Comment on the social and cultural determinants of sexual division of labour. (2012)
The sexual division of labour allocates tasks by sex. Whether it follows from biology or society is settled by the evidence: a division exists everywhere, but what is assigned to whom varies so widely that biology cannot be its cause. India adds its own determinants — caste, purity and honour — so the division here is as much a caste arrangement as a gender one.
The biological case, and why it fails
- George Peter Murdock (Social Structure, 1949), surveying over two hundred societies, found a sexual division of labour in each and called it expedient: men’s strength suits hunting and clearing, women’s childbearing suits domestic work. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox added the human biogrammar, a genetic programme inherited from hunting ancestors; Talcott Parsons formalised it as instrumental and expressive roles.
- The refutation lies inside Murdock’s own finding: universality of form with variability of content is the signature of a social, not biological, cause. Weaving, trading and cultivation are men’s work in some societies, women’s in others.
- Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), found the Arapesh gentle in both sexes, the Mundugumor aggressive in both, the Tchambuli inverting Western expectation. Temperament is culturally patterned.
- Ann Oakley delivered the decisive blow: sex is biological, gender cultural, and the housewife role a historical creation of industrialisation, which pulled production out of the home and left women a job not counted as one. The Sociology of Housework (1974) showed it bearing the marks of alienated labour — monotony, fragmentation, no pay, no boundaries.
The social and cultural determinants
- Purity and honour. Family status depends on women’s restricted mobility, and that restriction silently decides which occupations exist for them: work requiring travel, night hours or strangers is closed before aptitude is discussed.
- Caste. Seclusion marks rank, so it is unevenly distributed. M. N. Srinivas observed that Sanskritisation typically withdraws women from field labour in imitation of higher-caste practice — group mobility bought with immobility for its women. Dalit women, denied that option, face field labour and public violence alike.
- Kinship ideology. Leela Dube’s seed-and-earth metaphor naturalises it: the man gives the seed, the woman is only the field — reproduction becomes her defining function.
- Definitions of work and skill. Housework is classed as non-work in national accounting, while men’s tasks are more readily coded as skilled. The hierarchy sits in the classification before the task.
- Agrarian custom. Transplanting, weeding and post-harvest processing fall to women, ploughing to men, enforced by a widespread taboo on women handling the plough — which no strength differential explains.
The current Indian evidence
The Time Use Survey 2024 found women spending about 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against 88 for men, at participation rates near 81 and 27 per cent. Female labour force participation rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 in 2023-24 in the PLFS, but much of it is unpaid helper work on family farms. The care penalty holds: women enter the paid economy without leaving the unpaid one.
Conclusion
The determinants are social and cultural, in India caste-cultural; biology supplies an occasion, never a rule. Sylvia Walby completes it: the division did not dissolve when women took paid work, it migrated. Public patriarchy reproduces through occupational segregation and the pay gap what private patriarchy enforced at home.