How Patriarchy Convinced Us That Women Contributed Little to Society

On androcentrism, its many flawed assumptions and tricks, and research that challenges them

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The figures portrayed on Late Mycenaean period kraters — large, two-handled vases popular in ancient Greece — known as ‘The Sword Bearers’ were long assumed to be male.

After all, they carry swords — objects historically associated not only with men and masculinity but also with power and authority.

But a recent analysis by archaeologist Nicoletta Antognelli Michel suggests these figures actually represent women. In addition to bearing swords crossed over their chests, the Sword Bearers wear large, elaborate cloaks and have long hair, which are details typically reserved for women in Mycenaean iconography. The figures are also shown in peaceful scenes, such as processions or alongside chariots. As Michel notes in her study:

The symbolism of the weapon in these figures could be more connected to ritual power and female authority in religious ceremonies than a representation of violence or war.

It’s been argued by several scholars before that women in Aegean civilisations — Bronze Age societies around the Aegean Sea, including the Myceneans — weren’t restricted within the domestic domain and held important roles and a remarkable amount of authority. Still, archaeologists and art historians have defaulted to the assumption that sword-bearing figures depicted in Aegan material culture must be men. This interpretation is far from unusual, though. Modern biases are frequently projected onto our understanding of the past, shaping it to reflect an androcentric narrative where men are seen as the sole doers of all the ‘cool, important stuff,’ while women are relegated to merely following their lead.

Only that’s hardly an accurate portrayal of our past. 

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If you assume that only men fought, hunted, ruled, held influential religious or secular positions, invented and used tools, built houses and engaged in creative pursuits, then, naturally, you’ll interpret every fragment of our past through that lens. Consequently, every weapon, tool or lavish object is then understood as representing or belonging to men.

For instance, and similarly to the case of Mycenaean kraters, it’s long been assumed that stela — stone or wooden slabs often used as grave markers in the ancient world — depicting weapons or tools represents a man. Meanwhile, stela depicting figures adorned with headdresses and jewellery represents a woman.

However, a recent excavation of a 3000-year-old funerary complex in southwest Spain that contained a Bronze/Iron Age stela challenged that long-standing interpretation. The stela depicted elements typically classified as both ‘male’ and ‘female,’ prompting the team behind the discovery, formed by archaeologists from Durham University and Sevilla University, to propose that social roles during this era were much more fluid than previously thought and not rigidly tied to gender.

Unsurprisingly, similar simplistic gendered interpretations have also been consistently applied to artefacts found in ancient burials.

The 9,000-year-old body discovered in 1934 in the German town of Bad Dürrenberg, buried with a lavish inventory of grave goods — such as deer antlers, skulls, and pierced animal teeth — was initially assumed to belong to a powerful and wealthy ‘Aryan’ white man. This discovery was even used by Nazi ideologues to support their racial doctrines, asserting that the Aryan ‘race’ had always inhabited Germany. And yet modern scientific techniques have revealed that both the gender and racial assumptions were wrong: the influential figure was a dark-skinned young woman, now known as the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg.

A similar situation occurred with a 5,000-year-old burial in Valencia, Spain, once thought to belong to a man, dubbed the ‘Ivory Man,’ presumed to be the highest-ranking person in the entire Iberian Copper Age. Only recent analysis confirmed this individual was also a woman — the ‘Ivory Lady’. Additional research at nearby archaeological sites even revealed that most people buried with comparable pomp and wealth from that period were all women, suggesting female leadership was the norm — not the exception.

Quite a few warrior and hunter ancient burials initially presumed to belong to men have turned out to be those of women, too. This was the case, for instance, with a high-ranking female Viking warrior burial excavated in the 19th century in Sweden, the 9,000-year-old skeleton of a Peruvian female big-hunter and chieftain — actually, up to half of all the hunters found in burial sites in Peru turned out to be women — as well as the remains from a Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 Japan, which, out of a total of 105 bodies contained 35 that belonged to female samurais. A couple of other archaeological sites across Japan have yielded similar results, too.

Now, it’s certainly more challenging to understand the extent of prehistoric and ancient women’s contributions to the creation of tools, art, buildings, and other objects. But thanks to new cutting-edge technologies, it’s not impossible either. One recent study using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology revealed that ancient Egyptian terracotta figurines from the Late and Ptolemaic periods — seventh to second centuries BCE — were mostly created by women. Earlier research also discovered that women left as much as three-quarters of handprints in prehistoric cave art. Based on the practices of surviving pastoralist and agricultural communities — for example, those in sub-Saharan Africa — we can infer that women played key roles in construction processes, too.

All over the world and throughout various periods of history, women have contributed significantly to the societies they lived in, performing important tasks alongside men — including in domains typically viewed as ‘male’.

But then we… forgot about it.

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There’s one crucial point to consider in any discussion on the heavily androcentric understanding of our past: men’s monopoly on the kind of information that gets celebrated, documented, and remembered.

It’s not just that many early natural scientists were men armed with a barrage of biases (though this is significant, especially as these disciplines matured during the hyper-gendered Victorian era). It’s also that throughout history, women’s voices, perspectives, and stories have been systematically diluted, overshadowed, or distorted. And even when scholars or chroniclers included women in their work, they often downplayed their achievements or cast them in an inferior, sexualised, or even demonic light, echoing misogynistic views that have sadly persisted since antiquity.

