Inequality is everywhere in modern societies—from wealth gaps to unpaid housework—and yet people often judge these disparities as fair. Why do we accept some inequalities, such as gendered divisions of household labour, while rejecting others, like unequal splits in an anonymous economic game? Angarika’s work examines the psychology behind these judgments: how people think about inequality, how fairness is evaluated, and how social environments shape these evaluations.

A central case she focuses on is the persistent inequality in household labour, where women often do the lion’s share of the work and still consider the arrangement fair. Drawing on fieldwork with hunter-gatherer societies, controlled experiments, and large-scale survey data, Angarika shows that fairness judgments are highly sensitive to relational contexts—specifically, the norms, obligations, and expectations that come with different social roles and networks. When inequalities are embedded in these relationships, people can come to expect, justify, and even reproduce them. This helps explain how women may themselves uphold patriarchal norms, despite being disadvantaged by them.

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