Why feminism worked best in the West with Alice Evans

Social scientist Alice Evans talks about why, despite a superficially similar feminist movement in East Asia, Western feminism has been much successful. Alice, Sam and Aria talk about dating markets, drinking culture at work, top-down media control, and what tax policy is best for motivating people to have more children.

For more of Alice's work, check out her Substack.

Go to worksinprogress.co to read more from Works in Progress.

You can watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

References

• Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women' s Rights Worldwide Paperback by Hawon Jung

• The clan and the corporation: Sustaining cooperation in China and Europe by Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini

• The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden by Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh

• Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization Hardcover by Edward Slingerland

Transcript

Sam Bowman: Hi, welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. My name’s Sam Bowman. I’m one of the editors at Works in Progress.

Aria Babu: My name’s Aria. I’m also an editor at Works in Progress.

Sam Bowman: Our guest today is Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a social scientist at King’s College London, and she also writes the excellent Substack, The Great Gender Divergence. And I wanted to start, Alice, by asking: what is The Great Gender Divergence?

Alice Evans: Thank you, Sam. So The Great Gender Divergence is about why the entire world has become more gender equal, and why some societies are more gender equal than others. Over the past century, women in some parts of the world – like Latin America, East Asia, Europe – have made tremendous strides in terms of gaining status, running parliaments, working in high-end careers, and also gaining protections from male violence.

But in other places, women continue to be very much suppressed and their mobility is limited and they continue to have low status. So the question is: why? What I’ve been trying to do, rather ambitiously, is study the cultural evolution of every single society in the world, going back thousands of years. And I’m the first person in the world to do qualitative research pretty much across all world regions. So I’m trying to cobble together this massive jigsaw.

Aria Babu: Is there anywhere in the world that is less gender equal now than it was, say, a hundred years ago?

Alice Evans: Aria, that’s a great question. I think a hundred years ago, before the advent of state institutions and modern communication technology, there would’ve been an enormous amount of cultural heterogeneity. So there may well have been some matrilineal tribe where women had high status in their village, and maybe that could have gotten suffocated, say by the Iranian Islamic Revolution, right? So there’s lots of heterogeneity, lots of things moving backwards and forwards. But I think for the most part, most parts of the world have seen improvements in women’s status and protections from violence.

Sam Bowman: What accounts for that being such a straightforward trend everywhere?

Alice Evans: Economic growth. So job-creating economic growth is a powerful engine of social change because, one, it motivates parents to invest in education. Two, when there is contraception and other kinds of technology, it enables women to reduce their fertility, control their time, pursue education, pursue careers.

But it’s mediated by culture. So in cultures where male honor depends on female seclusion, women don’t necessarily seize those jobs. In authoritarian countries where women are heavily repressed in terms of what they can say and organize, it’s harder to mobilize and persuade at scale.

Sam Bowman: Is your view that growth enables empowerment of women by providing resources for their education, and by creating incentives for it?

Alice Evans: Absolutely. I have this theoretical framework called the honor-income trade-off. Let’s suppose in South Asia and East Asia, they’re both concerned about male honor, but they also value income. So which one do you value more? And if you value income at all, if you value upward mobility and economic prosperity, you’ll be like, yeah, sure, okay, it’ll hurt our face, say in East Asia, a little if we send our daughters to the factory. But when the returns are so great, when there are labor-hungry factories and the recruiters are saying to the rural villages, “please give us your daughters,” those Chinese fathers sign the forms and send their daughters off.And when all the girls go, then you have a collective action change where you shift the equilibrium and it becomes normal, totally accepted, and a normal part of adolescence. And then women go into the cities, they gain careers, they become journalists and scriptwriters, and they tell their own stories. And this is a crucial process. It’s not just about individual women having jobs, but about reshaping the script and persuading people at scale and then mobilizing for stronger reforms.

Aria Babu: This might be too strange of a subculture, but with ultra-Orthodox Jews, or maybe just Orthodox Jews in Israel, the men basically seem to spend most of their time on religious study, but the women actually work. They still seem like they’ve got a very conservative gendered culture. Is that actually not the case? And they are much more liberal in ways that don’t fit my understanding of liberalness? Or is that actually just one of those exceptions that happens throughout the world?

Alice Evans: Great question. I’m very fascinated by Jewish culture. Ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to have six women per child. 80% of ultra-Orthodox women work. And I think there it’s important to recognize that high rates of female labor force participation don’t necessarily translate into status. So across Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, women can be toiling in the fields, but men may still be allowed access to the community governance circle. So it’s still the men who are doing the specific Hasidic rituals, only the men who are studying scripture, and that’s a high-status activity. So here it’s really important to have the qualitative insights to understand what actually gives status, because it may not be work.

Aria Babu: And I guess there’s also secluded work that women have done throughout history as well, like grinding wheat – as we talk about in a Works in Progress article – and stuff like that.

Alice Evans: Yeah, absolutely. Throughout human history, women have always done work. So the next question is: what actually gives women status? Women have always been grinding or doing drudgery at home, and that’s important for household survival. But then we have a separate question about what leads to people being revered, their words carrying wisdom, acting as religious authorities, creating community governance. So that’s separate from work.

Aria Babu: Okay. Should we get talking about East Asia?

Alice Evans: Yes.

Aria Babu: I think the first really interesting thing about East Asia is that when I see, primarily through your work, the way people talk about digital feminism in East Asia, it actually seems remarkably similar to our online feminism. You’ve talked about this on the Chinese Little Red Book social media, about how you’ve got ‘girls support girls’ hashtags, which seem very similar to me to the ‘girls’ girl’ TikTok trend. You’ve got the #MeToo movement in East Asia as well. All of that seems very, very similar. And yet actually, when you dive into what their cultures are like, they seem to be much more misogynistic. Is that because this feminism is actually much more marginalized than it is over here? Or is it just that it’s interfacing with a very different kind of culture and I’m only seeing the bits that are most intelligible to me?

Alice Evans: I think everything you’ve said is a hundred percent correct, Aria. So yeah, over the past 20 years we’ve seen this acceleration of technological connectivity. Let’s take the example of China, because obviously there’s heterogeneity within East Asia. In China, the CCP heavily moderates and suppresses any criticism of the state, but citizens are still allowed to criticize other Chinese people. So as long as it’s not organized, as long as it’s not a threat to the state, you can still be critical. So men on Baidu Tieba may bitch about women and call them like ‘tanks’ or whatever. And women on Little Red Book may show solidarity or sympathy with other women. So when they’re posting about gender-based violence or, again, it’s the idea of selfless sisters, certainly women can speak out and show empathy and solidarity. And that’s hugely important because throughout history – and our history has always been very patriarchal – men ruled the script, whether that was through state power, with Confucian literature, or here in Europe with very patriarchal literature. But now women can show alternatives and show empathy, and that shifts people’s expectations about the pathways to status or getting ostracized or actually respected. So online literature is hugely, hugely important in emboldening people to test out alternatives and changing ideas of prestige.

That said, there are important differences. One is that East Asia was always much more patriarchal. It had strong pronounced patrilineal systems, pronounced son bias, but also hidden elements that people might not recognize unless they’ve done qualitative research comparing around the world. So for example, one thing I was very struck by in my fieldwork in both Korea and Hong Kong and my many interviews with Chinese people is this idea of collective harmony and of extreme discomfort with being an individual troublemaker or speaking out. For example, one time I was sitting down for an interview with a South Korean professional woman, and she said to me, the first thing she said to me is, “Are you a feminist?”

“No, I’m just a social scientist. I’m interested in East Asia.”

And she was like, “Good. Because feminists are too outspoken, too assertive, but the gender problems here are very real.” And then she proceeded to tell me these very heartfelt stories about how she’d been discriminated against at work, how she’d been passed over for promotion, about how her male colleagues went to a lap dancing club and invited her. And then another woman, again, was saying, “Oh, there are these feminist protests here and I don’t like them.”

