → Disaster → Unequal Recovery → Deeper Inequality → Next Disaster

When that Dalit family in Kerala was turned away from a relief centre, the issue was not access to a building. It was access to protection itself- who is considered entitled to it, and who is not.

Climate change is often framed as a shared crisis. But its impacts are not shared equally, and its costs are not distributed randomly. They follow the structure of the system they move through.

Disasters do not redraw those lines. They deepen them.

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)

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