Traditional Discourses on Gender and Work: Historical Perspectives and Economic Theories

Why is cooking at home not considered “real work,” but cooking in a restaurant is? Why does a woman caring for her children count as leisure in economic textbooks, while a man working on an assembly line counts as productive labour? These questions are not new. They have deep roots in how human societies organised themselves, how economies were theorised, and how capitalism shaped the modern world of work. To understand gender inequality in the workplace today, we need to trace it back – far back – to the earliest human communities and the ideas that followed.

Gender and work in early human societies 🔗

The story of gendered work begins with nomadic, hunter-gatherer communities. In these early groups, survival depended on a basic division of tasks. Men typically took on hunting – an activity that required long-distance travel, physical risk, and group coordination. Women, often responsible for bearing and nursing children, managed tasks closer to the settlement: gathering food, preparing meals, tending to the young, and maintaining shelters.

It is important to note that this division was not necessarily hierarchical at first. Anthropological evidence suggests that in many foraging societies, women’s contributions were essential and often recognised as equal in value to men’s. The food gathered by women frequently made up the bulk of the community’s caloric intake. So, while roles were divided, one was not automatically “superior” to the other.

The trouble began when societies started to settle down.

The shift to settled societies and the devaluation of domestic work 🔗

As human communities transitioned from nomadic life to settled agriculture, the nature of work changed dramatically. With permanent settlements came surplus production – farming, animal husbandry, and eventually trade. These activities, which took place in the “public” sphere, were largely dominated by men.

Women’s work, meanwhile, remained tied to the household: cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and maintaining the home. And here is where a critical shift occurred. The work done outside the home – production for exchange and trade – began to be seen as more valuable than the work done inside it. The domestic sphere became invisible in economic terms, even though it was the very foundation that allowed “productive” work to happen.

Think about it this way: a farmer could only go to the field because someone at home had cooked his meal, mended his clothes, and looked after his children. Yet, that “someone” – almost always a woman – was not considered a worker.

How “production” became gendered 🔗

This distinction between productive and reproductive labour became deeply embedded in social norms. Productive labour referred to work that created goods or services for exchange in the market. Reproductive labour – a term used by feminist economists – referred to all the work involved in maintaining and reproducing the workforce itself: bearing children, feeding families, emotional caregiving, and household management.

Over centuries, productive labour was associated with men and the public sphere, while reproductive labour was associated with women and the private sphere. The former was rewarded with wages, status, and power. The latter was expected, unpaid, and largely unacknowledged.

Traditional economic theories and the exclusion of women’s work 🔗

When modern economics emerged as a discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, it inherited and reinforced these biases. The foundational thinkers of classical economics – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and later Alfred Marshall – built their theories around market transactions. Work, in their framework, was something that produced commodities for exchange. Household labour did not fit this definition.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), focused on the division of labour in factories and markets. The unpaid work of women at home was simply outside the scope of his analysis. Smith’s framework measured national wealth through market output, leaving domestic contributions entirely uncounted.

This exclusion was not accidental. It reflected the patriarchal assumptions of the time. Women were seen as dependents – not independent economic agents. Their work at home was treated as a natural extension of their “feminine duty,” not as labour that deserved compensation or recognition.

The concept of “economic man” 🔗

Classical and neoclassical economics built their models around the idea of “economic man” (homo economicus) – a rational, self-interested individual who makes decisions to maximise utility in the marketplace. This concept was, quite literally, male. It assumed a worker who was free from domestic responsibilities, who could sell his labour in the market without worrying about who was feeding his children or washing his clothes.

Feminist economists like Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson have pointed out that this model only works because it assumes the existence of an unpaid domestic worker – typically a wife – who handles everything outside the market. The “economic man” is not self-sufficient; he depends on invisible, feminised labour.

GDP and the invisibility of household work 🔗

This theoretical bias carried over into national accounting systems. When countries began measuring Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the mid-20th century, they followed the same logic: only market transactions counted. A woman working as a domestic help in someone else’s house contributed to GDP. The same woman doing the same tasks in her own home did not.

The absurdity of this was famously captured by economist Simon Kuznets, one of the architects of GDP measurement, who himself acknowledged the limitations of the metric. Yet, decades later, unpaid domestic work remains largely excluded from official economic statistics in most countries.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), women perform over 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care work. In India, women spend nearly six hours daily on unpaid domestic and care work, compared to less than one hour for men – a gap among the widest in the world.