And I was trying to understand the problem. And again, it was this emphasis on assertion. In Japan there’s a saying: ‘the nail that sticks up will be hammered down.’ And so I thought, let’s do a little role-play exercise. And I said to them, okay, let’s suppose you are uncomfortable with the drinking culture at work. And suppose in your work office you put up your hand and say, “I’d like to propose that we don’t have company after-work drinks anymore.” And the minute – I was trying to be my most diplomatic, charismatic self to the best of my ability – and instantly her lips recoiled in horror, and she goes, “Well, I think that’s very...” She was totally uncomfortable with that kind of self-assertion.

There’s lots of Pew values survey data on this: if you have this culture that reveres collective harmony, then any kind of disruption or self-assertion, especially if it’s twinned with something which is already kind of subversive in your culture – i.e., feminism – it can cause a bit of disruption. So I think you were a hundred percent correct that there is this online literature that is tremendously important in pushing for protections against male violence. For example, in this year, 2025, South Korea has just announced an anti-harassment law. So that is super, super important, but people will react in a different kind of way.

Aria Babu: Are men also less supportive of feminism there? I guess my perception of the West is that maybe until very recently, most men were also basically feminists. And it’s potentially only a very recent backlash, and even then I’m not sure about it. Whereas it seems like men in East Asia – and this is obviously speaking in major generalities – are actually very hostile to feminism and a lot of their online culture seems incel-y in some way.

Alice Evans: Okay, brilliant. And I will respond in three parts.

First of all, I think the vast majority of men in Europe and America are very supportive of gender equality. They believe that women should work, believe that women should be leaders. And we see that both in surveys and genuine voting. I would say that’s a little bit different from supporting feminism.

So if you look at Pew data, men might say gender equality is fine, but I don’t want feminism. That’s a pretty normal response in the US. That said, you are a hundred percent right that men are more supportive of gender equality in the West than, say, East Asia. East Asia has had a culture of patrilineality whereby men perform the ancestral rituals. The son is the most prized child and celebrated, while girls are just an afterthought who are going to marry into another family. So a hundred percent there’s that cross-national difference.

And I think another factor that’s underestimated is that the West got very lucky in the timing of our feminist revolution. It occurred in the 1970s, when our media was much more shared and we had much more in common. So when there were higher barriers to entry, there were fewer firms, fewer outputs. We were all watching similar shows, whether it’s BBC News, Friends, or The Simpsons. So we’re all on that shared cultural journey. In Sweden, for example, they only allowed private media, private TV stations in 1989. Before that, everyone was getting indoctrinated with hardcore egalitarianism. Now, as we see this intense personalization and individualism in social media, that’s what East Asians and Latin Americans are getting right now. So women, of course, will opt into feminist media, right? Because it gives them everything they want. Yes, status is great, yes, you can be independent, yes, you can live your own life. And there are all kinds of female vlogs where they’re celebrating their independence after work, for example. But why would any man want to watch that, right? So by virtue of technological backwardness in the 1970s, a bunch of guys were watching pretty egalitarian stuff, or Cheers or whatever. But East Asians today can opt out.

Sam Bowman: I’m not sure if I actually think this, but Korea seems quite susceptible to Western memes in a way that I think Japan doesn’t. North Korea is the most communist country the world has ever seen. Christianity is most popular in South Korea, and they do it in quite interesting ways – the Reverend Moon’s church and mass weddings and things like that. Feminism seems to have caught on much more as a sort of ideal. I’m sure it’s not widely accepted, but there are subcultures of feminism much more there. And this sort of men’s rights ‘MRA’ thing has sort of caught on.

So is it possible that what’s going on in Korea is they have some sort of cultural openness, say, to Western memes and Western ideas in a way that Japan doesn’t and China doesn’t, and these are sort of wreaking havoc? It’s almost like a virus in the New World, where they just don’t have a kind of immune system to resist either, depending on whether you think these things are good or bad. But like inceldom, feminism, Christianity, communism, whatever it might be, is it possible that Korea is just very, very vulnerable to weird ideas?

Alice Evans: I think that’s an interesting hypothesis, and I will take us back in time to the 1870s when Japan had the Meiji Restoration. When they were being attacked by foreign ships, they thought, ‘We need to rapidly industrialize for our defense.’ And so many intellectuals went on tours of the West, Europe, the US. They’re like, we’ve got to bring back these ideas. And if you go to Japan, you see lots of European-style architecture, massive reforms of education, and many of the leading intellectuals are like, we’ve got to have these secular scientific projects. We’ve got to destroy the samurai. We’ve got to have massive reforms. So certainly within Japan’s history, they’ve taken on many commercial and cultural adoptions of Western culture in terms of dress, in terms of clothing.

So that said, I think what might be different in Korea today is they’ve managed to build – and this actually goes back to Christianity – a more militant labor movement, which then gave birth to democracy, which then gave birth to this feminist activism. So I would see a slightly different, more contingent story. I don’t think Japan has this necessary immunity to European memes.

Sam Bowman: But when the Japanese did it, it basically worked really well. I mean it worked really well until World War II happened, but it isn’t that they went over and just got their brains washed by Prussian militarism. They thought, ‘This one works well. We like the strength of the army in Prussia or in Germany. We like the way the English do their schools. We like the way the French do their financial system.’ And they brought these things back in a selective way, like a conscious way.

Alice Evans: Totally.

Sam Bowman: Korea doesn’t feel like that. Korea doesn’t feel like they are doing well out of the Western ideas that are going there and being adopted there. They feel like they’re victims of those ideas.

Alice Evans: Well, I think that, like I was saying, I, as a social scientist, will be careful about normative claims. So whether something’s good or bad is not for me to say. But I would say that the South Korean feminist movement has been very successful in many ways because there have been waves of protests and organizing in a distinctly Korean way. So for example, one fun little aside, if you go to a Western feminist protest, you’ll see that often each woman would wear her own style of clothing and she’ll have some groovy slogan, some hilarious thing, like, ‘Patriarchy sucks, but my boyfriend does even more.’

It’s something a bit quirky, but in South Korea, all their feminist protests, they’re all totally color-coordinated with all the same banners and all the same slogans because I think this reflects their strong culture of collective harmony and strength and unity and no one wanting to stick out. So certainly they’re doing feminism in their own way, but it has been incrementally successful in emboldening other women. And just this year they’ve got this anti-harassment law, and for example, feminists were part of the anti-president, anti-military rule thing. So I think there have been some important strides for women’s welfare and status and protections from male violence as a result of feminism, without any normative claims.

Aria Babu: This would explain another strange observation of mine, which is I think it’s so bizarre that K-pop has groups instead of having any individual stars.

It makes total sense to me that they have special schools where they train people from their teen years to become celebrities, and it kind of makes sense that the companies that do this want to invest across a bunch of different personality types so they can tap into lots of different audiences. But the group ... that seems so strange because obviously over here our biggest celebrities are basically all solo acts. Like, Beyoncé had to leave … Destiny’s Child ... I think? Taylor Swift, obviously.

Sam Bowman: Yeah, Destiny’s Child. Come on.

Aria Babu: It’s before my time!

Alice Evans: I think that’s a brilliant point, Aria. Absolutely. I think there is this strong reverence for the group and we can get into the history about why that might be. I totally agree.

Aria Babu: Another thing that I was thinking could be the reason why the feminist backlash seems quite big in East Asia is their dating markets are so, so skewed. So they’ve got the history of sex-selective abortion, but what I didn’t realize is obviously because you have a norm that men are older than their girlfriends and wives, because they’ve got such a low birth rate, it’s even more enhanced because you’ve got a smaller generation below, and then also you have the queuing effect. So you’ll have groups of 30-year-old men waiting to see if the next set of younger women want to go out with them. So that seems like, even if you have like a 100% coupling up amongst women, something like 15-20% of men would be permanently single. I can see why men in that position are less open towards, I guess, respecting women’s complaints.

Sam Bowman: Could you unpack that a bit? Why would a hundred percent of women coupling up not lead to a hundred percent of men coupling up?

