The Interplay of Class and Gender in Shaping Social Inequality

Social class has long been treated as one of the master categories of sociology, the lens through which scholars from Marx to Weber explained who gets what and why. But for most of its history, class analysis quietly assumed a male worker, a wage packet, and a wife at home. When women’s labour, both inside the factory and inside the kitchen, finally entered the conversation, the entire framework had to be rebuilt. This is the story of how class and gender stopped being treated as separate puzzles and began to be understood as two threads woven into the same fabric of inequality.

How traditional class analysis missed half the population 🔗

Classical sociology built its theories of stratification around paid work in the public sphere. Marx focused on the relationship between workers and owners of the means of production. Weber expanded the picture with status and party, but still anchored class in market position and occupation. In both frameworks, the typical actor was assumed to be a man selling his labour for a wage.

The household was treated as a single unit with a single class position, usually derived from the occupation of the male head. This shorthand had a name in later sociological debates: the conventional view or the male breadwinner-female housewife model, in which the rise of industrial capitalism separated the home from commodity production and pushed women into economic dependence on their husbands or fathers.

The trouble with this neat picture is that it never quite matched reality, and it became less accurate with every passing decade. Treating the family as a single class actor hides three important things at once: the work women do for no wages, the wages women do earn, and the unequal distribution of power and resources within the household itself.

The invisibility of unpaid domestic labour 🔗

Cooking, cleaning, fetching water and fuel, caring for children, looking after elderly parents, managing illness in the family. None of this work shows up in GDP, on a payslip, or in most measures of occupational class. Yet without it, no paid worker could leave the house in the morning. Feminist sociologists pointed out that traditional class analysis effectively counted only one half of the labour that keeps a society running.

The numbers from India make this stark. The latest Time Use Survey released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in 2025 shows that women aged six and above spend an average of 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services for household members, compared to just 88 minutes for men. A separate analysis notes that Indian women’s unpaid domestic and care work is more than eight times that of men, higher than in most other countries. The Economic Survey 2024 estimated that women’s unpaid care work contributes about 3.1 percent to India’s GDP, a figure that captures only the most easily measurable slice of this hidden economy.

The assumption that the household has one class position 🔗

Even when both spouses earn, traditional class theorists usually placed the family in the class of whoever earned more, almost always the husband. This produced odd anomalies. A woman with a postgraduate degree working as a school teacher would be classed by her husband’s job as a small businessman, even if her education, occupation and worldview were very different from his.

It also masked a more uncomfortable truth: resources are not always shared equally inside a household. Food, healthcare, education, leisure time and decision-making power are often distributed along gendered lines. A “middle-class” family can contain a comfortable son and an under-fed daughter, or a husband with savings and a wife with no independent access to money.

Static roles in a changing economy 🔗

The breadwinner model also assumed the gendered division of labour was fixed. In India, that assumption looks especially shaky. The female labour force participation rate has climbed from 23.3 percent in 2017-18 to 41.7 percent in 2023-24, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, driven largely by rural women returning to agriculture and self-employment. Any class theory that treats women as housewives by default will misread a workforce in which a large and rising share of women earn, produce and trade.

Women’s work and the class position of women 🔗

Once we stop assuming that a woman’s class can be read off her husband’s job, a new set of questions opens up. What kind of paid work do women actually do, how is it valued, and how does this shape their place in the class structure?

Occupational segregation and feminised work 🔗

Women’s entry into the paid workforce has not been even across all jobs. Worldwide, women cluster in a narrow set of occupations: teaching, nursing, care work, garment manufacturing, domestic service, retail and clerical jobs. These are often called feminised occupations, and they share a striking feature. They tend to pay less and carry less prestige than male-dominated jobs that require similar levels of skill and education.

In India, the pattern is clear. A study of gender-based occupational segregation finds that while differences in education explain a large part of the rural wage gap, a considerable share of the urban gender wage gap is explained by differences in occupational profiles across gender. Women remain clustered in undervalued sectors such as education, healthcare and social work, which the PLFS shows are paid less than male-dominated sectors like engineering and finance.

The double burden and time poverty 🔗

Entering paid work has rarely meant leaving unpaid work behind. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this the “second shift”, the household labour that begins when the day job ends. The Indian time-use data confirm that the second shift is alive and well. In 2019, women in India spent an average of 299 minutes each day on unpaid domestic services for household members, over three times more than men; by 2024 the figure had only dropped to 289 minutes, while men’s contribution actually fell.

