The Social Construction of Gender Roles

Why is cooking considered a woman’s job in most Indian homes, but a male chef is celebrated in a five-star hotel? Why are boys handed cricket bats while girls are given kitchen sets? These everyday patterns are not accidents of nature – they are gender roles, a set of socially constructed expectations that dictate what men and women should do, how they should behave, and what spaces they may occupy. Understanding gender roles is essential for anyone studying public policy, development, or governance, because these roles directly shape access to resources, opportunities, and power.

What are gender roles? 🔗

Gender roles refer to the socially assigned activities, behaviours, and responsibilities that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. They are not derived from biology but from cultural norms, traditions, and institutional practices that evolve over time. As the Pew Research Center documented in a large-scale survey of nearly 30,000 Indian adults, about nine in ten Indians agreed that a wife must always obey her husband – a finding that illustrates just how deeply entrenched these expectations remain in domestic settings.

The distinction between sex and gender is foundational here. Sex refers to biological differences – chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct. Judith Butler, one of the most influential gender theorists, argued that even the way we categorise bodies as “male” or “female” is itself shaped by social interpretation. In the Indian context, this distinction matters because much of the inequality women face is not a result of their biology but of the roles society has imposed on them.

How gender roles are socially constructed 🔗

Gender roles do not appear out of nowhere. They are actively produced and reproduced through multiple channels – family, education, religion, media, and law. This process is known as gender socialisation, and it begins at birth.

The role of family and early socialisation 🔗

In Indian households, gender socialisation starts from the moment a child is born. Families transmit expectations through clothing choices, the toys they provide, and the behaviours they encourage or discourage. Anthropologist Leela Dube’s research has shown how girls in India are gradually trained through what she calls “apprenticeship” – learning household chores, caring for younger siblings, and acquiring cooking skills from a young age, all of which prepare them for their expected adult roles as wives and mothers.

A particularly powerful cultural concept is that of “paraya dhan” (someone else’s wealth), which frames daughters as temporary members of their birth families. As documented by researchers studying cultural socialisation and gender in India, this notion profoundly affects how families invest in girls – often less in their education, health, and aspirations compared to boys, because the “returns” on that investment are seen as going to another family after marriage.

Media, education, and institutional reinforcement 🔗

Schools, textbooks, and media further reinforce gender roles. In Indian cinema and advertising, men are overwhelmingly cast in roles reflecting leadership, intelligence, and heroism, while women are confined to being wives, mothers, or hypersexualised objects. Even formal education has not been immune – a CBSE board examination passage once contained lines suggesting that women gaining independence causes family problems, before public backlash led to its removal.

The result of this sustained socialisation is that both men and women internalise these roles. A Pew Research Center survey found that Indian women were only marginally less likely than men to agree that wives should always obey their husbands (61% vs 67%). This shows that gender norms are not simply imposed by men upon women – they are absorbed and reproduced across society.

Gender roles vary across cultures and time 🔗

One of the strongest arguments against biological determinism is the fact that gender roles differ dramatically across cultures and historical periods. What is considered “women’s work” in one society may be “men’s work” in another.

In ancient India, women held significant social positions in certain periods – participating in intellectual discourse, owning property, and even choosing their husbands (as in the swayamvara tradition). As the IntechOpen research on gender roles in India explains, the status of women across ancient, medieval, and modern periods has been far from static, ranging from authority and freedom to subservience and control. Colonial rule, the caste system, and reform movements each reshaped gender expectations in different ways.

Even within contemporary India, gender roles vary by region, caste, class, and religion. A woman in an upper-caste urban household may face restrictions around “respectability” and seclusion, while a woman from an Adivasi community may have more freedom of movement but face other forms of marginalisation. Gender roles, therefore, are contextual and intersectional – they cannot be understood in isolation from other social categories.

The gender division of labour 🔗

At the heart of gender roles lies the gender division of labour – the way societies allocate different types of work to men and women. This division typically assigns men to “productive” roles in the public sphere (earning income, making decisions) and women to “reproductive” roles in the private sphere (childcare, cooking, cleaning, eldercare).

This division is not neutral. Work performed in the public sphere is compensated, valued, and measured in economic indicators like GDP. Work performed in the home – overwhelmingly by women – is unpaid, invisible, and taken for granted.

India’s Time Use Survey: the numbers tell the story 🔗

India’s Time Use Survey (TUS) 2024, conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, puts hard numbers on this disparity. Women in India spend approximately 289 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work, compared to just 88 minutes for men. When caregiving is added, women aged 15-59 spend over five hours daily on unpaid domestic and care tasks – nearly six times more than men.

An analysis by the Observer Research Foundation of the 2019 TUS data found that Indian women spend eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men – a gap far wider than the global average of three times. Strikingly, this pattern holds regardless of a woman’s education level or employment status. Women who earn their own income do not spend less time on unpaid work – they simply carry a heavier total burden.

The economic implications are enormous. Government estimates place the value of women’s unpaid domestic and care work at 15 to 17 percent of India’s GDP, yet public spending on care infrastructure – childcare centres, crèches, maternity benefits – remains minimal.

The triple burden: understanding women’s three roles 🔗

Development scholar Caroline Moser introduced an influential framework in 1993 that identified three distinct roles women typically perform simultaneously – the reproductive role, the productive role, and the community managing role. Together, these constitute what is known as the women’s triple burden.