Aria Babu: You’ve got more men than women.

Sam Bowman: Because of sex-selective abortion?

Aria Babu: Because of sex-selective abortion, yeah.

Alice Evans: So, yeah, a hundred percent. South Korea historically had skewed sex ratios because parents preferred sons: they were going to earn more, and also they brought prestige and status in the family, and they do the ancestral rituals. Although South Korea no longer has that sex ratio, certainly the existing chunk of men in their twenties and thirties face the world’s worst dating market. But here is where culture again is really, really important: because then men go onto online message boards and they vent. They vent about that personal experience of being ghosted, ignored, and they may be in a pretty crappy job and have pretty low status in a hierarchical firm where the bosses treat them like crap. So your life is pretty crap in many, many ways in a culture that is incredibly status-oriented.

So in South Korea, you really have to be in the top decile to feel a much greater degree of happiness. So South Koreans are usually pretty miserable unless they’re in the top decile and that’s why East Asians are much more unhappy than you’d predict from their level of GDP per capita because they’re only happy if they’re at the top. And so if you are a man in the lower deciles, one, you are demographically doomed. Women won’t give you the time of day. Your bosses treat you as incredibly inferior. You’re constantly bowing and kowtowing and doing all this nunchi. And then on top of that, you go to these message boards and you say, ‘Oh, women are awful,’ and everyone is agreeing with you because you’re in this very single-sex-oriented environment.

And that’s an important underrated point: that South Korea has a very strong history of single-sex education or single-sex classes. So a lot of young men won’t spend that much time with women.

Aria Babu: And they don’t have sisters.

Alice Evans: Great point. So I think this is really, really important – that male-female friendships can be a really important part of building empathy and understanding. Just in this conversation, look how Sam is building empathy with this perspective. He’s being transformed in this moment and becoming this radical feminist. So if we talk and share and discuss ideas, that can help build commonalities and understanding. But if you are just constantly separate, you’re an only son, you’re going to a school with other boys, then you’re ranting on a message board with a bunch of other men, sharing your perspective … And those message boards are not just showing solidarity with you, but also – I mean, you’ve read Hawon Jung’s wonderful book Flowers of Fire, and it’s all about this vitriol and this sense of vengeance and humiliating and getting revenge on women. So your whole cultural environment is totally saturated with pretty steep misogyny. And then you get all these feminists protesting on the street, which is like this attack to all your ideas of your expectations of how you should be treated. Then it triggers this counter-reaction.

Sam Bowman: At a personal level, how much does this affect the ability of men and women to couple up? That kind of thing probably is somewhat relevant in the West, but I don’t think it’s deterministic. You sometimes get misogynists and feminists in relationships together. It’s not the most determining factor. How big of an issue is that in somewhere like Korea?

Alice Evans: I think that there are many prior constraints to coupling up. So for example, this more gender-segregated environment where you don’t have so many male friends, where people are much more work-oriented. For example, if we look at Pew surveys and what people value, it’s all about money and work rather than, say, family. So it’s certainly a shift in values about what people want. So when young people are left to their own devices and not forced into arranged marriages, they pursue what makes them happy, which increasingly seems to be economic advancement. So those seem to be prior constraints. When I interviewed Koreans on precisely this point, they’d often say that the people on the message boards are crazy extremists, but the people that they meet in ordinary life are not like that. And obviously they could be consumer taste. So I think the online radicalization might be downstream of other things, though it’s certainly going to be a friction if you internally perceive men as against you.

Aria Babu: How do young East Asians date? Do they have dating apps?

Alice Evans: So in my interviews in Korea, people prefer to do blind dates where your friends are setting you up. And I think that’s partly associated with networks of trust and also ideas of propriety. East Asia has always had a much stronger culture of idealizing female chastity. So the idea of just meeting up with a man who you’ve never met and no one in your network knows, it’s a pretty crazy, it’s a pretty radical view. So you’ve got this one-shot interaction with no motivation to be nice afterwards because it won’t affect your future interactions and a state that sort of allows impunity for male violence. That’s a risky, maybe potentially disreputable thing to do. So people tend to set their friends up.

Aria Babu: I guess if people then have largely – and this might be the core of the problem – gender-segregated schooling and friendship networks, does that mean that some people don’t have friends of the opposite gender?

Alice Evans: It’s going to create some friction. You might have some cousins, some networks from work, for example. But also another really important thing, and maybe this is something we want to get onto later, Sam, is how many of the evening activities heavily involve a lot of alcohol, which isn’t necessarily a fun, conducive, welcoming environment for women. So if we go out in Britain … making social environments more welcoming to women, women will be more likely to want to socialize with you.

Aria Babu: So did they used to do arranged marriages?

Alice Evans: Yes. Oh, totally.

Aria Babu: So when did that finish?

Alice Evans: Great question. East Asia is patrilineal exogamous, which means that descent is followed through the paternal line, but you marry out, so you are not marrying within your immediate circle of relatives, and instead you are forging business relations with anyone. And so over the 20th century, as we’ve seen rising education and urbanization, young people flocked to the factories or to do office clerical work, and they increasingly mixed, mingled, built their own networks. And families were more permissive of this because that exogamous culture doesn’t motivate you to stay within the group.

Sam Bowman: Exactly the same as in the West, then. Western Europe has exactly the same kind of tradition right up until to the present day, basically.

Alice Evans: Western Europe never had arranged marriage though.

Sam Bowman: But it does have the pattern of descent through the male line and exogamy. So it has not clan-based business relationships, not clan-based marriage. You’re marrying outside of your family and you’re creating businesses outside of your family. So it is very, very similar to Western Europe, right?

Alice Evans: I wouldn’t say so. I’d say the patrilineal emphasis is much ... if you look at clan structures in East Asia, you might find that only the men are named. Whereas I can study my entire family history going back several hundred years and every woman will be named. So every woman is recognized as an important part within a family lineage. In Korea, maybe a hundred years ago it might be seen as disreputable to say the woman’s name, the wife’s name. So this idea is much, much stronger. I mean, in Europe, women could still inherit property. You might want a male to do it, but women could still inherit property.

Sam Bowman: Interesting. Because it is striking though that it’s unlike a lot of patriarchal traditional societies, where they are very clan-based and they are very much based on the family as not just the family unit, but the economic unit, and the extended family as being like that’s how trust goes. It’s really striking that according to your work, at least East Asia doesn’t rely that much on the extended family or as much as, let’s say, the Middle East does.

Alice Evans: Well, I think this happens in conjunction with economic growth, right? So if you have low economic growth and everyone is living in their village, then you have this very strong patrilineal clan structure, and then you have the ancestral halls. In China, since 1536, commoners could build their own ancestral halls. So you have these very strong clans, especially in the rice-growing regions of southern China, where you need lots of people to collaborate, building irrigation, et cetera.

So you are all cooperating within the unit. You might be building club goods together, you need a bridge, you build it within your clan. There’s this wonderful paper by Greif and Tabellini all about how people are collaborating, building these club goods. You might even build for defenses or something like that. You do it all within your clan.

But then when you get economic growth, there’s an incentive to go to a city. There’s an incentive to build all these diverse networks and you can build guanxi, which is the idea of mutual relationships of reciprocity and trust and taking care of one another, with almost anyone. So it could be a schoolmate, it can be a guy you met on the street. You can build guanxi with anyone in China, and that’s very radical from a more endogamous like cousin or clan marriage system.

Sam Bowman: Why do you think that’s happened in East Asia, but not in North Africa, the Middle East, maybe South Asia?

