Friedl’s rule. Ernestine Friedl’s comparison found that the best single predictor of women’s standing is not how much of the work they do — it is whether they control the distribution of valued goods beyond their own household. Trobriand women hand out wealth at mortuary exchanges; Yoruba and Asante women run markets; a Maasai wife gives out her house’s milk. Watch the giving, not the labour.
These are analytic types, not a ladder. No people climbs from one to the next, none is earlier or simpler as a society, and the variation inside a type is often larger than the gap between types — the Haudenosaunee and the societies of the New Guinea Highlands are both horticultural and sit at opposite ends of this chart. Note also that no confirmed matriarchy — women holding public power the way men hold it in patriarchies — has been documented anywhere. Matrilineal descent is a different thing, and it is common.