“Why is gender a dimension of social stratification? How does gender intersect other dimensions of inequality based on caste, class, race and ethnicity?” (2019)
Social stratification is the ranking of social categories into layers that receive unequal rewards, persist across generations and are justified by ideology. Gender meets every one of these criteria. Yet it never works alone: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality (1989) holds that gender combines with caste, class, race and ethnicity to produce distinct social positions.
Why gender is a dimension of stratification
- Ascribed and universal. Gender is assigned at birth, and no known society gives women more power than men. Ann Oakley (1972) showed that the ranking is social rather than biological, because gender roles vary across cultures.
- Unequal rewards.
- Economic: women’s labour force participation is 40.0% against 79.1% for men, and only 18.2% of working women hold regular salaried jobs (PLFS Annual Report 2025).
- Women spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against men’s 88 (Time Use Survey 2024). Christine Delphy calls this appropriation of wives’ labour a domestic mode of production.
- Unequal power. Only 74 women (13.6%) were elected to the Lok Sabha in 2024.
- Legitimating ideology. Talcott Parsons presented the instrumental–expressive division as natural complementarity. NFHS-5 found that 45% of women and 44% of men accept wife-beating in some circumstances, which shows the ideology has been internalised.
- Autonomous from class. Joan Acker (1973) and Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) showed that patriarchy has its own structures and cannot be read off a husband’s class.
How gender intersects other inequalities
Intersections are multiplicative, not additive. Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought, 1990) calls the result a matrix of domination.
Caste
- Uma Chakravarti’s “Brahmanical patriarchy” (1993) shows that caste purity is reproduced through endogamy, which requires control of women’s sexuality. Leela Dube’s “seed and earth” symbolism gives that control its ideological form.
- Among upper castes, secluding women signals status, and M. N. Srinivas noted that Sanskritisation tightened such restrictions.
- Dalit women do more work outside the home but face caste-targeted sexual violence, as in Khairlanji (2006). Sharmila Rege (“Dalit Women Talk Differently”, 1998) argued they cannot be represented by upper-caste feminism or by Dalit men.
Class
- Female work participation follows a U-shape across income levels, as described by Claudia Goldin (Nobel, 2023). Poor women work out of necessity, middle-income households withdraw women as a status marker, and highly educated women return to paid work.
- Middle-class women’s careers often rest on the paid care work of poorer women. Arlie Hochschild calls this a care chain.
Race
- In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), Black women lost a discrimination claim. The company hired Black men for factory jobs and white women for office jobs, so the court saw neither race nor sex discrimination. That gap is what prompted Crenshaw’s concept.
Ethnicity
- Nira Yuval-Davis (Gender and Nation, 1997) shows that women are treated as the boundary markers and biological reproducers of ethnic collectivities, so ethnic conflict is fought over their bodies. Examples include mass rape in the Bosnian war and the May 2023 parading of two Kuki-Zo women in Manipur.
- Women are also agents in ethnic politics: the Meitei Meira Paibis (“torch-bearers”) mobilise their community.
Limits of the intersectional lens
- Marxists warn that endless sub-categories hide the common exploitation that class explains.
- Indian evidence nonetheless shows that axes compound. A single-axis policy, whether gender-only or caste-only, misses the Dalit or Adivasi woman at the intersection.
Conclusion
Gender is a dimension of stratification because it ranks, rewards, transmits and legitimates inequality on its own terms. Its real effects emerge only at intersections. Understanding inequality in India requires a lens that reads caste, class, ethnicity and gender together, and policy needs the same approach.