Alice Evans: Right. Great question. I think that could be primarily due to state power and prestige. So certainly in the Song Dynasty, it was actually illegal to marry someone within seven relations, and that’s similar to how the Catholic Church in Europe banned cousin marriage, whereas in the Middle East, North Africa, as Arab ... well, I should be careful as we don’t have genetic data, so I don’t know precisely when the Middle East adopted cousin marriage. That said, one hypothesis is that the Bedouin camel-riding Arabs always idealized cousin marriage because they were lactose tolerant, so they could ride their camels and drink lots of milk without getting sick. But the camel-riding Bedouins were at the top of the social hierarchy. They’ve got camels, so everyone thinks they’re great. So other Arabs adopted this system because you’re getting this special lactose tolerance. Then the Arab Islamic armies were incredibly successful in conquering and they became the ruling group.

Then everyone is adopting the Arabic language, Arabic customs, so all those regions that were once under the Umayyad Caliphate now have cousin marriage. Is that a coincidence? I welcome a geneticist who goes back to 400 CE and tells me whether they’ve got cousin marriage. But I’ll tell you one little exciting bit of evidence that you will like, Aria. We do have some genetic data from Central Asia and they find that in, for example, Uzbekistan, precisely the time that the Uzbeks started settling as opposed to being nomads, that’s when they started adopting this more endogamous marriage system. So it’s possible that as they started living in towns when they also simultaneously adopted a bunch of Arabic practices, they’re like, oh, this is the cool prestigious thing to do. So I think in my analysis of history, what I do see is this conjunction between state power, the ruling elites: they use wealth and extraction to create whatever they think is prestigious, and when they spread, you’re like, ‘oh, yeah, a bit of cousin marriage!’ and then it becomes culturally celebrated. If you meet someone, you might say your father’s name, you might be able to recite all the people that were in that lineage. At wedding celebrations, they’ll talk about their entire lineage and they’ll be tremendously proud. And this idea of being so proud of your clan and wanting to have that loyalty and build up your clan ... You get this sort of cultural persistence through pride and children’s socialization and loyalty.

Sam Bowman: So the answer might be that those regions have a strong cultural fashion for cousin marriage, which East Asia doesn’t have, in quite a higher degree.

Alice Evans: Totally. If you ask a Chinese person today, they might say it’s unlucky to marry someone with your same surname.

Sam Bowman: Yeah.

Alice Evans: So these things can get a bit sticky.

Aria Babu: When did East Asia start to become monogamous?

Alice Evans: Great question. Elites all over the world have always enjoyed a bit on the side, a bit of sexual variety and concubines, and East Asians were no exception. But around, I think, 1900, you’ll see more modernizing reforms, some stipulations against having concubines and against polygamy.

Aria Babu: So they had concubines but not multiple wives?

Alice Evans: There would’ve been some variation, but certainly concubines would be more common. But again, this is only an elite thing, not so common for the majority.

Sam Bowman: And when does this begin to fade away or break down?

Alice Evans: Over the 20th century, I think we’ve seen the rise globally of monogamy, even in the Middle East and Egypt. It became very uncommon over the 20th century to have multiple wives, and that may be partly fashion, partly finances.

Aria Babu: How do people treat casual sex in East Asia? It seems that the average marriage age is about 30, but from the polling I’ve seen, the average age of losing your virginity is like 20 or so. So clearly it’s happening somewhat, but they seem like a much more prudish culture.

Alice Evans: Certainly there’s always been this very strong ideal of female chastity in particular. If we go back to Confucian literature, it’s certainly elevated. There are even these stories of ‘exemplary women’ from the Tang Dynasty, and there’ll be stories about women who threw themselves off a cliff rather than be raped, the woman who cuts off her nose so a man does not assault her. The greatest woman in the world is one who preserves her chastity. So you are elevating it in status and you’re saying it’s very, very bad because if you’ve got a patrilineal system, you want to retain everything within the male line. And so in marriage markets, you would seek women who are signaling their chastity.

Fun story – in South Korea, they even had this little game of seesaw where women would jump on their seesaw so they could see over the wall to their house because that’s how secluded some of the samurai elites were. That’s how much they valued seclusion. Some of those samurai elites even practiced a form of veiling.

Sam Bowman: What’s married life like in an East Asian culture like South Korea for both men and women compared to single life, if they’re not at the bottom of the social pecking order, let’s say?

Alice Evans: If we look at nationally representative data, certainly we might see a big gender gap in terms of share of care work like cooking and cleaning, with women doing much more. Also, we might see a sense of women working at high rates, but often earning less. So you’re likely to see a woman in a lower-status, lower-rung job in her career. She’ll be set for the non-managerial track and doing a larger share of care work. And I think a really crucial part of East Asian culture is even though they’ve increasingly celebrated this idea of female independence and freedom and careers, their ideas of romantic love and emotional compatibility and deep devotion to each other are still much weaker. So Western Europe has had these very strong ideas of romantic love for maybe 250+ years. And if a man does not love his wife, if he’s not devoted to making her happier, then maybe he doesn’t have that sense of empathy that she’s at home doing the washing up while he’s out partying with his mates, drinking, and then he comes back drunk and expects her to deal with it.

So I think that expectation in terms of a sense of duty – ‘I do my duty and that’s her responsibility’ – is slightly different. And that sense of limited care and compassion may actually discourage some people from going into marriage. If you don’t think you’re going to be loved and treated and revered as an equal. That said, of course there’s huge heterogeneity. I’ve interviewed Chinese women and this one young woman said, “My husband, he cares about my dreams.” And he was willing to move cities so that she could pursue the job that she wanted. And romantic love is such an important and underrated driver of gender equality because a man who wants his wife to be happy, wants to support all her ambitions, really makes a huge difference.

Aria Babu: Something that’s noteworthy to me is that East Asian women in America are three times more likely to marry a white person than they are another East Asian. Why?

Alice Evans: My suspicion, though I haven’t done research on interracial relations in the US, would be that if white Americans score as much more gender equal and with more ideas of romantic love and sharing and compassion, then women will get a better deal out of marrying a white man.

Aria Babu: That’d be my instinct as well. I guess. Does that mean that ... are you familiar with the concept of passport –

Alice Evans: By the way, I should say the reverse could also be true – that if men want patriarchy, then you might get it more from marrying an East Asian woman. So it goes both ways, right?

Aria Babu: Yeah. There are happy and sad reasons for it to be happening, I guess.

Sam Bowman: One hypothesis I’ve heard about East Asia’s general problem with declining birth rates, and I’d love you to grade this hypothesis, is that over time the status and wellbeing of women outside of marriage has risen. They are more likely to be able to get good jobs, they’re socially more celebrated, they basically – it’s a much better thing now for a woman to be single than it was 50 years ago in a lot of East Asian countries. Whereas relatively, the status and wellbeing of women in marriage has not risen at the same rate. So the trade-off is much larger than it used to be. So women are much, much more reluctant to give that up and go into a marriage where, in some cases, as the way you’ve described it, they’re kind of almost slaves. They’re toiling away doing housework, they’re not getting any support, they maybe have to give up their jobs. And who on earth would want to make that sacrifice, especially if there’s no romantic love involved? They defer marriage, maybe they don’t marry at all. And the natural consequence of that, because very few people have children outside of marriage in those cultures, is you just get far fewer children. How accurate is that story, first of all, and how compelling do you think that is? How complete is that as a story about declining birth rates?

Alice Evans: Firstly, I totally agree with this idea of thinking about trade-offs. ‘What are my options?’ So 50 years ago there was massive stigma of being left on the shelf as a spinster, right? Even the CCP used to demonize and vilify these women 10 years ago as ‘leftover women’ because it was really trying to disparage them. This is a great example of how state power can be used to change the prestige of something. And that’s clearly changing. On Little Red Book, women celebrate and glamorize this sort of single life of doing independent things and enjoying their freedom. So a hundred percent, I’m with you. I’d also add that entertainment now increases the desirability of having fun by yourself. My only resistance would be not to say that married women are slaves. I think that would be going too far. It’s a more gender-unequal marriage, but not at that level. So I broadly agree with that freedom, that framework. Totally.

Sam Bowman: And in terms of... as a share of explaining the... at least East Asia, the level effect of East Asia, they have very similar problems in some ways to the Western world, but obviously South Korea has a much worse birth rate problem than most Western countries.

