Understanding Gender Stratification: Unequal Access to Power, Prestige, and Property

Walk into any Indian household, workplace, or panchayat meeting, and you will notice a pattern. Men and women are not just different; they often hold different positions in the social ladder, with unequal control over money, decisions, and dignity. Sociologists call this gender stratification, and it is one of the oldest and most stubborn forms of social inequality in human history. Understanding how it works helps us see why a brilliant girl may drop out of school after Class 10, why a woman earns less for the same work, and why certain tribes in Meghalaya turn this whole picture upside down.

What is gender stratification? 🔗

Gender stratification refers to the unequal distribution of wealth, power, prestige, and privilege between people based on their gender. Sociologist Russ Long describes it as a system where gender becomes the basis for social ranking, much like caste or class. It is not the same as biological sex difference. A man being taller on average than a woman is biology. A man earning more than a woman for the same job is stratification.

The key idea here is that this inequality is socially constructed, not natural. It is built through cultural norms, family practices, religious texts, schooling, media, and laws, and it is passed down generation after generation. As one widely used sociology textbook explains, stratification is a system in which groups of people experience unequal access to basic, yet highly valuable, social resources. When that unequal access is organised around gender, men typically gain greater privilege and power over women, transgender, and gender-non-conforming people.

The three Ps: power, prestige, and property 🔗

A useful way to grasp gender stratification is to break it down into three resources that society distributes unevenly:

Power refers to the ability to make decisions that affect others, whether in the household, the workplace, or the legislature. In India, women hold only about 14 to 15 percent of seats in Parliament and state assemblies, despite making up nearly half the population. The Women’s Reservation Act of 2023 is an attempt to correct exactly this kind of imbalance.

Prestige refers to the social respect and honour attached to a position. Occupations associated with men, such as engineering, business leadership, or scientific research, generally enjoy higher prestige than those associated with women, such as nursing, primary school teaching, or unpaid domestic work.

Property refers to control over economic resources, land, and assets. Even after the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, daughters in many families are quietly persuaded to give up their share of ancestral property in favour of brothers. Globally, the International Labour Organization estimates a gender pay gap of about 20 percent, with the gap in India running even higher in many sectors.

Gender stratification in India: the numbers tell a story 🔗

The scale of the problem becomes clearer when we look at recent data. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024 ranked India 129th out of 146 countries, with the country scoring particularly low on the economic participation sub-index. Women in India earn roughly Rs 40 for every Rs 100 earned by men in comparable roles.

Female labour force participation is another striking indicator. While male participation hovers near 78 percent, female participation has long lagged at around 37 to 41 percent. As recent analysis points out, rural female workforce participation actually dropped from 54 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 2017, a decline that puzzles economists because it happened even as the economy grew. Much of women’s work, especially cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and farm labour, remains unpaid and invisible in official statistics.

The structural-functional view: why society organised gender this way 🔗

To explain why gender stratification exists at all, sociologists turn to different theoretical paradigms. The structural-functional paradigm, developed most influentially by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1940s and 50s, offers one of the earliest and most debated explanations.

Functionalists view society as a system of interconnected parts, each of which performs a function that keeps the whole running smoothly. Applied to gender, this paradigm argues that gender roles were established well before the pre-industrial era, when men typically took care of responsibilities outside the home, such as hunting, and women took care of domestic responsibilities. According to functionalists, this division survived because it worked, at least for the kind of small, agrarian societies in which humans spent most of their history.

Parsons’ instrumental and expressive roles 🔗

Parsons, working alongside Robert Bales, proposed that the nuclear family functions best when adults play two complementary roles. The instrumental role, traditionally performed by the husband or father, focuses on earning income, making major decisions, and linking the family to the outside world. The expressive role, traditionally performed by the wife or mother, focuses on emotional care, child socialisation, and maintaining harmony inside the home.

For Parsons, this was not just a description of 1950s American suburbia. He argued it was functional, because children needed to grow up in a family in which the instrumental and expressive roles are performed by the respective parents if they were to develop stable adult personalities. He even talked about the family acting like a “warm bath” for the working man, soaking away the stresses of the workplace.