Take Aspasia, a highly educated Greek woman who became a mentor and teacher to Socrates, credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Yet the only surviving contemporary sources to discuss her life are… comedic plays. They also primarily focused, rather disparagingly, on her sexuality — not intellectual prowess. Needless to say, none of her male contemporaries were subjected to such reductive portrayals. And though later records portrayed Aspasia more positively, her legacy remains largely forgotten. I doubt many ‘philosophy bros’ even know her name.

Quite a bit of knowledge was also lost during the witch-hunt craze that swept Europe and North America between the 15th and 18th centuries. Some scholars have even referred to it as a ‘knowledge war’ precisely because so much of it was lost during this time, particularly in areas like biology, medicine, spirituality, and the female body. After all, many of the ‘witches’ were simply wise women — healers, nurses, midwives, herbalists, and educators — and if they were believed to be influenced by the devil, then their knowledge was likewise condemned and had to be purged from this world.

We’ve seen similar mechanisms of dismissal and appropriation of women’s intellectual labour in recent centuries as well. There’s even a term for this systematic erasure of brilliant women and their work from history, the Matilda Effect, which I wrote about in more detail a few months ago.

Even the female monarchs, warriors, scholars, inventors, and artists whose names have, thankfully, survived the passage of time rarely make it into mainstream history books. According to research by English historian Bettany Hughes, a mere 0.5% of 3,5000 years of recorded history is dedicated to women. Unsurprisingly, this absence is reflected everywhere — from the statues in towns and cities to portraits in museums and the pages of modern textbooks. As one study by researchers Annie Chiponda and Johan Wassermann, which analysed history textbooks from all over the world, including countries like the US, UK, South Africa, and Russia, concludes:

Women are portrayed as historically unimportant and incapable, contributing little to society outside of the domestic sphere.

It’s true that patriarchy — a system of social structures and practices that has enabled men to dominate women for the past few thousand years — has largely excluded women from education, political and intellectual life and has denied them basic rights, such as owning property or voting. It’s also true, though, that women have left a large imprint on the world in so many ways despite these significant restrictions on their freedom and autonomy.

Patriarchy hasn’t fully succeeded in stifling our potential and passions. But it has in gaslighting us into believing that it did.

Or, at least, until fairly recently.

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The final trick in patriarchy’s toolbox, and one that’s perhaps the most visible today, is the devaluation of anything coded as ‘feminine.’

Recognising women’s contributions in domains typically considered ‘masculine’ is undoubtedly important, yes, but it hardly paints the full picture of what women have done throughout history. For centuries, women have also specialised in fields such as textiles, apparel, tapestry, dairy, brewing, baking, food preparation and distribution, some of these going back to ancient times. This is reflected in the stories we tell about our female ancestors — our mothers, grandmothers, or great-grandmothers who shared their recipes for hearty stews and tender cakes or rare crochet patterns.

How can we, sometimes in the same breath, then claim that women have accomplished nothing of value?

If it weren’t for centuries of women perfecting the technology of the needle and thread, humans would have never reached the moon, as it was female seamstresses who designed and sewed lunar spacesuits for the Apollo astronauts. And if it weren’t for generations after generations of women mastering food preparation, I doubt we would have many of the modern food innovations and dishes we so often take for granted.

The reason why typically female-dominated fields, as well as domestic and care labour, are undervalued has nothing to do with their actual importance. It has everything to do with their association with women. And it’s the result of viewing our world through an androcentric lens.

Just like so many other things.

In some cases, as we saw earlier, this led to cartoonish, heavily gendered assumptions about our prehistory — swords or tools or shiny objects = male; jewellery = female. In other contexts, it diminished or outright erased women’s work. Men did all the important stuff. Women did what they were told and sometimes went crazy and had to be burned at the stake.

Unfortunately, these distorted narratives still shape our biases even today. The belief that women can’t lead? That’s based on the myth that men were historically the heads of everything. The belief that women are less competent and brilliant than men? That’s thanks to the myth that men created everything of value in our world. The belief that women’s work is inherently less valuable? That’s a product of the systemic exclusion of women from formal education, the demonisation of their knowledge, and the forced reliance on oral traditions to pass it down.

Androcentrism has also infused nearly every scientific field, dictating which primate species researchers focused on — mostly the male-dominated ones — which bodies were included in medical studies until just recently — male — and even how we describe biological processes like human fertilisation — it’s the ‘active’ sperm that’s thought to fertilise the ‘patiently awaiting’ egg, even though the latter isn’t actually passive.

Still, we’re all impacted by the rigidity of patriarchal gender norms and the backwards idea that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant.

Excluding nearly half of the world’s population from fully participating in it isn’t only unjust — it’s also just plain stupid.

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With parts of the world succumbing to authoritarianism and nostalgically yearning for a past that only ever existed in some people’s heads, it’s now perhaps more crucial than ever to recognise how human history has been oversimplified and distorted — especially when it comes to erasing and minimising women’s contributions.

The reality is that humans of all genders contributed to the world we live in today. And the more we zoom in on our past, the less blue and pink it becomes.

Recognising this isn’t erasing men’s contributions, as some claim.

Instead, it’s acknowledging that the picture of our past, painted through an androcentric lens, is incomplete and that we all need to play an active part in shaping our future if we want to build something better than what we have now.

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