Theories Explaining the Feminisation of Labor: From Modernization to Exploitation

Why do millions of women in India work long hours in garment factories, cashew processing units, and home-based piece-rate jobs, yet earn far less than their male counterparts? Why has women’s participation in paid labour risen sharply in some regions while collapsing in others? Scholars studying the feminisation of labour have proposed several theoretical frameworks to answer these questions. Each lens, whether it focuses on individual choice, structural inequality, or the global economy, offers a different diagnosis and a different prescription. Understanding these theories helps us see why women’s work continues to be undervalued even as it becomes more visible.

What does feminisation of labour mean? 🔗

Before unpacking the theories, it helps to define the term. Feminisation of labour refers to two simultaneous shifts: a rise in the number of women entering paid employment, and a restructuring of jobs to take on characteristics historically associated with women’s work, such as low pay, informality, flexibility, and insecurity. The phenomenon became visible globally from the 1970s onwards as export-oriented industries, sub-contracting chains, and home-based work expanded, drawing women into wage employment on terms that were rarely favourable.

According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24, the female Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) for those aged 15 and above rose from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24. While the headline number looks promising, scholars are divided on what is actually driving this shift, and whether it reflects empowerment or distress. This is exactly where theoretical frameworks become useful.

Modernization and developmentalist theories: the supply-side view 🔗

The earliest serious attempts to explain women’s labour participation came from modernization theory, which dominated development thinking through the 1950s and 1960s. According to this view, societies pass through linear stages from “traditional” to “modern”, and women’s employment is largely a function of how far along this path a society has travelled.

Core claims of modernization theory 🔗

Modernization theorists argue that women’s ability to enter and remain in paid work depends primarily on supply-side factors, that is, characteristics of women themselves and their households. The key variables are education, vocational training, age at marriage, fertility, and exposure to “modern” values. As a country urbanises and industrialises, the theory predicts, more women will acquire education and skills, traditional norms will weaken, and female employment will rise naturally.

This framework places the explanatory burden on individual choices and household-level constraints. If women are not working, the reasoning goes, it is because they lack the qualifications, training, or motivation, or because patriarchal family structures hold them back. The remedy, therefore, is investment in girls’ schooling, skill-building programmes, and awareness campaigns to shift attitudes.

The developmentalist refinement and the WID approach 🔗

By the early 1970s, this neat picture began to crack. Ester Boserup’s landmark 1970 study Woman’s Role in Economic Development showed that modernisation often worsened women’s economic position rather than improving it. Mechanisation of agriculture displaced women from traditional roles, and new industrial jobs were predominantly given to men. This evidence gave rise to the Women in Development (WID) approach, which argued for deliberately integrating women into development programmes.

Developmentalist scholars pushed the analysis further. They observed that as women’s traditional roles in subsistence economies eroded, they were forced into the informal sector, petty trading, domestic service, and home-based work. The framework began to acknowledge that not all paid work signals progress, and that the kind of work women enter matters enormously.

Strengths and limits of the supply-side view 🔗

The modernization-developmentalist tradition has clear strengths. It draws attention to education, skills, and social norms, all of which genuinely matter. The government’s own analysis shows a curvilinear, almost U-shaped relationship between education and female LFPR, with very low and very high education levels both correlating with higher participation. Such patterns are exactly what supply-side frameworks try to explain.

However, this view has serious blind spots. It treats the labour market as a neutral space waiting to absorb qualified women, ignoring the fact that the market itself is structured by gender. It cannot easily explain why women with similar qualifications earn less than men, why certain industries actively prefer female workers for low-paid tasks, or why feminisation has been concentrated in precarious work globally. To answer those questions, we have to turn to the demand side.

Demand-side theories: capitalism, exploitation, and the global system 🔗

Demand-side theories shift the spotlight from women themselves to the structural conditions that shape capitalism’s appetite for female labour. Three traditions are especially important here: Marxist feminism, dependency theory, and world-systems theory.

Marxist feminist theory and the reserve army of labour 🔗

Marxist feminism, drawing on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, argues that women’s oppression is rooted in the structure of capitalism rather than in male attitudes alone. Two concepts are central. First, capitalism depends on unpaid reproductive labour, the daily and generational work of cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elder care, that keeps the wage workforce functioning. This labour is performed overwhelmingly by women and has no exchange value in the market, even though the system could not survive without it.

Second, women constitute a “reserve army of labour”. Building on Marx’s idea of a surplus pool of unemployed workers, scholars like Veronica Beechey argued that women function as a reservoir of cheap labour that can be activated when capital needs more workers and pushed back into the home when it does not. Wartime mobilisation followed by post-war demobilisation is the textbook example, but the same logic applies during economic booms and busts. The constant threat that women can replace men at lower wages also keeps overall wages suppressed, benefiting capital.

Marxist feminists therefore see feminisation not as progress but as a particular phase in capitalism’s labour strategy. When firms need flexible, low-cost workers, they recruit women. When demand falls, the same women are sent back to unpaid domestic roles, where their labour remains essential but unrecognised.

