Cross-Cultural Codes Dealing with the Relative Status of Women

The purpose of this article is to present a set of codes dealing with the status of women relative to men, along with ratings for each code on 93 cultures. The codes were developed in order to investigate how women's status varies in preindustrial societies, and why women do better in some societies than in others. In the larger study for which these codes were developed (Whyte I978), they were used to test a wide variety of hypotheses dealing with variation in aspects of the status of women, and for this purpose associations with another set of codes for the subsistence base, political structure, and other organizational characteristics of each society were examined. Here we restrict ollr attention to the women's status codes themselves and their interrelations.