Sexual Division of Labour and its Impact on Women’s Work

Walk into almost any Indian household at 7 a.m. and a familiar scene unfolds. Someone is in the kitchen kneading dough, packing tiffins, and supervising school uniforms. Someone else is reading the newspaper, finishing chai, and getting ready to “go to work.” The first person, more often than not, is a woman. The second is usually a man. This everyday choreography is not an accident of personality or preference. It is the product of a deeply rooted social arrangement called the sexual division of labour, and it shapes how women’s work is valued, counted, and rewarded across the economy.

What is the sexual division of labour? 🔗

The sexual division of labour refers to the systematic allocation of tasks, roles, and responsibilities to people on the basis of their gender rather than their skills, interests, or abilities. Cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and elder care get tagged as “women’s work,” while earning wages, owning property, and participating in public decision-making get tagged as “men’s work.” Sociologist Ann Oakley famously argued that this division is culturally rather than biologically determined, which means it is learned, reinforced, and inherited from one generation to the next.

Because the arrangement looks “natural” – mothers nurse babies, so surely they should also wash dishes? – it rarely gets questioned. But the moment you separate biology from social expectation, the logic falls apart. There is nothing in human anatomy that explains why women sweep floors and men handle bank accounts. The pattern survives because society has been organised around it for centuries.

Patriarchy: the engine behind the division 🔗

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power across political, moral, economic, and household domains. It is not just about individual men being dominant – it is a structural arrangement that produces and protects male authority through laws, customs, religion, family norms, and everyday language. The sexual division of labour is one of patriarchy’s most effective tools because it organises daily life around male privilege without anyone needing to enforce it consciously.

Feminist scholars point out that patriarchy controls women through multiple entitlements – over labour, sexuality, mobility, property, and reproduction. Of these, control over labour is perhaps the most economically significant. By assigning women to unpaid, invisible work inside the home, patriarchy ensures that men dominate the paid, visible work outside it. Caste, class, and religion intersect with this system in India to make the burden even heavier for women from marginalised communities.

How children learn the script 🔗

Gender roles are not announced; they are absorbed. A four-year-old girl is handed a toy kitchen set while her brother is handed a toy car. School textbooks for decades showed mothers serving food and fathers reading newspapers. Festivals, films, and family conversations all rehearse the same message: caring is feminine, earning is masculine. By the time girls reach college, many have already internalised the idea that household work is “their” responsibility, even if they go on to take up demanding careers.

Public versus private spheres of work 🔗

The sexual division of labour rests on a sharp distinction between two zones of activity. The public sphere includes the marketplace, factories, offices, courts, legislatures, and universities – places where work is paid, contracts are signed, and reputations are built. The private sphere includes the home, where work happens for love, duty, or obligation, and almost never for money.

Men have historically dominated the public sphere; women have been confined, by tradition or coercion, to the private one. This binary shapes how we even define the word “work.” A man who spends eight hours at a desk is a “worker.” A woman who spends fourteen hours cooking, cleaning, fetching water, tending livestock, helping with farm tasks, and caring for children and the elderly is often described as “not working” or “just a housewife.”

The invisibility problem 🔗

This linguistic erasure has serious consequences. National income accounts, GDP calculations, and labour force surveys traditionally exclude unpaid household work from their definition of economic activity. The result is that the contributions of millions of women simply disappear from the macroeconomic picture. India’s Time Use Survey 2019, the first nationally representative survey of its kind, captured the scale of this hidden economy. It found that women spent an average of 299 minutes per day on unpaid domestic services for household members, compared with just 97 minutes for men – roughly three times more.

A more recent analysis estimates that Indian women spend nearly eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men, and this gap remains consistent regardless of women’s education or employment status. Even women with postgraduate degrees and full-time jobs continue to shoulder the bulk of housework – a phenomenon sometimes called the “double burden” or “second shift.”

The impact on women’s economic status 🔗

When work is divided this way, the economic consequences cascade through women’s lives.

