Gendered Division of Labour: Examining the Gendered Nature of Work

Work is never just work. What counts as “real” work, who does it, and who gets paid for it – these questions are deeply shaped by gender. Across households, farms, factories, and offices, the tasks assigned to men and women follow patterns that are so familiar they often go unquestioned. But when you look closely, the gendered division of labour reveals a system that consistently undervalues women’s contributions while limiting their economic independence.

What is the gendered division of labour? 🔗

At its core, the gendered division of labour refers to the way societies allocate different types of work to men and women based on perceived gender roles. Men are typically associated with productive, income-generating work in the public sphere – factories, offices, markets. Women, on the other hand, are expected to handle reproductive and domestic work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, and eldercare – tasks that fall within the private sphere of the household.

This isn’t a natural arrangement. It is a social construct reinforced over generations through cultural norms, religious traditions, legal frameworks, and economic structures. The result is a persistent pattern where men’s work is visible, valued, and compensated, while women’s work remains invisible, undervalued, and largely unpaid.

The public-private divide 🔗

One of the most enduring frameworks in understanding gendered labour is the division between the public sphere and the private sphere. The public sphere – encompassing politics, commerce, and formal employment – has historically been coded as male territory. The private sphere – the home, the family, care and nurture – has been assigned to women.

This binary is not merely descriptive; it is prescriptive. It tells men and women where they belong and what kind of work is appropriate for them. When women do enter the public sphere, they often face structural barriers: wage gaps, glass ceilings, occupational segregation, and the persistent expectation that domestic responsibilities remain primarily theirs.

How this plays out in Indian households 🔗

Consider a typical dual-income household. Both partners may work full-time jobs, but it is overwhelmingly the woman who is expected to manage cooking, childcare, and household maintenance after returning from work. This phenomenon – often called the second shift – means women effectively work two jobs while only being compensated for one.

Data from the Time Use Survey conducted by the National Statistical Office in 2019 starkly illustrates this reality. The survey found that women in India spent an average of around 299 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work, compared to just 97 minutes for men. This three-to-one gap is among the widest globally and demonstrates how deeply entrenched the gendered allocation of household labour remains.

Gender and agricultural labour 🔗

Agriculture is one of the clearest arenas where the gendered division of labour operates with full force. In rural economies, farming is not a single, unified activity – it is a complex web of tasks, and these tasks are divided sharply along gender lines.

Cash crops vs. subsistence farming 🔗

Men typically control cash crop production – the cultivation of crops meant for sale in the market, such as sugarcane, cotton, or commercial vegetables. They also dominate activities related to marketing, transport, and negotiation with buyers. This gives men direct access to income and, by extension, greater economic decision-making power within the household.

Women, meanwhile, are concentrated in subsistence farming – growing food for the family’s consumption, tending to kitchen gardens, managing seeds, and performing post-harvest processing like threshing and winnowing. They are also primarily responsible for allied activities such as animal husbandry, fetching water, and collecting firewood. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women make up a significant proportion of the agricultural workforce in India, yet their labour is frequently categorised as “help” rather than recognised as productive work in its own right.

This division has real consequences. Because men control the crops that generate cash, they control the household’s financial resources. Women’s subsistence work, while essential for the family’s survival, generates no direct income and therefore attracts no economic recognition.

Invisible labour on the farm 🔗

A key issue in agricultural settings is the invisibility of women’s work. National income accounting and census data have historically undercounted women’s agricultural labour because much of it is unpaid family work. Women working on family farms are often recorded as “non-workers” or “marginal workers” in official statistics, rendering their economic contribution statistically invisible.

The Ministry of Labour and Employment has acknowledged the challenges in accurately capturing women’s workforce participation, particularly in the unorganised and agricultural sectors. This statistical invisibility feeds back into policy neglect – if women’s work is not counted, it is easy to overlook in budgets, schemes, and development planning.

The concept of “labour of love” 🔗

One of the most powerful mechanisms that sustains the gendered division of labour is the framing of women’s work as a “labour of love.” Cooking for the family, nursing a sick child, caring for ageing parents – these activities are presented not as work but as expressions of love, duty, and feminine nature.

This framing has a double effect. First, it naturalises the expectation that women will perform these tasks willingly and without complaint. Second, it removes the question of compensation entirely. You don’t pay someone for loving their family, the logic goes. The result is that an enormous volume of economically valuable work – work that would cost lakhs of rupees annually if purchased on the open market – is performed for free.

