Definition
Gender hierarchy is the systematic ranking of people by sex, almost always with men placed above women in political, legal, economic, and religious life. Harari notes that this pattern is one of the strangest features of human history: virtually every agricultural society, on every continent, independently arrived at some form of patriarchy.
He treats the term cautiously. Biological sex is a fact; gender — the bundle of expectations, roles, and rights attached to that sex — is an imagined order. The hierarchy under examination is the imagined order, not the chromosome count.
Why it matters
How it works
A gender hierarchy works the same way other imagined orders work: through laws, religion, kinship rules, property arrangements, and the daily socialisation of children. Each generation inherits a world in which "men do X, women do Y" is already inscribed in courts, temples, schools, and stories — and that inheritance is then reinterpreted as biology speaking through culture.
Harari is clear that the difficulty of explaining patriarchy is itself a finding. If a deeply rooted, near-universal hierarchy turns out to have no clean biological grounding, then much of what we call natural about gender is, in fact, contingent — and so, in principle, revisable.