Reproductive role 🔗

This encompasses all the care and maintenance work needed to sustain the household and its members – bearing and raising children, cooking, cleaning, looking after the elderly, and managing the day-to-day needs of the family. This work is essential for the survival and reproduction of the labour force, yet it is rarely counted as “work.” In most Indian households, it is almost entirely the responsibility of women and girls.

Productive role 🔗

This refers to work done for income or economic value – whether in the formal sector, informal sector, subsistence farming, or home-based production. Women do participate in productive work, but their engagement is often less visible and less valued than men’s. In rural India, for instance, women perform a substantial share of agricultural labour, yet they are frequently classified as “unpaid family helpers” rather than as workers.

Community managing role 🔗

Women are also often responsible for managing community-level needs – organising local events, managing water and sanitation resources, participating in self-help groups, running neighbourhood healthcare initiatives, and so on. As the United Nations ESCWA notes, women tend to work longer and more fragmented days than men because they are usually involved in all three types of roles simultaneously. Crucially, community managing work by women is mostly voluntary and unpaid, whereas men’s community involvement (such as political leadership) tends to carry payment, status, or power.

Why the triple burden matters for policy 🔗

Moser’s framework is not just academic. It has direct policy implications. When planners design development programmes – whether for agriculture, infrastructure, or health – they often assume that women have “free time” to participate. In reality, women are already stretched across three types of work. Adding new responsibilities without reducing existing burdens simply overloads them further. For example, research published in PMC on the impact of COVID-19 on working women demonstrated how the merging of domestic and professional spaces during lockdowns created severe “role overload” for women, with patriarchal norms ensuring that no redistribution of domestic work took place.

The undervaluation of women’s work 🔗

A central consequence of gendered labour divisions is the systematic undervaluation of women’s contributions. Because reproductive and community managing work is unpaid, it is treated as though it has no economic worth. National income accounts do not measure it. Development indicators ignore it. Policymakers overlook it.

Consider this: India’s female labour force participation rate has historically been low – hovering around 24-25% in 2018-19 before rising to roughly 41.7% by 2023-24 according to official labour force surveys. Yet even as more women entered paid employment, their time spent on unpaid work barely changed. Women’s total work time in 2024 averaged 367 minutes per day, compared to 307 minutes for men – meaning women not only work more but also have less time for rest, leisure, and self-care.

This has measurable consequences for women’s wellbeing. Research using Indian time-use data has found that each additional hour a woman spends on caregiving reduces her probability of labour market participation by 20 percentage points and negatively affects her happiness, life satisfaction, and health – effects that are not observed for men performing the same caregiving tasks.

Gender roles and their impact on public policy 🔗

Gender roles are not merely a private or cultural matter – they have significant implications for governance, planning, and development policy.

Why gender-blind policies fail 🔗

Policies that do not account for the existing gender division of labour often end up reinforcing inequality rather than reducing it. A rural employment scheme that requires workers to travel long distances, for instance, may exclude women whose mobility is restricted by domestic responsibilities and social norms. An agricultural subsidy programme that directs resources to the “head of household” – typically a man – may bypass the women who actually perform most of the farm labour.

Towards gender-responsive planning 🔗

Recognising gender roles in policy design means asking a fundamental question: who does what, who has what, and who benefits? This is the essence of gender analysis frameworks used by institutions like the World Bank and UN agencies. Policies need to account for the fact that women and men have different daily routines, different access to resources, and different constraints on their time and mobility.

In India, some steps have been taken in this direction. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) now tracks indicators of women’s decision-making power, freedom of movement, and economic empowerment. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) mandates that at least one-third of its beneficiaries be women. Yet much more remains to be done – particularly in investing in care infrastructure (crèches, daycare centres, elderly care facilities) that can reduce women’s unpaid work burden and free them to participate more fully in economic and public life.

Challenging and transforming gender roles 🔗

Gender roles are socially constructed, which means they can also be socially deconstructed and transformed. Change happens at multiple levels – individual, household, community, and institutional.

At the household level, a more equitable distribution of domestic work is essential. At the community level, engaging men and boys in understanding and challenging patriarchal norms is increasingly recognised as critical. At the institutional level, policies must move beyond treating women as beneficiaries and instead recognise them as agents – with the right to define their own roles, access resources on equal terms, and participate in decision-making.

The Indian Constitution itself provides the foundation for this transformation. Article 14 guarantees equality before law, Article 15 prohibits sex-based discrimination, and Article 16 ensures equal opportunity in public employment. Legislation such as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (2013), and the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act (2017) all represent steps toward legal recognition of gender equality. But legal frameworks alone cannot change deeply embedded social norms – sustained investment in education, awareness, and institutional reform is needed.

What do you think? If gender roles are learned rather than innate, what would it take for Indian households, schools, and workplaces to genuinely share responsibilities between men and women? And should governments treat unpaid care work as an economic contribution that deserves formal recognition in national accounts?

References

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/how-indians-view-gender-roles-in-families-and-society/
2. https://socio.health/gender-and-society/cultural-socialization-gender-roles-discrimination-india/
3. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/1215042
4. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/underlining-the-work-that-women-do-findings-from-time-use-survey-2024
5. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data
6. https://eige.europa.eu/publications-resources/thesaurus/terms/1224?language_content_entity=en
7. https://www.unescwa.org/sd-glossary/triple-role-multiple-burden
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9922660/
9. https://m.thewire.in/article/gender/what-the-time-use-survey-says-about-womens-work
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X23002371
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11633985/