Why this view has come under heavy criticism 🔗

The structural-functional view has been criticised on several grounds. First, it confuses the descriptive with the prescriptive. Just because something exists does not mean it is fair or necessary. Second, Parsons based his model on the white, middle-class American family of the 1940s and 1950s and failed to account for diverse family structures or the realities of working-class and minority families where women have historically been part of the workforce.

Feminist sociologists argue that functionalism treats male dominance as natural and stable rather than as an outcome of historical power struggles. Conflict theorists go further, arguing that gender stratification persists not because it benefits society, but because it benefits men as a group at the expense of women. Despite these criticisms, the structural-functional paradigm remains useful because it forces us to ask how a given arrangement of gender roles is maintained, even if we reject the claim that it is inevitable.

Case studies from India: matrilineal societies of Meghalaya 🔗

One of the most fascinating challenges to the assumption that male dominance is universal comes from within India itself. In the hills of Meghalaya, three tribes, the Khasi, the Garo, and the Jaintia, have practised matrilineal traditions for centuries. These societies invert several of the patterns we take for granted in mainstream Indian society and show that the link between gender and stratification is not fixed by biology.

The Khasi: the youngest daughter inherits 🔗

Among the Khasi, descent and inheritance are traced through the mother’s line. The youngest daughter, called Ka Khadduh, inherits all ancestral property, and after marriage, husbands move into the mother-in-law’s home while children take the mother’s surname. The birth of a girl is celebrated rather than mourned, a sharp contrast to the skewed sex ratios found in many parts of northern India.

It is important to note that matrilineal does not mean matriarchal. Women trace lineage and hold property, but political authority often still rests with male relatives, especially maternal uncles, in village councils called dorbar. Some Khasi men have even formed associations to protect men’s rights, perceiving themselves as having a secondary status. Gender stratification, in other words, exists here too. It is just organised differently.

The Garo: the chosen daughter and the maternal uncle 🔗

The Garo, living in the western hills of Meghalaya, follow a similar but distinct pattern. The youngest daughter, known as Nokna, is typically chosen as the heiress and is expected to care for ageing parents. Property and clan names pass through women, but the maternal uncle plays a powerful role in decisions concerning his sister’s children and the management of family lands. Anthropologist Chie Nakane’s classic 1967 study, Garo and Khasi: A Comparative Study in Matrilineal System, showed that even within matriliny, descent rules and household structures can vary significantly.

What these societies teach us 🔗

The Meghalaya cases matter for three reasons. First, they prove that the patriarchal arrangement found across most of India is not biologically inevitable. Second, they show that even when women control property, full equality in power and prestige is not automatic. Research published in Social Science and Medicine has linked female house ownership in Meghalaya to better health outcomes for women, suggesting that property rights have real, measurable effects on well-being. Third, they remind us that gender stratification is a continuum rather than an on-off switch, with different societies sitting at different points along it.

Why this matters for population and family health 🔗

Gender stratification is not an abstract idea confined to sociology textbooks. It shapes how many children a woman has and when, whether she gets antenatal care, whether her daughter is vaccinated, and whether she can leave an abusive marriage. The persistent preference for sons in much of India, reflected in a child sex ratio of around 929 girls per 1,000 boys in the latest census data, is a direct outcome of how power, prestige, and property have been distributed across genders. Closing these gaps is therefore not just a question of fairness, but of public health, economic growth, and social stability.

What do you think? If matrilineal traditions like those of the Khasi can survive in modern India, what would it take to weaken patriarchal patterns in your own family or community? And do you think structural-functional explanations of gender roles still hold any value today, or have they outlived their usefulness?

References

1. https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/12-2-gender-and-gender-inequality
2. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/new-ilo-report-finds-pay-gaps-persist-progress-women-leadership-roles
3. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2024/
4. https://www.iea-world.org/to-prosper-india-must-close-its-gender-employment-gap/
5. https://www.simplypsychology.org/parsons-instrumental-and-expressive-roles.html
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineal_society_of_Meghalaya
7. https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/matrilineality-in-meghalaya/
8. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953625006860