“What do you understand by gender-based domestic division of labour? Is it undergoing a change in the wake of increasing participation of women in formal employment? Clarify your answer with illustrations.” (2025)
The gender-based domestic division of labour is the allocation of housework, care and household management by sex rather than by ability or availability. It makes cooking, cleaning and child and elder care “women’s work”, and earning and public representation “men’s work”. It is socially constructed and ties the private family to the labour market.
Understanding the concept
- Functionalist view: Talcott Parsons (Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955) saw the husband’s instrumental role and the wife’s expressive role as complementary and functional for the industrial nuclear family.
- Feminist critique: Ann Oakley (The Sociology of Housework, 1974) showed that housework is real, monotonous and unpaid labour, and that the “housewife role” is a product of industrial capitalism. Christine Delphy (Close to Home, 1984) described a domestic mode of production in which husbands appropriate wives’ labour.
- Marxist-feminist view: unpaid domestic work reproduces labour power cheaply for capital. This was the thrust of the domestic labour debate opened by Margaret Benston (1969).
- Indian specificity: Leela Dube showed how girls are socialised early into service and self-effacement. Uma Chakravarti’s “Brahmanical patriarchy” (1993) links control of women’s labour and sexuality to caste purity, so withdrawal from outside work marked status.
Signs of change
- Symmetrical family thesis: Michael Young and Peter Willmott (The Symmetrical Family, 1973) predicted converging roles as wives entered paid work. Alan Warde and Kevin Hetherington (1993) found younger British couples more egalitarian than older ones.
- Money and decisions: Carolyn Vogler and Jan Pahl (1994) found that the more a woman earns, the more say she has over spending.
- Indian illustrations:
- Dual-earner couples in Bengaluru’s IT sector or government service share shopping, school runs and cooking more than their parents did.
- Crèche mandates under the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, now carried into the Labour Codes, move part of care outside the home.
Why change is limited
- The second shift: Arlie Hochschild (The Second Shift, 1989) found that employed American mothers worked an extra month of twenty-four-hour days a year. She called this a “stalled revolution”.
- Indian data: the Time Use Survey 2024 shows women spending 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against 88 for men. Only 18.2% of women workers hold regular wage jobs (PLFS 2025), so formal employment is still too thin to reshape most households.
- Doing gender: Julie Brines (1994) found that economically dependent husbands sometimes did less housework, to display masculinity.
- Class and caste transfer: middle-class women meet the double burden by hiring domestic workers, mostly poor, migrant, Dalit or Adivasi women. Hochschild’s global care chain operates within Indian cities, redistributing care between women rather than between men and women.
- Kin substitution: in joint and “modified extended” families, mothers-in-law take over childcare, so the burden stays with women of another generation.
- Role conflict: Promilla Kapur (Marriage and the Working Woman in India, 1970) documented guilt and strain among working wives expected to remain ideal homemakers.
Assessment
Change is real but uneven and asymmetrical. It is in attitudes and decision-making more than in hours of work, among the urban educated middle class more than others, and it happens more through outsourcing and kin support than through men’s participation.
Conclusion
Formal employment has loosened the ideology of the male breadwinner without dismantling women’s responsibility for the home. The revolution remains stalled. Its completion depends on shared parental leave, public care infrastructure and men’s socialisation into care, which would turn the “dual burden” into genuine symmetry.