Cultural information dynamics and the rise of women in Norway’s state and military

The growing presence of women in the Norwegian state and military heralds an epoch-making, worldwide transformation. A key challenge is to explain why institutions which excluded women for more than a millennium no longer promote all-male membership. This tectonic shift is investigated with a data-based synthetical methodology. Multidisciplinary evidence going back five thousand years is combined with a graphical analysis of two centuries of time series data. The guiding theory is that historical pathways for cultural information flow have coevolutionary spatial and energetic sociodynamics. Accordingly, women’s exclusion from warfare and politics in agrarian-era Norway coevolved with three interconnected constraints: oral communication, dependence on musculoskeletal energy, and the spatial limitations of person-to-person contact. The contemporary relaxation of such constraints is investigated using two centuries of data culled from Norway’s statistical yearbooks. These data show that women’s entry into Norway’s national legislature, pushed by women’s organizations, roughly coevolved with literacy-based communication and education, industrial-era extrasomatic energy, and distance-closing motorization. Multidisciplinary evidence also indicates that women’s military and political careers were spatiotemporally handicapped by inflexible work hours and worksites far from childrearing locations. The Norwegian military prioritized physical endurance rather than the competencies that women would later bring to a 21st-century rapid reaction force. Today, with new information pathways forming, the digitalized knowledge economy is reversing the human-capital advantage of men compared to women. Instantaneous information exchange and high-tech energetics are reducing spatiotemporal barriers via remote work. Cross-disciplinary and time-series evidence suggest that these digital-age dynamics contribute to a more gender-neutral state and military.