Bias, Bias Everywhere. When does it end?

Sally Slocum was a feminist anthropologist who is known for her work “Women the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” in which she reinterprets human development with an emphasis on the contribution of females rather than males. According to Slocum, “… questions always determine and limit answers… we choose to ask certain questions and not others” (Slocum, 307). With this in mind, she focused on the question, “What were the females doing while the males were out hunting?”  

With her question, Sally Slocum brought to light the fact that throughout the course of history, men’s roles were prioritized while women’s roles were ignored and downplayed. Historically, there has always been an emphasis on the importance of Man the Hunter and the contributions that resulted from this practice of hunting while the contributions of Women the Gatherer have been downplayed or ignored. In the excerpt from “Women the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology” Slocum reinterprets the idea of Man the Hunter and claims that all of aspects of the human development, such as the invention of art, language, tools, weapons, and various other skills such as cooperation, coordination, and communication, have simply been attributed to males hunters. The other half of the human species, the women gatherers, were credited with staying at home, popping out babies, and gathering food in areas that had no potential threats. Slocum points to these claims about the contributions of the hunter as evidence of male bias. In her reinterpretation, she concludes that hunting wasn’t the primary factor that forged the way for the development of the distinguishing traits that makes us human. According to Slocum, gathering and taking care of the young required just as much skill, if not more, as hunting. Additionally, the women’s role as gatherer, along with her role in reproduction, including difficult births, infant dependency, and longer gestation, helped create the selection pressures that led to larger brain size.

While I agree with Sally that there has been male bias not only the field of anthropology, but all fields of study, I also think that with this piece, Sally may be exhibiting female bias a little more than necessary. It is very well known that each individual, whether male or female, holds a certain bias that is impossible to completely eradicate. The closest way of lessening the impact of the bias may simply be to acknowledge in whatever piece that the bias exists. However, in my opinion, Slocum used the argument of their having been a Male bias for Man the Hunter throughout history in order to herself introduce an especially strong female bias against man the hunter and for women the gatherer. She literally takes all the skills and contributions that have previously been attributed to the male hunters and counters them by explaining how these skills were more developed by female gatherers, and there is no mention that maybe it was a combination of both sexes that attributed to human development.

So then does that mean if one reads Slocum’s piece about Women the Gatherer and then reads a piece about Man the Hunter, it cancels out the bias on both ends? Or does it not really work that way?