Dependency theory and the unequal global economy 🔗

Dependency theory, associated with Latin American scholars like Raúl Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank, argues that poverty in the Global South is actively produced by its economic relationship with wealthy nations. Resources, raw materials, and cheap labour flow from poor countries to rich ones, while finished goods and capital flow back, locking poorer regions into a subordinate position.

Applied to women’s labour, dependency theory explains why female workers in developing countries end up concentrated in export-oriented assembly lines, garment factories, and agricultural plantations. Light-industry export processing zones in parts of Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean have employed labour that is overwhelmingly young and female, while non-traditional horticultural exports rely heavily on low-paid seasonal women workers. The gendered division of labour is not accidental; it is functional for the global economy because women are perceived as more docile, more dexterous, and willing to accept lower wages.

World-systems theory and the international division of labour 🔗

Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory extends and refines dependency theory by arguing that the entire world economy is a single, integrated system organised through an international division of labour. Core countries specialise in high-skill, capital-intensive production, peripheral countries supply raw materials and cheap labour, and semi-peripheral countries occupy a buffer position, exploiting the periphery while being exploited by the core.

Within this framework, the feminisation of labour in peripheral and semi-peripheral economies, including India, is a structural feature, not a temporary stage. Global production chains deliberately seek out regions where female labour is cheap and minimally regulated. Brand-name companies in the core outsource garment stitching, electronics assembly, and call-centre work to firms that recruit women, often in informal or sub-contracted arrangements. The result is a global hierarchy in which women in the Global South form the base of value chains while capturing the smallest share of the value they create.

Comparative analysis: what each theory illuminates and misses 🔗

Each framework captures part of the reality, and each leaves something out. A careful comparison helps us see why no single theory is sufficient.

Where the frameworks agree and differ 🔗

Modernization and developmentalist theories focus on the individual and household; Marxist, dependency, and world-systems theories focus on structures and global hierarchies. The first set assumes that markets are roughly neutral and that women’s outcomes will improve as they acquire human capital. The second set argues that markets are designed in ways that systematically extract more value from women’s labour while paying them less.

The supply-side view explains why education and fertility patterns matter, and why some women succeed in formal employment. The demand-side view explains why most women remain concentrated in informal, precarious, low-paid work even when they are educated. In India, where over 90% of employed women work in the informal sector, the structural explanations seem particularly compelling.

Limitations of each framework 🔗

Modernization theory underplays power. It cannot explain why women’s unpaid domestic work remains invisible in GDP, or why female-dominated occupations are paid less even when they require comparable skills. It also tends to treat “tradition” as the villain, ignoring the fact that modern capitalism often creates new forms of gendered exploitation rather than dissolving old ones.

Marxist feminism, while sharper on structure, has been criticised for being too economistic, neglecting patriarchy as an independent force, and treating women as a homogeneous group. Caste, religion, and regional inequalities matter enormously in the Indian context but sit awkwardly within a purely class-based analysis. Some scholars also note that the reserve-army framework explains the expansion and contraction of female employment but says less about long-term changes in the value of women’s labour.

Dependency and world-systems theories effectively explain global inequalities but can be overly deterministic, leaving little room for agency, culture, or local resistance. They also pay limited attention to gender, race, and class dynamics within countries, treating peripheral nations as if internal hierarchies did not matter.

Towards a combined approach 🔗

Many contemporary scholars argue that no single framework can capture the complexity of women’s labour today. A useful synthesis draws structural insights from Marxist and world-systems thinking, the global lens from dependency theory, and the attention to education, fertility, and norms from the developmentalist tradition. Recent data from India illustrates why this matters: while the female LFPR has risen, the increase is driven largely by rural self-employment in agriculture and subsistence activities rather than expansion of quality jobs, and real earnings for self-employed women have actually fallen. Such a pattern requires us to think simultaneously about household constraints, the structure of rural labour markets, and India’s position in global value chains.

Why these theories still matter 🔗

Theoretical frameworks are not abstract exercises. They shape policy. If we believe modernization theory, we invest in schools, scholarships, and skill programmes. If we believe Marxist feminism, we focus on minimum wages, social security for informal workers, recognition of unpaid care work, and the right to organise. If we believe world-systems theory, we push for global labour standards, fair trade rules, and regulation of multinational supply chains. The Economic Survey 2024 estimated that women’s unpaid care work alone contributes around 3.1% of GDP, a figure that becomes invisible without a theoretical lens that takes reproductive labour seriously.

The persistent gender gap in employment, wages, and working conditions tells us that women’s entry into paid work is not the same as women’s economic liberation. Whether the rising LFPR in India represents genuine empowerment or distress-driven feminisation depends on which framework we use to read the data, and on what we choose to do about it.

What do you think? Do you find supply-side explanations or structural-demand explanations more convincing for women’s labour patterns in your own state or community? And if women’s unpaid domestic and care work were fully counted in national income, how do you think it would change the way we measure economic progress?

References

1. https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/What_does_the_Feminisation_of_Labour_Mean_for_.htm
2. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2057970
3. https://dge.gov.in/dge/sites/default/files/2023-05/Female_Labour_Utilization_in_India_April_2023_final__1_-pages-1-2-merged__1_.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
6. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
7. https://blog.ipleaders.in/marxist-feminism/
8. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity/what-is-behind-the-recent-rise-in-women-s-workforce-participation