Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction

Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we show that a society's risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these norms differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we start by showing that languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction than those from male-dominant societies. We propose a conceptual framework in which male-dominant societies are more expansionist via two channels: (i) military capacity sustained through surplus extraction, and (ii) demographic pressure through women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor. As a result, they expand at the expense of more gender-egalitarian groups. We test this prediction in two empirical settings. Leveraging European colonization as a natural experiment, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are more vulnerable to cultural extinction. We examine alternative pre-colonial societal arrangements and find that cultural extinction is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than in hierarchy or dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighboring groups' gender structure across Africa, we further show that languages from gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in grid cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion across the continent.