Women as a reserve army of labour 🔗

Karl Marx, while critical of capitalism, introduced a concept that has particular relevance to women’s work: the reserve army of labour. Marx argued that capitalism always maintains a pool of unemployed or underemployed workers who can be drawn into the workforce when needed and pushed out when they are not. This keeps wages low and workers compliant.

Women have historically formed a key part of this reserve. During both World Wars, for example, women were actively recruited into factories, offices, and public services to replace men who had gone to fight. In Britain, the famous “Rosie the Riveter” campaign in the United States and similar efforts encouraged women to take up industrial jobs as a patriotic duty.

But once the wars ended, women were expected to return to their homes. The jobs they had filled were handed back to returning male soldiers. Government propaganda shifted from encouraging women to work to encouraging them to be homemakers. The message was clear: women’s labour was welcome when it was needed, but disposable when it was not.

The Indian context 🔗

In India, this pattern has played out in different ways. During periods of economic expansion, women have been pulled into the labour force – particularly in agriculture, garment manufacturing, and domestic work. But their participation has often been on exploitative terms: lower wages, informal employment, no social security, and poor working conditions.

India’s female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) has been a subject of significant concern. Data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) has shown fluctuations over the years, with structural barriers continuing to limit women’s access to quality employment. Much of women’s work, especially in rural areas, remains in the informal and unpaid sector – precisely the kind of work that traditional economic frameworks have historically ignored.

Even in the organised sector, women are concentrated in lower-paying roles. The gender pay gap persists across industries, and women are significantly underrepresented in leadership positions. All of this traces back to the fundamental devaluation of women’s work that began centuries ago.

Capitalism and the double burden 🔗

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of these traditional discourses is what feminist scholars call the double burden (or double shift). In the modern capitalist economy, many women work outside the home for wages – but they are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic work at home. They effectively work two shifts: one paid, one unpaid.

This is not just a matter of individual household dynamics. It is a structural feature of how capitalism operates. By not paying for domestic labour, the capitalist system gets a massive subsidy. Workers arrive at factories, offices, and fields every day fed, clothed, and emotionally sustained – and the cost of all that sustenance is borne privately by women, for free.

Feminist Marxist scholars like Silvia Federici have argued that the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic work is not a side effect of capitalism – it is central to its functioning. In her influential work Caliban and the Witch, Federici traced how the rise of capitalism in Europe was accompanied by a deliberate devaluation of women’s autonomy and labour, pushing them into the domestic sphere to serve the needs of the emerging industrial economy.

The wages for housework debate 🔗

In the 1970s, a global feminist movement emerged demanding wages for housework. Activists argued that if domestic work were recognised and compensated, it would transform the economic position of women worldwide. While the movement did not achieve its immediate goal, it fundamentally changed how economists, policymakers, and societies think about unpaid work.

Today, organisations like UN Women and the ILO actively advocate for the recognition, reduction, and redistribution of unpaid care work. Time-use surveys – which measure how people spend their hours, including on unpaid tasks – are now conducted in many countries, including India, to make this invisible work visible in policy discussions.

Why these historical perspectives matter today 🔗

Understanding these traditional discourses is not just an academic exercise. The assumptions built into early economic theories continue to shape policy, workplace norms, and social expectations. When governments design welfare programmes, when employers set wages, when families decide who stays home with a sick child – all of these decisions are influenced by centuries-old ideas about what counts as “real” work and who should do it.

In India, recent policy initiatives like the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 and various state-level schemes for women workers are steps in the right direction. But structural change requires more than policy. It requires a rethinking of the very categories we use to understand work, value, and contribution.

The traditional discourses on gender and work created a world where half the population’s labour was rendered invisible. Recognising this history is the first step toward building a more equitable future.

What do you think? Has the way we define “work” in economics and policy truly evolved, or are we still operating under frameworks that undervalue domestic and care labour? And in your own experience, how do you see the double burden playing out in households and workplaces around you?

References

1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/huntergatherer-intergroup-conflict-and-warfare/77ACABF2E6EADCE45D2C425FD3796E07
2. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work
3. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html
4. https://www.amherstbooks.com/product/beyond-economic-man-feminist-theory-and-economics
5. https://www.bea.gov/about/history-of-bea
6. https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_633135/lang–en/index.htm
7. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/rosie-riveter
8. https://mospi.gov.in/
9. https://carindia.org/silvia-federicis-caliban-and-the-witch-a-summary/
10. https://www.unwomen.org/en
11. https://wcd.nic.in/