Alice Evans: Yes.

Sam Bowman: As a share of explaining that gap, do you think it’s sufficient? Do you think it’s a big part of the story?

Alice Evans: Oh totally. There’s a wonderful paper, Jisu Huang, who is a genius. She shows that as South Korea has seen a rise in unmarried women, it very closely tracks their decline in fertility. So a lot of the difference is a rise in singles. In fact, it was reading Jisu Huang’s paper – I read her paper, I did all my interviews in Hong Kong and Korea, and I was like, wait a minute, this thing is global! And it was by looking at a study in East Asia that I started putting all the dots together. I’m like, wait, marriage is declining in Turkey and Iran and the US!

Sam Bowman: So talk about this a bit more.

Alice Evans: Everyone is talking about why fertility is plummeting all over the world in the past 15 years, and many people on the left will blame house prices, cost of living, and all those things are true, right? As we all migrate to primary productive cities, housing’s very expensive. That’s a problem that policymakers should address. But is it the primary reason why people aren’t having kids? I’m skeptical because people have always done things that cost money. It really just depends on their priorities. And then when I looked into the data more, I found that it’s not just about people remaining as couples and not having children. It’s primarily that marriage rates are just dropping pretty much all over the world, with the exception of, say, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and it’s this rise in the US. 55% of people under 35 are still unmarried, uncoupled.

And this is happening across Latin America. This year, I was doing a month’s fieldwork in Brazil, then I was over in Costa Rica; two years ago, I did a month in Mexico. It’s happening all over the world that many people are staying single. So people are putting the cart before the horse when they’re talking about baby bonuses. So let’s look at Sweden, fantastically glorious social democracy, wonderful supports for working mothers and nurseries, but 60% of Swedish households are single adults. You’re not going to get many babies if people live by themselves.

Sam Bowman: I will disagree on the baby bonuses point to some extent for two reasons. One, there’s not very much opportunity cost between that kind of policy and let’s say a pro-coupling policy. Maybe there is if we have a fixed amount of spending and we could spend it on getting married. We could give marriage tax breaks or things like that. But two, I think actually the best way of spending money personally is on marginal babies. And I would not spend money on giving people money for their first baby. And my interest here is I have one baby, so I would be the beneficiary of that! But I think it’s about looking at where people are most likely to have an extra baby but are not having an extra baby. That way you can take a given amount of money and concentrate on a much smaller number of babies. Because the big problem is that for any baby bonus, we’re spending a lot of money on existing babies who will be born anyway. And what we care about is babies who will not be born if we don’t do this.

Alice Evans: Totally, totally.

Sam Bowman: So effectively, where is the most ‘elastic’ baby, to use a very strange bit of terminology! Yeah, they’re very elastic, very rubbery! I think that is third or fourth babies. And luckily, or maybe unluckily, third or fourth babies account for a tiny share, like one sixth or one tenth, of total babies. So we can give six times more for just rewarding the third baby you have, or ten times more for just rewarding the fourth baby you have than if we were giving you money for the first baby you have. That’s basically it. I just want to make a defense of baby bonuses.

Alice Evans: Let me clarify. I apologize. My resistance to the baby bonus is only the status quo current amount. All I’m saying is a descriptive claim that currently the amount of money offered doesn’t seem sufficient to increase Finland’s … China just this year has announced that they’re going to give the equivalent to like £500 per couple, per baby, per year. That’s not enough.

So I’m sure macroeconomists can work out what is the best way to increase ... We can think about babies as a positive externality. Parents hugely invest in the child’s care and education, and in return, we get this future worker that gives the rest of us pensions and that’s great. And so we should work out, as economists, how do you internalize this externality? How do you incentivize parents? And then this could feed into marriages because if there is a greater economic incentive to have babies, then you might be more likely to want to couple up.

So the only way to potentially rethink your ideas, if we see male loneliness as a problem, you might want to motivate marriage, and you might not do that by motivating the fourth baby. You might also want to give people a reason to get married in the first place. So there could be different things to think about. And I leave that to the macroeconomists to work out.

Sam Bowman: We’re now getting onto what I love talking about, which is tax. But another thing you can do is joint filing. Most married couples treat their income as a single pot. Most married couples probably do keep some separate income, but they mostly pay the same mortgage. They pool their income when they need to. They maybe pool their income permanently. So it’s very economically irrational to not treat them as a single economic unit. It’s very economically irrational, for example, to say that the man has a personal allowance of this much and a standard allowance of this much, and you, as a woman, have this much and this much, because they’re not acting in that way and they’re not making any economic decisions in that way. And then when they make decisions about who should work and how long they should work for, they’re not thinking in terms of themselves as individuals. They’re thinking in terms of a single economic unit.

The sort of tax system ... If you wanted to be more in line with the way people actually act and think about their finances when they’re a married couple ... and this is actually I think a really significant reason that marriage should be the way you do this, and not long-term unmarried relationships. Because they often don’t pool their resources. Marriage is often the trigger because basically legally you do pool your money when you’re married. Allowing joint filing and allowing for single pooled tax allowances, single pooled benefits and things like that would be I think economically efficient. It wouldn’t be a subsidy in the sense I consider a subsidy. It wouldn’t be about bribing people to do anything or rewarding people for doing anything. It would be about removing what is currently an irrationality in the tax system that basically says, do this thing that you would never do normally if you were able to just ignore the tax system. So allowing joint filing would be a really, really significant way of going with the grain. It wouldn’t be distortive, it wouldn’t be a big subsidy. It probably would cost a bit, but it wouldn’t cost that much, and it would recognize the way people act in marriage with their finances. So I think... I know what you’re going to say.

Alice Evans: Swedish 1970s tax reform!

Sam Bowman: Okay, great. We’ll get onto their transaction tax after this. There’s so much. Swedish tax history is surprisingly interesting. They did a wealth tax that they got rid of. They did a transaction tax that they got rid of.

Alice Evans: So this book that I would really recommend is The Swedish Theory of Love, and it’s basically about the cultural evolution of Swedish values. And one of their arguments is that Swedes have this strong culture of prizing independence. And what the Social Democrats did over the 20th century was state-enabled independence. And in the 1970s, feminists really pushed for individual taxation and they said this is very, very important that each person should be in control of their own income. So I just want to push back and say there is a huge amount of cultural variation and the way that we understand our incomes even after marriage could vary globally.

Sam Bowman: Yeah, I’m talking about the UK and the US. I don’t know how it is in other countries.

Aria Babu: It’s a bit more extreme actually. In Britain, we have two stages where you are penalized for getting into a stronger relationship. So if you’re receiving any kind of benefit, if you move in with your partner, that means that your benefits will be assessed jointly and they’ll probably be taken back. So that’s probably one way in which some people are stopped from getting into relationships with each other.

Sam Bowman: Although I think that is how it should be. So my argument is that once you move in with somebody, you are in fact a single economic unit. But keep going.

Aria Babu: Yeah, that’s fair. I guess. Yes, we do do that. And the other case where we do that is also the same problem: at the upper end of the income distribution, if you are two property-owning people who get married, you then have to pay capital gains tax on one of your homes if you sell them. So I’ve got one friend who’s getting penalized for this. He owned a flat, his wife owned a flat, they moved in together, and now he has to pay capital gains tax on his original flat.

Sam Bowman: So in fact, you’re completely right about this benefits point, certainly in Britain. And I think the US does have some joint filing. It doesn’t have full joint filing.

Aria Babu: My understanding is this is actually much more extreme in the US, but it’s harder to tell a coherent story because they’ve got so much variation state by state. But you can have very severe penalties for moving in or marrying someone.

Sam Bowman: In Britain, we treat benefits on a household basis, including things like childcare subsidies. So for example, if you are an unmarried woman with a child and you move in with the father of your child, your collective income, or in this case, if one of you earns over, let’s say, £100,000, your childcare subsidies go away. All of the childcare benefits we calculate on the basis of you or your live-in partner. We don’t do anything like that for tax. So all the money we give to people we calculate on a household basis. I think that’s correct. I think that’s rational. I think that actually reflects how people are and act. Although I disagree with some of the specific applications that I’ve mentioned. The fact that we don’t do that for taking money away, it’s really just a revenue-raising thing. There’s no rationale for that. There’s no economic rationale for that at all.

