Okay, Woj has successfully jerked my chain on this. There are many hunting and gathering societies that have far less gender stratification
[WS:] And what percent of the population live in hunting and gathering societies? I do not think there are many such societies left. Even the !Kung bushmen went out of business.
Comparing complex societies to small hunting and gathering groups is comparing apples to oranges. First the internal structure of both kinds of groups is very much different, which makes a comparison of social distance between subsets of the societies very difficult if at all possible. Obviously, there is much more specialization in complex societies, and thus possibility for stratification, than in a small nomadic band. Second, there is a great diversity among hunting and gathering societies - some of them egalitarian other extremely stratified and male-dominant (cf. the Yanomamo). So which of these should we compare to more complex societies?
And then, there is the fundamental question. Suppose for the sake of the argument that hunting and gathering societies are, on average, more egalitarian than complex ones. Does that mean that we should do away with more complex social organization and all its vices and benefits, and return to the primitive form?
One more thing. Last time I took an anthro class some 20 years ago I read that the status of women depended not on the size of the society but on whether women did mainly in the housework or contributed the household by working outside the household. It was higher when the worked outside. With that in mind, capitalism transformed women from housewives and domestic workers to market producers - and that was the main factor that significantly narrowed the gender gap. Some may yearn for simpler and more bucolic times when men worked the land, but at that same time women stayed home, served their husbands, and dying while producing babies from, oh well, the lack of specialized health care.
Wojtek