Gender equality would first be a conquest of cheap energy, not of moral conscience or institutions. This is the thesis defended by Véra Nikolski in a short and unsettling book, published by Fayard in April 2026. She does not disqualify feminist struggle. She examines the material conditions that make equality possible.
The Essentials
- Nikolski argues that women’s participation in work and education is a byproduct of industrial energy abundance, not an autonomous moral or institutional evolution.
- In countries without universal electricity, educational investments alone do not significantly advance female labor market participation, according to World Bank and International Energy Agency data.
- The author draws on evolutionary anthropology and comparative data to show that societies without abundant energy maintain a functional, not ideological, sexual division of labor.
- If this causality holds, equality policies that ignore the energy constraint are fragile at the 2040-2050 horizon.
Who is Véra Nikolski
Véra Nikolski is a political science researcher specializing in post-Soviet Russia and transformations in industrial societies. She teaches in a higher education institution. Why Amazons Don’t Exist, coauthored with Nicolas Pichoff, is her second major essay in French, following Feminicene (Fayard, 2023). Here she leaves the terrain she is known for to tackle a broader question: why no known human society has durably institutionalized female domination over men, and what this asymmetry reveals about the material conditions of emancipation.
The Thesis: Energy as Infrastructure of Equality
Nikolski begins with a simple anthropological observation. The Amazons, those warriors who governed themselves without men, existed only in Greek myths. All documented human societies present a sexual division of labor. The extent of this division varies, but the division itself is universal. The challenge is understanding what reduces or amplifies it.
Nikolski’s answer is materialist in the strict sense. The sexual division of labor is first a functional response to energy constraint. In preindustrial societies, male physical strength had direct productive value. Women were assigned to domestic and reproductive tasks because these tasks absorbed almost all of their available time: fetching water, making fire, cooking, washing. Industrialization mechanized these tasks.
Electricity made them nearly instantaneous. In doing so, it liberated female time on a scale without precedent in human history.
It is this liberated time, Nikolski argues, that made possible the education of girls, their entry into the labor market, and subsequently the legal and political conquests of the twentieth century. The order of causality is crucial here. Rights followed material transformation: they did not precede it. The feminism of suffrage and wage labor flourished on soil that washing machines and electrical networks had prepared.
This thesis is uncomfortable for two reasons. It decenters the political agency of feminist movements without denying it: it makes them a force that accelerated and directed a transformation already underway, rather than its first cause. And it implies that everywhere this material transformation has not occurred, equality remains beyond the reach of education or legal policies alone.
The Evolutionary Argument: Why Inverse Domination Does Not Exist
The book’s second line of argument is even more original. Nikolski and Pichoff mobilize evolutionary anthropology to explain the universal asymmetry. No society has durably institutionalized female domination over men by chance, but for reasons tied to reproductive biology. Matrilineal descent exists. Durable female political domination over men does not.
The authors advance an argument about differential reproductive costs: men can reproduce at very low marginal cost, women at very high cost. This asymmetry creates different selective pressures on risk-taking, competition, and cooperation behaviors. Nikolski explains why certain social configurations are more stable than others under given energy constraint conditions. This position rests on solid corpus of primatology and comparative anthropology, and it clearly distinguishes itself from biological arguments used to justify inequality.
The decisive point is that this reproductive cost asymmetry becomes less determining as abundant energy reduces inequalities of physical strength in production. The evolutionary argument and the energy argument converge: what changes gender relations is the transformation of material conditions of production, not human nature itself.
The Data
Data that the World Bank and International Energy Agency published over the decades 1950-2024 support the correlation Nikolski describes. In countries that have achieved universal electrification, the rate of women’s participation in the labor market generally exceeds a significant threshold. In sub-Saharan Africa, where access to electricity is often below 50%, the rate of female labor market participation reaches 65% on average (World Bank, 2024), with countries exceeding 80 to 88%, regardless of educational investment level. The promise of the diploma and the glass ceiling of the market illustrates moreover that even in industrialized countries, access to education does not suffice to guarantee real economic equality: market structure counts as much as qualification.
This correlation poses a problem for theories that make education the principal variable in female emancipation. In several low-electrification countries, girls’ education progresses faster than their economic participation. The gap between the two curves indicates that something else blocks. Nikolski identifies this something: non-mechanized domestic time, which continues to absorb four to six hours daily in these contexts. In the most electrified regions (Europe, North America), women still spend 3.6 to 3.8 hours per day on unpaid domestic work according to UN Women (2023).