Low labour force participation 🔗

India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the female LFPR rose from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, while the corresponding rate for men stood at 78.8%. The recent rise is encouraging, but researchers caution that much of the increase comes from definitional changes and from women being pushed into self-employment or unpaid help in family enterprises, not from a structural opening of good jobs. In other words, women are working more, but often in distress-driven, low-paid, or invisible roles.

Wage gaps and occupational segregation 🔗

Even when women enter the public sphere, the sexual division of labour follows them. They get clustered into “feminine” occupations – nursing, primary teaching, domestic work, garment stitching, anganwadi services – which are systematically paid less than “masculine” jobs in engineering, finance, or construction supervision. Within the same job, women often earn less. In Indian agriculture, women receive 60-80% of the male wage for similar activities, with chores like weeding traditionally commanding lower pay simply because they are coded as women’s tasks.

Constrained career choices 🔗

The unpaid work at home directly limits the paid work women can take outside. Research using India’s Time Use Survey shows that an additional hour of caregiving reduces a woman’s probability of labour market participation by significant margins and cuts into her self-care, leisure, and life satisfaction. Women turn down promotions that require travel, leave jobs after marriage or childbirth, and choose flexible but lower-paying gigs because the family expects them to remain available for housework. Men rarely face the same trade-off.

Weaker bargaining power 🔗

Economic dependence translates into reduced voice – within the household, in the community, and in politics. A woman who does not earn cash income may struggle to assert her preferences on family spending, children’s education, or her own healthcare. At the macro level, the under-representation of women in legislatures, corporate boards, and policy bodies means that the rules of the economy continue to be written largely by people who do not perform unpaid domestic work themselves.

Why the division persists 🔗

If the sexual division of labour is so unequal, why has it not crumbled under its own contradictions? Several forces keep it alive.

Social norms and prestige: In many Indian families, a woman staying home is treated as a marker of upward mobility or “respectability,” particularly among newly affluent groups. Sending the daughter-in-law to work can feel like a status loss.

Lack of care infrastructure: Without affordable creches, eldercare facilities, or reliable public transport, the burden of care has nowhere to go but back onto women. The state has historically treated care as a private family matter rather than a public good.

Workplace design: Most formal jobs assume an “ideal worker” who has no caregiving responsibilities – someone available for long hours, sudden travel, and uninterrupted careers. This template fits men with stay-at-home wives, not most women.

Safety and mobility: Concerns about harassment, unsafe commutes, and restrictive family permissions further narrow the geography of women’s work, especially in small towns and rural areas.

Cracks in the wall 🔗

The picture is not static. Rising education levels, urbanisation, women-led movements, and legal reforms have all chipped away at rigid gender roles. Women are entering professions once considered exclusively male – pilots, scientists, judges, defence officers, software engineers. Self-help groups have given crores of rural women a first taste of independent earnings. Policy conversations have begun to acknowledge unpaid care work, with proposals to count it in satellite national accounts and to invest in a public care economy.

Yet, as the Time Use Survey 2024 shows, very little has changed in the actual hours women spend on domestic work over the last five years. The cultural script has loosened, but the labour script remains stubbornly the same. Real change will require not just more women in offices, but also more men in kitchens – and a state willing to recognise care as work that the whole society benefits from.

What do you think? If unpaid housework were counted in GDP at market wages, how would it change the way we measure a country’s economic success? And in your own home, who decides which tasks are “naturally” male or female – and why has that division remained unquestioned for so long?

References

1. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/25913/1/Unit-5.pdf
2. https://lotusarise.com/patriarchy-entitlements-and-sexual-division-of-labour-in-india/
3. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1659814
4. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2057970
6. https://www.theindiaforum.in/economy/rise-female-labour-and-work-force-participation-rates
7. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0488-2
8. https://csr.education/gender-development/gendered-division-labour-global-perspective/
9. https://m.thewire.in/article/gender/what-the-time-use-survey-says-about-womens-work