The consequence is what researchers call time poverty. This inequitable allocation of unpaid work leaves women with little or no discretionary time, with serious consequences for their economic opportunities and health. Time poverty narrows the kinds of jobs women can take, the training they can pursue and the leisure or rest they can claim. It also pushes women toward part-time, home-based or informal work, where wages and protections are weakest.

Informality and precarious work 🔗

Women’s class position is also shaped by the kind of contract, or lack of contract, attached to their jobs. Over 90 percent of employed women in India work in the informal sector, with little to no access to social security, maternity benefits or legal safeguards. Domestic workers, home-based garment stitchers, agricultural labourers and street vendors form a vast underclass of women whose work is essential but whose protections are minimal.

This is not just a problem of low wages. It is a structural location in the class hierarchy that classical theories struggle to name, because their categories were designed for factory wage labourers in formal employment.

Contemporary perspectives that put gender back into class 🔗

From the 1970s onwards, feminist sociologists pushed class analysis to rebuild itself. They argued that gender was not an extra variable to be added at the end, but a fundamental axis of the class system itself.

Materialist feminism and social reproduction 🔗

Materialist feminism is one of the most influential responses to the gender blindness of classical theory. It argues that women’s subordination is rooted in material conditions, especially their relationship to production and to reproduction, rather than in attitudes or culture alone. Drawing on figures like Friedrich Engels and later Marxist-feminists, this tradition argues that full women’s liberation cannot be achieved without addressing the unpaid housework that capitalism quietly relies on.

From this stream emerged social reproduction theory. Capitalism, this theory points out, depends on a continuous supply of healthy, schooled, fed and emotionally supported workers. The work of producing and maintaining these workers, day after day and generation after generation, falls overwhelmingly on women in the family. The “productive” economy of factories and offices, in other words, sits on top of a hidden “reproductive” economy of homes and care.

Socialist feminism and the dual systems approach 🔗

A related school, socialist feminism, argues that women’s subordination flows from the intersection of two systems, capitalism and patriarchy, rather than from either alone. Thinkers like Heidi Hartmann, Juliet Mitchell and Alison Jaggar insisted that you cannot dismantle gender oppression without confronting economic exploitation, and the reverse is equally true. From this angle, the gender pay gap, the care economy and women’s underrepresentation in positions of power are not separate problems but symptoms of how capitalism and patriarchy reinforce one another.

Intersectionality and the limits of class alone 🔗

More recent scholarship has pushed further. Class and gender do not act on a uniform population. In the Indian context, caste, religion, region and migration status all shape how class and gender combine. A Dalit woman in a brick kiln, an upper-caste woman in a corporate boardroom and an Adivasi woman in seasonal migrant labour share a gender but inhabit very different class worlds. Intersectional approaches insist that we trace these overlapping hierarchies together rather than treat each as a separate add-on.

Why this rethinking matters for policy 🔗

These theoretical shifts are not just academic. They reshape what counts as policy. If domestic work is real work, then crèches, paid maternity leave, piped water and clean cooking fuel become economic infrastructure, not welfare. If feminised occupations are systematically underpaid, then minimum-wage laws, collective bargaining for domestic workers and equal-pay enforcement under frameworks like CEDAW and India’s Code on Wages become tools of class justice for women.

Putting class and gender back together 🔗

Traditional class analysis treated households as units, men as workers and women as background. The result was a map of inequality with whole regions missing. Contemporary perspectives, from materialist feminism to social reproduction theory and intersectional analysis, redraw that map. They show that the worker on the shop floor and the woman at the kitchen sink are part of the same system, that feminised occupations are not naturally low-paid but historically devalued, and that household power is itself a site of stratification.

The lesson for anyone trying to understand inequality in India today is to read class and gender together. The rural woman whose work is now appearing in labour force statistics, the urban graduate hitting a glass ceiling, the domestic worker on a smartphone-managed roster: each of their stories needs both class and gender to make sense.

What do you think? If unpaid domestic work were counted in national accounts at fair-market wages, how do you think it would change the way we measure the “class” of Indian households? And in your own family or neighbourhood, who is treated as the household’s “real” worker, and who quietly makes that work possible?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-class/
2. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=154004
3. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/underlining-the-work-that-women-do-findings-from-time-use-survey-2024
4. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=151782
6. https://iwwage.org/gender-based-occupational-segregation-a-barrier-for-womens-economic-empowerment/
7. https://indialeadersforsocialsector.com/gender-pay-parity-india-diverse-landscape/
8. https://www.bluekraft.in/time-use-survey-a-time-for-change/
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7688061/
10. https://sociology.institute/introduction-to-sociology/socialist-feminism-class-gender-analysis/
11. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/stories/op-ed/2022/09/the-gender-pay-gap-hard-truths-and-actions-needed