Stibbard–Hawkes and von Rueden argue that egalitarianism should not be understood mainly as equal outcomes but as a set of social processes that limit domination, reduce dependence, and help people protect their own resource access, status, and autonomy. They help move the debate away from idealized pictures of equality and toward the actual practices by which people prevent others from becoming too powerful. It also helps correct romantic views of small-scale societies as places of simple harmony or universal fairness.

However, from a feminist perspective, the key question is not only whether social processes limit hierarchy but also for whom they do so and at whose expense. A society may look relatively egalitarian in public or male-coded domains while still reproducing deep inequalities in the parts of life most shaped by gender, including reproduction, care, sexuality, bodily vulnerability, mobility, and exposure to coercion. What appears as egalitarianism may be only a partial achievement.

Stibbard–Hawkes and von Rueden note that women in many relatively egalitarian societies often bear greater childcare burdens, are less likely to gain prestige through hunting or public leadership, and are more exposed to intra-household violence. They also note that women’s political influence often increases when direct childcare demands become lighter. These points suggest that gender is not just one inequality among others. It shapes the background conditions under which people can act, speak, move, resist, or leave.

This matters because process-first theories can still miss where domination really sits. Practices such as demand-sharing, status-leveling, consensus decision-making, and residential mobility may reduce hierarchy in some visible settings, especially in relations among men competing over prestige or authority. But these same practices may leave intact, or even depend upon, inequalities in less visible parts of life. A community may successfully stop some people from rising too far above others while still relying on women’s labor, time, and bodies as if they were more available. If so, then equality in one part of social life may be sustained by unequal dependency in another.

Feminist understanding of autonomy shows that autonomy is relational. Marway (Reference Marway2024) argues that autonomy must be understood in ways that are both relational and intersectional, because social position shapes what forms of self-direction are actually possible. Kuokkanen (Reference Kuokkanen2025) makes a related point through the idea of relational freedom. Freedom is not simply the absence of interference from above. It depends on the structure of one’s relationships and on whether those relationships support or constrain agency. Women may formally have some autonomy while still living inside relations of dependence that make refusal, disagreement, or exit much more costly.

Feminist philosophy of care and dependency helps explain why process-first egalitarianism needs a stronger account of hidden burdens. Hoppe (Reference Hoppe2025) argues that modern ideals of autonomy often depend on denying dependency, embodiment, and care. Jesenková (Reference Jesenková2025) shows that care is always connected to power. Care is not outside politics. It is one of the places where power is organized and justified. A society may appear egalitarian in distribution or decision-making while leaving care work heavily unequal. If one group carries more of the work of feeding, raising, cleaning, and staying, then others may be freer precisely because someone else is less free. Feminist social reproduction theory makes the same point in broader terms: the labor that sustains life is not peripheral to social order but one of its foundations (Mezzadri et al., Reference Mezzadri, Rai, Stevano, Alessandrini, Bargawi, Elias, Hassim, Kesar, Natile, Neetha, Ossome, Raghuram, Thiyaga Lingham, Tsikata and Wöhl2025).

Feminist studies on reproductive justice and bodily autonomy show why status, resource access, and mobility are not enough as measures of freedom. Cavaliere and Cesarano (Reference Cavaliere and Cesarano2026) show how gender socialization shapes both women’s choices and the costs attached to those choices. Restrepo-Sánchez (Reference Restrepo-Sánchez2025) argues that formal consent can exist alongside structural conditions that undermine autonomy, especially in reproductive contexts. Chadwick (Reference Chadwick2025) is especially helpful here because she distinguishes different forms of freedom: freedom from violence, freedom to labor, and freedom to be in relation. Autonomy is not exhausted by choice or movement alone. A person may be able to choose in one domain while still being unfree in another because of violence, obligation, or bodily vulnerability. The real question is not only whether people may choose but also whether they can form, avoid, and sustain reproductive and caring relations under conditions of dignity and nondomination (Sigle et al., Reference Sigle, Nunes, Sochas, Chanfreau, Suh and Wilson2025).

These feminist insights suggest a stronger test for process-first egalitarianism. We should ask not only whether most individuals can secure resource access, status, and autonomy but also whose labor, whose bodies, and whose time make those achievements possible. Residential mobility, for example, is unlikely to be equally available to those who are pregnant, nursing, caring for small children, or vulnerable to sexual coercion. Consensus decision-making may also look more equal than it really is if some participants arrive already more burdened, more interruptible, less safe, and less able to bear the costs of dissent. Even where no one openly rules, some people may remain less free because they are more tied to others through unchosen dependency.

This point also matters for the authors’ emphasis on autonomy. Autonomy should not be measured only by one’s ability to avoid domination in public decision-making or in access to resources. It should also include freedom from being made reliably available to others through care expectations, reproductive burdens, or violence. Feminist work on domestic violence shows that the work of securing freedom is often practical, uneven, and costly and often falls most heavily on those who are already vulnerable (Woodlock, Salter, & Western, Reference Woodlock, Salter and Western2025).

The authors are right that egalitarianism is not equality. From a feminist perspective, that claim should be pressed further. Egalitarian processes must be judged within an uneven moral landscape in which some forms of domination are easier to see than others. A society may limit some hierarchies while preserving deeper inequalities in dependency, bodily risk, and the conditions of exit. Without a gender-attentive account of care, reproduction, and vulnerability, process-first egalitarianism risks becoming a partial description of how some men limit other men while missing the wider structure of unequal lives.