Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.

Abdominal laparoscopy was first introduced by Kelling and Jacobaeus in the early 1910s and later by Palmer in the 1950s and 1960s.[1,2] Palmer noted that this new operative technique was superior to culdoscopy as there was a decreased chance of infection, better views of the pelvis, improved access to the pelvic organs and cul-de-sac, and easier application of surgical techniques.

Chapter 6 focuses on agriculture and food processing. Analysis demonstrates that women undertook a little more than a third of agricultural work tasks, doing more work in animal husbandry than arable agriculture but participating widely in both. The work-task approach also allows less well-documented activities such as work on common land to be analysed for the first time. The gender division of labour in agriculture is shown to have been flexible.

One of the most significant advancements in modern medicine has been the shift away from large incision “open” surgeries to video-assisted endoscopy, a groundbreaking innovation invented and pioneered by Camran Nezhat, MD, in the late 1970s.[1–4] Initially referred to as “keyhole,” “Band-Aid,” video surgery, or video laparoscopy, video-assisted endoscopy and video-assisted thoracoscopy (VAT) are now universally referred to as “minimally invasive surgery” (MIS), with or without robotic assistance. Dismissed as a barbaric and dangerous gimmick just 30 years ago, today MIS is recognized for profoundly improving the health outcomes of hundreds of millions of patients around the world. Indeed, with countless lives saved and millions of hospitalizations and surgery-related permanent disabilities prevented, the transformative impact that MIS has had on patients has been so remarkable that it has been described as a change to surgery as revolutionary for our era as anesthesia was for the nineteenth century.

In 1871 in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin introduced the notion of sexual selection. Sexual selection leads to features that help individuals gain access to mates and takes two forms – intrasexual and intersexual selection. Intrasexual selection involves competition between members of one sex for access to the opposite sex, while intersexual selection involves members of one sex attempting to attract members of the opposite sex. In nature these forces are believed to lead to elevated levels of aggression, greater body strength and the development of attractive features in males. For females sexual selection leads to choosiness over mates. Sexual selection theory and the notion of female choice have recently become important concepts for the understanding of behaviour. There is now clear evidence from a number of species that female choice has been a driving force in the evolution of male adornment and aggressive behaviour.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was the first convention to address biodiversity as a global common pool resource. The convention mandates the protection of biodiversity and deals simultaneously with distributive issues, that is, the allocation of benefits from the exploitation of germplasm resources. Although, “raw” germplasm resources have typically been treated as open access resources, “worked” germplasm resources are protected under various intellectual property right systems, such as breeders’ rights and patents. This disparity in the treatment of resources has prompted developing countries to assert jurisdictional control over their “raw” germplasm resources and to charge fees on persons (researchers, corporations) who wish to access such resources. This chapter analyzes the global arrangements for the sharing of benefits from the use of germplasm resources and whether such arrangements will be disrupted by the new techniques of synthetic biology and the advantages offered by the in silico conservation of germplasm resources. We further scrutinize whether the existing arrangements, or potential future configurations of benefit sharing, will have a tangible impact on the livelihoods of people of the developing world – indigenous peoples and farmers.