Write short note: Gender Roles in Changing Structure of Family. (2004)
Gender roles are the socially prescribed expectations attached to being a man or a woman. In the traditional family these roles were built into the family’s structure. As that structure changes through nuclearisation, dual earning, migration and new household forms, gender roles are being renegotiated. The change is real but uneven.
Gender roles in the traditional structure
- Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales (Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955) described a functional split. The husband held the instrumental role of breadwinner and link to the outside world. The wife held the expressive role of care and emotional support.
- The Indian joint family ordered roles by sex and seniority: authority lay with the male karta, and the young bride was subordinate to her mother-in-law. Leela Dube showed how girls were raised as temporary members, “another’s wealth”, of their natal home.
- Deniz Kandiyoti (“Bargaining with Patriarchy”, 1988) called this classic patriarchy. A young bride accepted hardship in return for future authority as a mother-in-law.
How structural change reshapes roles
- Nuclearisation. Separate residence frees wives from in-law control and strengthens the conjugal bond. For Kandiyoti, it also breaks the patriarchal bargain, because older women lose the authority they had waited for.
- Dual-earner families. Michael Young and Peter Willmott (The Symmetrical Family, 1973) saw spouses sharing tasks and decisions. Rhona Rapoport and Robert Rapoport (1971) identified the dual-career family. Arlie Hochschild (The Second Shift, 1989) countered that employed wives simply add a second shift of housework. India’s Time Use Survey 2024 confirms the gap: women spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services, while men spend 88.
- Female-headed and migrant households. 18% of Indian households were female-headed in NFHS-5 (2019–21), up from 15%. Male out-migration from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala leaves wives managing farms, money and children, and they gain de facto authority without formal ownership.
- Single-parent, reconstituted and same-sex households blur the instrumental–expressive divide.
- Resource-based power. Where wives earn, decision-making shifts from cultural to resource grounds. In NFHS-6 (2023–24), 89% of married women reported taking part in key household decisions.
Limits of change
- Stalled revolution. Structure has changed faster than roles, and caregiving remains feminised. Even the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, which raised paid leave to 26 weeks, has no matching statutory paternity leave for the private sector, so the law still assumes the mother as primary carer.
- Low female labour-force participation. Female participation rose to 41.7% in PLFS 2023–24, but much of that work is unpaid help in family enterprises.
- Class and caste. Upwardly mobile families may withdraw women from paid work as a status marker, following the Sanskritisation pattern described by M. N. Srinivas. Poor and Dalit households depend on women’s wage work.
- Feminist critique. Ann Oakley and Sylvia Walby argue that patriarchy adapts, shifting from private to public forms, rather than disappearing.
Conclusion
The changing structure of the family has loosened ascribed, seniority-based gender roles and made them more negotiable. But the domestic division of labour and control over property lag behind. The Indian family is moving from authoritarian patriarchy towards a companionate but still unequal partnership.