FAMILY PATRIARCHY EAST AND WEST: A CONTROLLED COMPARISON OF HISTORICAL EUROPE AND CONTEMPORARY ASIA

Scholars have long argued that the familial, demographic and socio-cultural conditions in historical Europe left little room for patriarchal bias compared to Asia. However, these claims have not been rigorously tested through large-scale, data-driven, comparative analyses and statistical modelling. This paper fills this gap by applying Gruber and Szołtysek’s (2016) Patriarchy Index to IPUMS-International census microdata from 857 regional populations in historical Europe and 21 Asian/North African countries after 1970 (93 million people). Our descriptive, spatial and multilevel regression approaches challenge the ‘patriarchal East’ vs. ‘liberated West’ dualism. We find that some historical European areas were more patriarchal than the contemporary Asian data, and several regions in both Europe and Asia show less pronounced patriarchal tendencies than predicted by the models. Finally, we show that Asia and historical Europe are remarkably similar in the mechanisms influencing patriarchy. Overall, our work provides ample evidence that the historical patterns of patriarchy in Europe are not unique.