What unpaid care work is actually worth 🔗

Globally, the economic value of unpaid care and domestic work is staggering. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that unpaid care work, if assigned a monetary value based on hourly minimum wages, would constitute a significant share of global GDP. In India specifically, given the sheer volume of hours women spend on domestic tasks, the unmonetised value of this labour represents a massive, hidden subsidy that women provide to the national economy.

Despite this, unpaid care work remains absent from GDP calculations. This omission is not just a statistical technicality – it shapes how governments allocate resources, design social protection systems, and evaluate economic progress. When women’s work is not counted, women’s needs are not prioritised.

Occupational segregation in formal employment 🔗

The gendered division of labour does not disappear when women enter formal employment. Instead, it takes new forms through occupational segregation – the concentration of men and women in different types of jobs.

Horizontal segregation 🔗

Horizontal segregation refers to the clustering of women in certain sectors and men in others. Women are overrepresented in teaching, nursing, garment manufacturing, domestic work, and clerical roles. Men dominate engineering, construction, transport, finance, and senior management. These patterns reflect and reinforce stereotypes about what kinds of work are “suitable” for each gender.

The World Bank’s gender data consistently highlights how occupational segregation limits women’s access to higher-paying industries and contributes to the persistent gender wage gap. In India, where the female labour force participation rate remains one of the lowest among major economies, the sectors available to women who do work tend to offer lower wages, fewer protections, and limited opportunities for advancement.

Vertical segregation 🔗

Even within the same sector, women are concentrated at lower levels of the hierarchy. This vertical segregation – sometimes called the glass ceiling effect – means that women are less likely to hold leadership, managerial, or decision-making positions. They may enter a profession in large numbers but remain stuck at junior or mid-level positions while men advance to the top.

This pattern is visible across industries – from corporate boardrooms to government bureaucracies to academia. UN Women’s research has repeatedly documented how structural biases in hiring, promotion, and workplace culture create barriers that disproportionately affect women’s career trajectories.

Gender conflicts arising from the division of labour 🔗

The gendered division of labour is not just an academic concept – it generates real, everyday conflicts. These conflicts arise at multiple levels.

Within households: Disagreements over who should perform domestic tasks, resentment over the unequal distribution of the “second shift,” and tensions when women seek employment outside the home are common sources of friction. In many families, a woman’s decision to work is not entirely her own – it requires negotiation with, or permission from, male family members.

In workplaces: Women face hostility or scepticism when they enter male-dominated fields. They may be passed over for promotions, subjected to harassment, or expected to prove their competence in ways that men are not. Workplace policies – maternity leave, flexible hours, childcare facilities – become sites of contestation over how much accommodation employers should make for women’s dual roles.

At the policy level: Debates over reservations for women in legislatures and local bodies, equal pay legislation, and the recognition of unpaid work in national accounting are all expressions of the broader conflict over how labour and its rewards should be distributed across genders.

Challenging the gendered division of labour 🔗

Change is slow, but it is happening. Several developments signal a gradual shift in how gendered labour is understood and addressed.

Legal and policy interventions: The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 (now subsumed under the Code on Wages, 2019) mandated equal pay for equal work regardless of gender. Maternity benefit laws have been strengthened, and schemes like MGNREGA have attempted to provide rural women with direct wage employment, though challenges in implementation persist.

Time-use surveys: The decision by the government to conduct national Time Use Surveys is itself an important step. By measuring how men and women spend their time, these surveys make unpaid work visible in official data, creating a foundation for more gender-responsive policymaking.

Shifting social norms: Urbanisation, education, and exposure to diverse role models are gradually altering expectations about who can do what kind of work. More women are entering traditionally male-dominated professions, and there is growing – if still insufficient – recognition that men should share domestic and caregiving responsibilities.

However, structural change requires more than individual attitude shifts. It demands investment in public infrastructure – affordable childcare, safe public transport, accessible healthcare – that can redistribute the burden of care work from individual women to society as a whole.

What do you think? 🔗

If unpaid domestic and care work were included in GDP calculations, how might it change the way governments design economic policies and social welfare schemes? And in your own experience, do you see the gendered division of labour loosening, or does it remain as rigid as ever?

References

1. https://mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/Report_TUS_2019_0.pdf
2. https://www.fao.org/india/fao-in-india/india-at-a-glance/en/
3. https://labour.gov.in/womenlabour/about-women-labour
4. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/care-work-and-care-jobs-future-decent-work
5. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/overview
6. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/progress-of-the-worlds-women
7. https://labour.gov.in/sites/default/files/equal_remuneration_act_1976_0.pdf