In the Greek myth, Pandora was created as the first woman. Hesiod presents her arrival as the beginning of the female race within a story explaining human suffering, marriage, and the division of labor.
The account is not a modern historical claim about human origins. It is a mythic explanation embedded in archaic Greek poetry. Zeus orders Pandora’s creation as retaliation for Prometheus’s theft of fire, and the gods make her attractive while giving her qualities that Hesiod’s audience associates with both domestic life and danger.
The story’s gender assumptions reflect the society and period in which Hesiod wrote, probably in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Later writers and artists often focus on Pandora’s beauty or curiosity while omitting the poem’s broader social argument. Identifying her as the first woman is therefore different from calling her the first human: Hesiod’s myth gives the earlier male human condition a separate place.