What is the impact of gender division of labour on the development of society? (2020)
The gender division of labour assigns tasks by socially defined gender, not ability: production and public roles to men, reproduction and care to women. Functionalists saw it as an engine of social order and progress. Feminist and development scholars show that, in its present form, it holds development back, while a renegotiated division speeds it up.
The functionalist view: a basis of order
- Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) argued that the growing sexual division of labour in marriage deepened conjugal solidarity.
- George Peter Murdock (1949) saw it as efficient, and Talcott Parsons argued that instrumental (male) and expressive (female) roles made the nuclear family fit industrial society.
- On this view, specialisation freed men for the market and women for socialisation, which supported industrial growth.
The critical view: costs to development
- Economic loss: women’s unpaid work is left out of national accounts. Marilyn Waring (If Women Counted, 1988) called this the invisibility of women’s work. In India, women do 289 minutes of unpaid domestic work a day against 88 for men (Time Use Survey 2024). Their labour force participation is 40.0% against 79.1% for men, and 64.2% of women workers are self-employed, many as unpaid helpers (PLFS 2025).
- Development that bypasses women: Ester Boserup (Woman’s Role in Economic Development, 1970) showed that planners gave training, credit and technology to men, lowering women’s status and farm productivity. Maria Mies (The Lace Makers of Narsapur, 1982) showed how labelling women “housewives” cheapened their export work.
- Human development: care burdens pull girls out of school and create time poverty, and the effects pass to the next generation through maternal health and child nutrition.
- Asset and agrarian gaps: as men migrate, women do more of the farm work, yet Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) shows they rarely own the land. Without title they cannot get credit, so productivity suffers.
- Social and political costs: Arlie Hochschild’s “second shift” (1989) makes employed women’s lives a double burden. Sylvia Walby (1990) shows how segregation in paid work keeps women out of decision-making, and India ranks 131st in the Global Gender Gap Index 2026.
- Caste dimension: seclusion of women as an upper-caste status marker (Uma Chakravarti) keeps skilled women out of work, while Dalit women are confined to low-paid manual labour.
When the division changes, development accelerates
- Policy shift: the Gender and Development approach replaced “adding women in” with changing power relations. SDG 5.4 asks states to recognise and value unpaid care.
- Indian illustrations: women made up 58.1% of MGNREGS workdays in 2024–25, bringing cash into women’s hands. Kudumbashree in Kerala turned women’s collectives into producers and local leaders.
- Comparative evidence: Nordic dual-earner, dual-carer models, with paid parental leave and public childcare, combine high female employment with strong human development.
Conclusion
The gender division of labour once supported a particular model of industrial order. Today it wastes half of society’s talent, hides a large share of real work and reproduces inequality across generations. Development now depends on redistributing care, through shared housework, public childcare and women’s asset ownership, rather than on keeping the old division in place.