Alice Evans: I think there’s an interesting question about how big a financial incentive would need to be in order to motivate marriage and fertility. And I think it’s important to go back to your previous framework, Sam, of these trade-offs. What are people’s options today? And clearly, many women are willing to take a pretty mighty economic hit – if you just move in together, you’re saving on rent or mortgage. So people are already willing to take a huge, huge hit to their incomes in order just to stay single. So whatever your tax incentive would need to be, it would need to grapple with that reality that people are so entertained, amused, that they’re willing to go it alone.

Sam Bowman: I’m interested in what the potential cultural countercurrents to what we’re talking about are. Scott Alexander has written about this, others have written about this. There is a very, very persistent trend where whatever becomes fashionable among middle classes becomes unfashionable among the most high-status people. They want to show that they’re not like – not the middle classes economically, but people I call ‘upper normies’, people who like Radiohead and people who go to small plates restaurants and things like that. If you are more sophisticated socially than those people, then you want to show that you’re not like them.

Right now, among that kind of the lumpen elite, among people who have superficially sophisticated views, but actually not sophisticated views – like Radiohead is the sort of pinnacle there. Or maybe they think like Drake or Kendrick Lamar, they think Kendrick Lamar is really, really cool or something like that. The people who are more sophisticated than them who want to show off that they’re different to them will want something. So right now, among that group, not having children is very, very, very popular. Right now, your average university graduate is going to have children very late. If they live in a big city, if they’re culturally conscious, they’re going to have children late. The people who are above them, the people who are genuinely cutting edge and genuinely trying to show off that they’re really, really sophisticated, now, I think have some kind of desire. And I actually do perceive this to be happening, to show off that they will have loads of children and to show off that they are very pro-family and that they have big families. And I perceive the kind of nascent green shoots of it becoming high status now to have a big family, if you’re rich and culturally elite and culturally sophisticated, and I wonder if that might be something that is a countervailing trend to everything we’re talking about.

Alice Evans: I would push back. Name me one Hollywood film that features a family in the past 10 years, past five years.

Sam Bowman: Hollywood is downstream of what I’m talking about.

Alice Evans: But in terms of what we culturally celebrate, what we give prestige, where do we see families being celebrated?

Sam Bowman: I see a lot of mommy blogger type content on TikTok. I think you see a lot of, I don’t think this is particularly culturally elite, but there are subcultures, there’s the whole kind of weird trad-wifey type stuff. I don’t want to say that’s weird. There’s the whole trad-wifey stuff.

Alice Evans: So there are some very charismatic people who make bread. I totally agree. But that hasn’t led to any ... no labor market data seems to be suggesting that’s actually a trend. You can find anything in the world, there’ll be a couple of people who are very charismatic at doing it, whether it’s dancing with orangutans or whatever. But as a social scientist, I want to look at the data and see if there’s any evidence of it. And that doesn’t seem to be catching on. Now if large families become more popular, that’s all for the good. But I think that the question is going back to this framing of trade-offs. Now, in a world where women have reproductive freedoms, which we all strongly support, how can you make it for men and women that that’s a more desirable, attainable ideal compared to the alternatives? And so macroeconomists need to work out what are the right economic incentives. And this could be through the tax system. So some countries are experimenting with ideas that give people a tax rebate for having more children because then that’s one way of ensuring that you’re motivated to earn money, not keep a secluded housewife, and also have more children. And how can you make sure that schools are much more family-friendly? I do work in Brazil, in Indonesia and Malaysia, and all these people are suffering from the fertility crisis, but their schools are running from eight till one. No woman in the world is going to say, ‘yeah, sure, I’ll have the afternoon of having to manage my kid because then I can’t get a job. I can’t do fun things. I can’t have a pathway to status.’ So we just need to make our entire society much more family-friendly.

Sam Bowman: If it’s true that the job-child trade-off is important, do we see maternity leave and flexible working and any of those policies having any effect on child-rearing?

Alice Evans: I just want to go back to one more thing before I move onto the maternity leave. I was in Indonesia for a month and I did this one interview with this woman. I always start my interviews with very innocuous questions. And she tells me that she’s married. And I say, “Oh, do you have children?” And she says, “Yes, I have two children.” And immediately started crying. And I was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And I tried to console her and she shared this very strong sense of FOMO. And she was like, “On social media, I see all my friends who are doing much more exciting things, and I’m just stuck at home with these kids, and it’s so boring and tedious and I have no life and I have no friends.” And one kid was like two, another was five. And in Indonesia they only really start school at age seven, and even then it’s only the morning. And she just felt that her entire life is now just drudgery. So Betty Friedan famously wrote about this in the 1960s saying “the problem that has no name,” that all these baby boomer mothers were trapped in drudgery and they were being schooled into thinking this is fulfillment and glory, but actually it was mind-blowingly boring.

And she herself is having this sort of Betty Friedan moment that it’s just grim. It’s just totally grim. When you see on social media that people are posting their pictures and they’re adventuring and they go into the city and they’re being glamorous and she just feels like an unglamorous loser supported by a husband that doesn’t really care. So I feel that we need to empathize with men and women’s perspective. And here I think we should be very careful to recognize that it’s also men who are stepping back from marriage and family. And so often the discussion is, oh, why aren’t women having more babies? That’s always the complaint from the far right. And I’m like, wait a minute. When I do my interviews in Brazil, in Latin America, and even in the US, there are lots of, if you look at Pew survey data, half of US singles saying, I can’t really be bothered to date. And lots of Latin American guys don’t want the responsibility of the family. If you think of it, marriage is a big responsibility for men. The idea that they’re supposed to hand over their income and get all these kids when now they too have these trade-offs. Men too have these alternative ways of spending their time. Call of Duty is pretty fun. So you’ve got all these fun things you could be doing with your time.

Sam Bowman: And also, of course, men don’t have the biological clock, so they have much less pressure to have children young. They have much less pressure to couple up with women their own age. So there’s much, much, much more freedom. And the downside risk for men is much lower. They can leave it until they’re forty and then change their mind and say they do want to have kids, which women find it much, much more difficult to do.

Alice Evans: And there’s also a collective element, and I think this is really important. So if your group of friends all have kids, then it could be great fun to be a dad because you all go to the seaside together, you’ll have a picnic, you all have fun and you share the care work. Everyone makes a dish of sausages or whatever, but if no one else... yeah, Aria, if no one else has a kid, then what do you do?

Aria Babu: I was just laughing at your idea of men hanging out, making sausages together, as the default activity.

Alice Evans: Oh, let me tell you, wait a second. I want to defend my men and sausages thing because actually, so I did fieldwork in small-town Alabama and in small-town Alabama... No, I want to take you there. So in small-town Alabama where I have my little green bicycle and I’m cycling up all these hills and I’m going to Baptist Bible study and I’m hanging out with all these families and they do a lot of barbecues and all the other families come round and it’s great fun, and they do all these layers upon layers of different dips and barbecues and everyone brings their kids and dads are hanging out and talking about trucks.

Sam Bowman: That’s true abundance by the way, when I talk about abundance, that’s what I’m talking about.

Alice Evans: Sausages, babies, right?

Sam Bowman: Yeah.

Alice Evans: So everyone’s having great fun and it’s a normal part of the community that everyone enjoys. But if you are not in that kind of community, if you don’t have those kind of club goods, then, one, there’s less fun to having your own baby. Two, you don’t feel like a loser. Now – oh, do you want to talk about being a loser?

Sam Bowman: I want to talk about what you’ve just said because I think this is where housing constraints are important. So housing constraints are important in one way because they drive up costs, but with my housing theory of everything hat on I’ll say is they’re much more important because they constrain and limit agglomeration – people’s ability to locate around each other. Normally we think of agglomeration in terms of economics and what jobs you get.

