Shodagor women cooperate across domains of work and childcare to solve an adaptive problem

Abstract

Across human societies, women's economic production and their contributions to childcare are critical in supporting reproductive fitness for themselves, their spouses and children. Yet, the necessity of performing both work and childcare tasks presents women with an adaptive problem in which they must determine how best to allocate their time and energy between these tasks. Women often use cooperative relationships with alloparents to solve this problem, but whether or not women cooperate across different domains (e.g. work and childcare) to access alloparents remains relatively under-explored. Using social network data collected with Shodagor households in Bangladesh, we show that women who need childcare help in order to work draw on cooperative work partners as potential alloparents, and that all women rely heavily on kin, but not reciprocal cooperation for childcare help. These results indicate that Shodagor women strategize to create work and childcare relationships in ways that help solve the adaptive problem they face. We discuss the implications of our results and the example provided by Shodagor women for a broader understanding of women's cooperative relationships, including the importance of socio-ecological circumstances and gendered divisions of labour in shaping women's cooperative strategies. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives’.

New perspectives on the evolution of women's cooperation

“…Furthermore, women and girls are adept at exchanging cooperation across domains to balance multiple needs, such as childcare and productive labour. Starkweather and colleagues ([ 122 ], in this issue) showed that the cooperative childcare and work partner networks of Shodagor women in rural Bangladesh differed according to women's economic activities. Women who cooperated together as traders were also likely to provide childcare for each other.…”

Sedentarization and maternal childcare networks: role of risk, gender and demography

“…Discussing null results is always challenging as there may be a number of ecological, theoretical and methodological reasons why our predictions were not supported. Ecologically, it may be that (fishing-focused) food production is not as incompatible with childcare in the Agta as we have assumed—as compatibility depends on the types of economic tasks (see [ 56 ] for discussion)—reducing the need to use childcare as a solution to food shortfalls. Certainly, in the coastal population, women often engaged in marine foraging in the inter-tidal zones, collecting shrimps, crabs, mollusc and octopus.…”

“…As we have not included in our analysis cooperation in food sharing, production and domestic labour we are ignoring the links between the layers in women's multiplex social networks. As argued by Atkisson and colleagues [ 63 ], this means we risk drawing the wrong conclusions because the cooperation that occurs in one domain can structure another [ 56 ]. Relatedly, a further issue is that the distinction between mobile and settled camps is not great enough in our sample.…”

“…Therefore, we expect individuals to cooperate in childcare with the same households who provide food and other resources [ 64 ]. This dynamic is demonstrated in Starkweather et al 's [ 56 ] investigation into the trade-offs between work and childcare in the Shodgar, in which women who traded together were more likely to provide childcare, increasing the range of helpers they had available to them and ensuring they received the assistance required. Therefore, settlement, and its associated increase in material wealth, is expected to result in smaller, more kin-focused networks as a result of wider changes to how households deal with risk.…”

“…Therefore, reciprocal cooperation results in direct benefits (i.e. later-received help is more valuable [ 52 ]) and takes the form of food sharing [ 30 ], domestic labour [ 53 ] and childrearing [ 54 ], as all domains require time and energy to ensure the household needs are met, and cooperation easily moves between these different domains or currencies [ 36 , 37 , 55 , 56 ]. For this ‘risk-pooling’ to function, risk must be uncorrelated between exposure (i.e.…”