Correlation is not proof of causality, and Nikolski knows this. She mobilizes additional arguments to support causal direction: temporal sequence (electrification generally precedes progression in female participation in historical data), regional granularity within countries (zones electrified ahead of their neighbors see female participation progress ahead), and case studies of households with access to gas or electricity compared to those without access.
The Book’s Blind Spots
The book is short, fewer than 250 pages, and this brevity has a cost. Several objections merit honest formulation.
The first concerns causal direction. Economists like Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have shown that institutions that redistribute gains from technical progress are determinative for this progress’s impact on inequalities. Universal electrification results from political choices, public investments, and regulations that constrain companies to cover non-profitable zones. Scandinavian countries electrified their entire territory before the American South, largely because they had cooperative institutions and states capable of planning. Energy is a necessary condition, without being self-sufficient.
The second objection concerns post-transition societies. In fully industrialized countries, the domestic time constraint has been drastically reduced since the 1970s. Yet salary inequalities, political representation, and career disparities persist. If energy were the only variable, they should have disappeared. Nikolski acknowledges these persistences, but she attributes them to institutional adjustment delays and residual social norms.
This response is plausible, but it reintroduces an institutional and cultural causality that the materialist thesis had wanted to put aside.
The third concerns middle-income countries that progress without universal electrification. India, for example, has seen female participation in higher education advance significantly in contexts of partial electrification. The energy constraint does not capture everything.
These blind spots do not invalidate the central thesis. They calibrate it: energy is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and the institutions that distribute and regulate it count as much as its raw abundance.
Feminist Gains Facing Energy Abundance Erosion
The book poses this question without fully answering it, and it is central for the decades ahead. If women’s emancipation is a byproduct of industrial energy abundance, scenarios where this abundance contracts or redistributes differently merit examination.
The International Energy Agency documents that the transition to renewable energies temporarily creates energy rents highly concentrated geographically. Countries unable to finance their transition in time risk decades of energy costs exceeding those of leading countries. In these costly transition contexts, non-mechanized domestic burden could partially return, notably in median-income households that forgo renewing their electrical appliances. This signal remains weak in current data, but it deserves monitoring.
The more concerning scenario plays out in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia countries combining rapid demographic growth, incomplete electrification, and public finance pressure. For these countries, the sequence Nikolski describes—mechanization of domestic labor, liberation of female time, elevated education level, entry into the labor market—depends entirely on the speed at which electricity becomes universal and cheap. World Bank projections on electricity access show that several sub-Saharan African countries will not achieve universal electrification before 2040, and in some cases before 2050. If Nikolski is right, educational policies deployed alone in these contexts will produce educated women who will continue dedicating four to five hours daily to non-mechanized domestic tasks. Human capital investment will be real; its economic return will be blocked by material constraint.
The book opens a concrete question for development policy: conditioning aid for female education on parallel investments in energy infrastructure. Organizations like the International Renewable Energy Agency are beginning to document programs coupling rural electrification and female professional training. These experiments, still limited in scale, constitute the most direct empirical test of Nikolski’s thesis.
The stakes extend beyond developing countries. In industrialized societies, the debate on energy transition has largely concentrated on decarbonization and supply security. The gender equality dimension is almost absent. If cheap energy is indeed infrastructure of emancipation, the social cost of transition must also be measured by this standard.
The Book’s Interest
Why Amazons Don’t Exist addresses two types of readers. The first are those left unsatisfied by dominant feminist thought without quite knowing why: Nikolski offers them an analytical framework that takes emancipation seriously without reducing it to a struggle of conscience. The second are development and public policy practitioners seeking to move beyond educational policies as a universal solution to gender inequality.
The book unsettles because it reorders causalities that one prefers not to hierarchize. It does not say that women’s rights are useless. It says they are more stable and durable when they rest on actual material transformation rather than moral evolution alone. This is lucid optimism: progress is possible and documented, but its conditions must be understood to be reproduced elsewhere.
The book’s principal weakness is its brevity where depth is needed: the evolutionary argument is exposed quickly, and discussion of institutionalist objections merits an entire chapter. The book poses a question strikingly more than it answers exhaustively. For a major essay, it is an invitation to extend the work.
Title: Why Amazons Don’t Exist: Sexes, Risk, and Evolution Authors: Véra Nikolski and Nicolas Pichoff Publisher: Fayard Publication Date: April 2026 Source: fayard.fr https://1winkenya.top
Sources
- Véra Nikolski and Nicolas Pichoff, Why Amazons Don’t Exist: Sexes, Risk, and Evolution, Fayard, 2026, fayard.fr
- International Energy Agency (IEA), reports on gender and energy, iea.org
- World Bank, Women Economic Empowerment 2024, worldbank.org
- International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), reports on rural electrification and gender equality