But agglomeration is hugely important when it comes to living near your friends, living near people your own age, living near people in similar life places as you. The more constrained housing supply is, the more difficult that becomes, the harder it is to coordinate with each other. So what you’re talking about I think is completely true. People are much more likely to have children if other people physically close to them have children. Remote work, by the way, doesn’t change this. People often think remote work will eliminate housing shortages. It won’t. If you can locate, as people in Alabama can, cheaply and comfortably around people like you, the same age as you, with similar interests to you, who also have kids or are also on the brink of having kids, it’s so much easier to collectively share the cost of having kids and kind of collectively raise the kids. That is how I think housing shortages drive the shortage of children much more than I think housing costs by themselves do.

Alice Evans: The town where I was doing my fieldwork actually had seen a growth in population. People were coming in because they thought it was a fantastic place for families. You can buy a house and everyone else has kids and it’s a wonderful safe environment, which is great for everyone.

Sam Bowman: Yeah, people Aria and I know have talked about finding a town accessible to London but far away enough that it’s cheap for them all to move to. It’s so difficult to coordinate and do that. First mover disadvantage is enormous. If three of you go and everybody else says, you know what? Actually I decided I didn’t want to do that, you’re screwed. Right?

Alice Evans: Yes.

Sam Bowman: It’s incredibly hard to fix that problem. It’s a coordination problem above all. It’s really easy if everywhere in London, where basically the cost of going there and other people not following you is low, because you’re centrally located, you can get to your job easily. This is true in all major cities. I think this is one really, really big and underrated reason that housing constraints do, I think affect people’s ability to have kids and the drudgery of having kids. When you have kids alone in a big city, it’s very, very difficult. You don’t have parents nearby, you don’t have grandparents, you don’t have people your own age. So you are completely correct. By the way, I completely agree on all things...

Alice Evans: The...

Sam Bowman: Housing shortages are not the determining factor by any means, but I think they are underrated as a factor by people who have thought about this a lot and who have a lot of understanding because I think they think on the economic margin, but they don’t think on the agglomeration margin. I want to slightly, and if you’ve got more questions in this vein, that’s fine, but I really want to get onto this question of business relationships and both how different, but also how similar in many ways contemporary East Asian gender norms are within businesses. You’ve already talked about women being invited to strip clubs with their male colleagues and being humiliated for not enjoying that.

Alice Evans: Yes.

Sam Bowman: Obviously we know that the kind of drinking culture of going out really late, drinking ridiculous amounts, maybe staying out all night, sleeping on the side of the road and stuff like that ... Can you talk about that a bit? I’m also kind of interested in how similar it feels to me to Western norms up until the sixties or seventies.

Alice Evans: Yes. Okay, so I’m going to rattle off a couple of books which I think are really fabulous. So Ed Slingerland, he’s got a wonderful book called Drunk, and it’s all about how feasting, banqueting and drinking lubricates social relationships. We all relax, we have a good time, we build these bonds. And I think especially in business cultures like Japan or South Korea, where everyone has to be incredibly reserved, incredibly careful about what they say, then businesses actually value an opportunity where everyone can loosen up and say what they really feel because that’s – what does this person really think? If all day you’re so guarded, you need to know, well, can I trust this other person? Another important element, and I’ve done so many interviews on this with Chinese businessmen, is if the state is a primary party of the economy with state-owned enterprises, their products are not necessarily the most competitive on price or quality.

So how do you get other people to buy your products? You send them little gifts, you take them out on evenings to build up social trust and rapport. It is so interesting. I interviewed this guy who worked for a major car company and he says, “Yeah, when I was working at the state-owned enterprise, we were having to go drinking every single night.” Because it’s like you’re plying your clients with more and more drink to build up that rapport. So there are a bunch of reasons why it goes on. You enjoy it, it’s fun. You give these gifts, you build up rapport.

And going back to the 1960s and 70s, we built up this institutional, we built up this resistance against it. And people started complaining about it ruining your weekends and evenings, Sam. And then we decided as a culture, we should try to reduce this. So for example, at universities, it would now be uncommon for academics and students to go out drinking together because we might see that as a dangerous environment where people do things they don’t really mean. There’s also lawsuit potential. South Korea hasn’t developed that resistance and institutional reform. So yeah, there’s been an institutional divergence certainly.

Sam Bowman: But I do wonder how much is lost. Clearly what you’re describing is excessive. Everybody knows that feeling when you’re on a work trip and you go back to a hotel room for like five minutes, then you have to go back out or go drinking with your colleagues, who may be wonderful, but you’re just tired. You just really wish you could sleep. Everybody knows that feeling I’m sure. But there is a lot of value to that, right? There is a huge amount of value to, as you’ve mentioned, maybe not getting drunk, not blackout drunk, not getting completely shitfaced, but losing your inhibitions, showing that you are willing to lose your inhibitions with each other. There’s a lot of trust building there. It’s fun. You get to share in a fun experience, and I am kind of interested in how much is lost by that kind of culture becoming riskier and riskier, not through any individual’s fault, but for example, for men on a night out there is just much less risk of them assaulting each other, for example. There’s much less risk of them having extramarital affairs with each other – depending on who they are – but probably there is less risk than if it was two women and two men of the same age, let’s say. Not because any of them is a bad person necessarily, unless assault is taking place, but one of the costs or one of the downsides of a much more gender-equal workplace is that that kind of interaction is much more difficult to have. And I’m curious about whether there are benefits to the East Asian approach that maybe we neglect or maybe we ignore.

Alice Evans: That’s a great question. I will reply threefold. So first of all, I make no normative claims about which culture is best or worst, and I a hundred percent agree that opportunities for men to spend time socializing together, enjoying, relaxing, building bonds, is hugely important. Richard Reeves makes this point that male bonding is super, super important and we all want to combat male loneliness because that has massive, massive ill effects. That said, for many of the men I interviewed, like the one I previously mentioned, it’s just excessive. If you combine this with a hierarchical firm where it’s the boss saying that you’ve got to drink – it’s not that necessarily people are going on these work trips for fun. They go because the boss is encouraging you to drink. It’s a hierarchically ordained thing. It’s not a fun thing that people are doing for their own enjoyment. It’s a pressure coming from the top in an incredibly hierarchical environment.

In South Korea and Japan, people bow. In Japan, you bow to your company bosses. I interviewed one guy, he said his Japanese firm, people had different colored lanyards, and if you don’t have the right colored lanyard, you’re not allowed to speak at a work meeting. Very, very hierarchical systems.

Suppose one person doesn’t want to drink. I gave the example earlier of having the work meeting and saying, “I think we should stop.” But you can’t resist individually. So, one, it’s not that the men are necessarily doing this for their own fun, for their own leisure. On top of this, it actually creates a number of gender inequalities in the workplace. And this is something I think is totally underexplored, but I certainly see it in my own interviews. The companies of course select, when it’s sales work, strictly business-to-business interfacing, you select for the guys, for the people who are going to be able to drink the most, right? And who is that? Men. But it’s the sales jobs which are often paying more because that’s how you’re bringing home the bacon for the company.

So the companies are often advertising these sales jobs specifically for men. And even if women are in those environments, imagine it’s a 90% male environment, where they’re drinking very heavily. It’s not a nice environment for any women. And many women gave me these terrible horror stories about how they were being groped by their bosses. But in a culture whereby there’s impunity for male sexual assault and harassment and whereby individual self-assertion is strongly condemned and a woman wouldn’t feel that she’s supported, it’s very difficult to speak out. So then of course these men feel they can do it with impunity and add to that the people are drunk, so they’re not really thinking rationally about it anyway. So it creates a very toxic workplace in terms of gender inequality and I don’t think that many men enjoy it. So actually the Chinese government sees this as a problem and over recent years, especially since COVID, they’ve massively, massively cracked down on it, really trying to reduce the drinking. They think it’s excessive. So while I’m with you that male bonding is great, many East Asian governments think of this as a little bit excessive now.

Sam Bowman: So I’m not really saying that male bonding is great, by the way. I’m also not saying that this is good because it’s fun. If I was running a company, if I was a pure profit maximizer, didn’t care about the wellbeing of my employees or anything like that, I would want my employees to have very trusting relationships with each other.

And I think one way of getting those trusting relationships is these kinds of drunken experiences together, perhaps. Anyway, I don’t know if this is actually true, but it’s possible. I don’t think it would be possible for them to have those kinds of experiences in a mixed gender environment. I think it would be, as you say, it would immediately lead to harassment or assault, which would be unacceptable for a number of reasons, even as a pure profit maximizer. So if that’s right, then one of the costs of a gender-mixed workplace is that you cannot sustain those kinds of very, very close bonding experiences. And so you lose that kind of workplace trust building, not because the women are making anything less trustworthy, but because you just can’t have that kind of experience. It leads to assault, it leads to extramarital affairs, it leads to drama, basically.

That feels to me, basically true. That feels to me like it rings really true. And it seems like, and we don’t need to get too normative and say one is better than the other, but it seems like it’s maybe an underrated advantage of the East Asian approach relative to Western approaches. I also kind of wonder if this doesn’t need to be a male thing. I mean, you could have nights out of women together. There’s no particular reason it has to be men going out drinking together. It’s just once you add men to that, it basically becomes a completely different dynamic and one that no workplace wants to encourage. I think it’s hard to measure. I think it’s probably difficult to ... I’m certainly not saying that that cost outweighs the benefits of gender-mixed workplaces, but it does feel like maybe a cost that people don’t recognize.

Alice Evans: Okay, I will refer to a wonderful book by my friend Robin Dunbar, How religion evolved, and let’s go back to chimps. Chimps build their strength as a group by having more chimps. You want as many chimps as possible so that if you are attacked by a predator, you can be big strong chimps and attack them. Now the problem is as your group of chimps gets bigger and bigger, you have a problem of mistrust because who is that chimp over there? What are they up to? I don’t really know them. I don’t really hang out with them. So what they do is they build trust and reciprocity through grooming. Very calm, lovely grooming, like one stroke per three seconds, and this sensual activity bonds the group. And Robin Dunbar argues that throughout human history, maybe going back 200,000 years, we’ve always developed these collective synchronous rituals as a way of building trust within a community. So it could be choral singing, it could be religious trances, it could be shamans doing their thing, getting groovy. It could be going to church, it could be some kind of away day thing that maybe you do at Works in Progress – I don’t know what you get up to!

Aria Babu: Women still groom each other as well, right? That’s actually quite common bit of female bonding that you’ll do each other’s hair or something like that.

Alice Evans: Yeah, so there’s been very cool experiments where they look at people both on a rowing bike and they measure their exertion and they find that if you do the rowing bike together, you actually are much happier and higher dopamine. You know, check out people’s brains, check out their biceps, and find out that we love doing sports activities! When people play sports together, there’s sense of esprit de corps, of team spirit. So there are other ways – send people out for a game of cricket, Sam. So I think there are alternative ways that humans have always built a strong sense of national pride, local pride, without necessarily involving alcohol. Alcohol is just one means of building something that we all value.

Aria Babu: I would definitely rather drink with my colleagues than groom or ritualistically dance with them.

Sam Bowman: We’re talking about the median company and I’m really interested in this from a historical perspective. I think comparing Chinese steel companies with Western tech companies doesn’t really tell us very much. I am curious though about what has been lost or what is lost when workplaces generally ... I mean the point of Mad Men is that this is not a good world. The point of Mad Men is superficially nice, but actually it’s miserable. Everybody hates each other and themselves. And yet, there are elements of that world and there are elements of the world of a hundred years ago, where you had much, much, much more basically gender-segregated socializing and gender-segregated business dealings that facilitated trust building, facilitated maybe disagreeableness among men, for example, that seems to have been lost and isn’t really recognized as such. It’s not widely accepted that disagreeableness within companies I think is much, much, much lower now or it’s much less tolerated than it was even 30 years ago. And I don’t really have a strong, I don’t think there’s a strong policy conclusion there. I think the benefits almost certainly outweigh the costs there, but it is interesting that those costs maybe are there.

Alice Evans: I think that any form of creative disruption has costs though my only caveat on your claim would be that a hundred years ago, it wasn’t so much gender-segregated, as very patriarchal, in that all the ways of gaining prestige, whether through work or politics or religion, were dominated by men. Women were left to the lower-status grunt work of raising a family.

Aria Babu: I have two slightly contradictory thoughts on this.

Alice Evans: Go for it.

Aria Babu: The first is that I definitely agree, there are certain things that I feel like you can only really say if you’ve been drinking, that could be helpful in a workplace. Did I actually do that well or were you just being nice to me? Am I actually a good manager? Things like that, where it’s much more comfortable to ask those questions when you’ve got your inhibitions lowered.

But the other thought is if they have this really hierarchical structure where it’s actually quite difficult to be candid with your boss, then it seems like maybe they lose a bunch of those advantages that you might get from the drinking.

Alice Evans: So what I would say is that if we want a work environment where people are open, where Aria can say to Sam, “Sam, I’m really not sure about this business decision.” Or if our goal is to have a situation where Aria can say, “Sam, I’m not sure about this decision,” there are ways of making workplaces more inclusive and liberal. And here I think that liberalism is incredibly important – that we show tolerance for dissent. And for example in Scandinavia, which is incredibly egalitarian and consensus-oriented culture where the boss might be cycling to work, not in a corner office, but hot-desking with everyone else, if you create a more open egalitarian environment and you signal willingness for dissent, et cetera, then I think then you are able to hear from all voices.

So many company leaders will want dissent because they want to identify those problems. They want to know what’s working. So you can signal that you at the top, let me hear from all these kind of critical people. It’s very important to recognize these trade-offs and for liberals to be seen as recognizing these trade-offs. Going back to your point about disagreeability, if I was sat here as a feminist and said, “No, Sam, you are outrageous and you should never say that,” then we can’t have those conversations. But any kind of process of social change does come with costs and disadvantages. And then you want people to express them openly so that we can think, okay, Sam does have a point that we do ... Any business, any organization wants people to share their concerns, share their frustrations. So if you’ve got some people who are very sensitive to that level of disagreement and are likely to take it badly, what can we do to have the best of both worlds?

Is it to encourage the more disagreeable men to express themselves more carefully? Some of us can just be very diplomatic. So this is something that I try to learn, to express some of my criticism in a more measured way. But also for the people who are much more sensitive not to take it to heart. So if your colleague says this, run it through one of the LLMs, see if that’s passive aggressive or not. So I am fully here for having open expressions of dissent. And that’s how we build a better society..

Sam Bowman: Okay. People often say that’s one of my real strengths at work. Incidentally, I’m often praised for my ability to disagree with somebody without them realizing that I’m disagreeing with them at work. It’s said to be a real strength of mine.

Aria Babu: Oh no!

Sam Bowman: You wouldn’t agree with that?

Aria Babu: Well, I haven’t observed it, but I’m worried now that I’m being manipulated.

Sam Bowman: No, no, no. Works in Progress operates in a much, much more open way. We don’t have the disagreeability problem. I don’t think.

Aria Babu: I think we’re all a little bit disagreeable, probably, is basically it.

Sam Bowman: But when you’re in a large organization, you obviously are dealing with people who don’t have that culture and who are in fact from a different culture. They’re from California, one of the most alien cultures west of the Tiber. And you have to be as respectful of that culture as you would be of any other.

Well, that was very, very interesting and luckily if you want to read more, you can go to Alice’s Substack at The Great Gender Divergence on Substack, or you can wait until 2027 and read her book, The Great Gender Divergence, which is coming out then. If you want to hear more from us, go to worksinprogress.co and thanks for listening.