Module details Name Affiliation

Subject Name Social Work -

Paper Name Gender and Social Work (11) -

Module Module No. 3; Basic Concept in Gendering -

Social Work – Sexual Division of Labour
Paper Coordinator Dr. Shewli Kumar and Dr. Swati Banerjee Associate Professor,
School of Social Work,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai

E-mail:
Shewli Kumar -
shewli4@tiss.edu

Swati Banerjee –
sbanerjee@tiss.edu

Module Writer Ms. Ashmita Sharma &Dr Swati Banerjee Dr. Swati Banerjee
Associate Professor,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai
E-mail: sbanerjee@tiss.edu

Ms. Ashmita Sharma

PhD Student,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai
E-mail:
ashmitasharma31@gmail.com
Keywords Gender, Sexual Division of Labour,
Patriarchy

Summary This module delineates the concept of -

sexual division of labour and how it
impacts women and men in the household
and in the labour market. It also explains
the history and social origins of Sexual
Division of labour and the different
perspectives which informs the same.

Content reviewer Prof. Aruna Khasgiwala Retired Professor, MSU,

Department of Social Work,
 Baroda

Language editor Ms Sudha Ganapathy Manager, Publications Unit,

TISS

Introduction

A theme that has been brought to the fore by feminism along with the growing debate on
patriarchy is the sexual division of labour, for it is through the division of tasks between men
and women in different sectors that the former’s social and economic dominance in all class
societies is given prominence. Feminists have criticized both Marxist and non-Marxist
economic theories for having failed to adequately draw attention to the gendered work
processes that have characterized capitalist production from industrial revolution to date.
Under the capitalist mode of production, the control of women’s labour power is differently
structured than under feudalism (Clusters 1997: 22). Feminists have argued that the sexual
division of labour is consciously maintained by modern corporations, remains unequal and
oppressive to women, and is often shaped and reinforced by state policies (ibid.).

Learning Outcome

This module will enable students to understand the concept of sexual division of labour and
how it impacts men and women in the household and in the labour market. The different
theoretical frameworks that offer existing explanations of the division of labour between men
and women will help them analyse the concept better using the lens of different schools of
thought. The relationship between patriarchy and sexual division of labour will also be clear
by the end of this module. The module will further clarify that it is not enough to say that all
women are exploited and oppressed by men. There is an urgent need to unfold and analyse
the relationship of hierarchy and dominance between men and women that in turn perpetuate
sexual division of labour. It will also help students problematize the concept itself as not just
being the simple division of tasks between men and women, but a structural issue that
perpetuates and reinforces a dominant and exploitative system that oppresses women. It will
also enable students understand the problem of the unpaid nature of domestic work
performed mostly by women, for which feminist movements have been struggling across the
globe.
Topic 1. Origins of Sexual Division of Labour

The division of labour between men and women is considered to be the most natural aspect of
the human society, something that is seemingly based on the biological division of labour in
procreation. However, other than the biological division of labour, whereby women alone can
bear and nurse children, there is nothing so natural about the division of labour in the society.
It is in fact, the social construction of the biological fact of women’s child-bearing and
nursing capacity that forms the actual basis of the sexual division of labour in the larger
society and economy (D.N and G.K 1989). The division of labour even in the early days of
foraging was anything but natural. The fact of the matter is, since it was established as a
social norm, it acquired the force of law. Since it is not voluntary, division of labour acquires
the status of a ‘natural’ force (p. 1949). The social division of labour or the formation of the
distinction between men and women then is not a neutral matter. Established within the
family, division of labour extends beyond the family into the social sphere too. Rosaldo and
Ortner (1974) argues how among the tribes of Jharkhand, women are excluded from the
political or the social sphere, which suggests a feature of the social division of labour into the
‘public’ and the ‘private’ domains.
The sexual division of labour cannot be attributed to some universal sexism of men as such,
but it is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production which is only interested in those
parts of the human body which can be directly used as the instruments of labour, or which
can become an extension of the machine (Mies 1998). Though overtly the concept of sexual
division of labour seem to suggest that men and women simply divide different tasks between
themselves, it glosses the fact that it is men’s tasks that are truly considered human and
productive unlike women’s tasks which are seen as determined by their nature. This concept
also obscures the fact that the relationship between male and female labourers is one of
dominance and exploitation (ibid, p. 46). Therefore, Mies (1981) argues that when we
analyse the social origins of the division of labour, we should make clear that we mean this
asymmetric, hierarchical, and exploitative relationship and not just a simple division of tasks
between equal partners.

The three main empirical features of gender relations that characterize paid employment in
different sectors of the economy are: Why do women earn typically less than their male
counterparts? Why do women engage in less paid jobs? Why do women do different jobs
than men? The answer to these pertinent questions lies in the fundamental concept of the
sexual division of labour between men and women in the public domain as well as the private
sphere of the household. Existing explanations of gender divisions in employment fall into
four main schools of thought: economic and sociological functionalism, liberalism, Marxist
and Marxist feminist analysis, and dual systems theory.

Topic 2. Theoretical Frameworks

2.1 Economic and Sociological Functionalism

Functionalist analysts argue that women get paid less than men because they have less skill
and labour market experience and fewer qualifications than men as a consequence of the
differential time allocation by men and women in households. The human capital theorists
assume that people get paid according to their value or worth to their employer. They are of
the opinion that women have less human capital than men because of their position in the
family (Walby 1990: 29). This theory argues that since women play the homemaker role, they
spend less time in paid employment and hence acquire less human capital and less pay than
men (ibid, p. 30). Human capital theory has been subject to extensive criticism, including its
analysis of gender relations in paid employment. Treiman and Hartman argue that the main
source of wage differentials is the job segregation by sex. The major theoretical problem of
the Human Capital Theory is that it is based on the assumption of a perfect labour market in
which employers pay the employees according to their worth. This assumption runs parallel
to that of the functionalist theories of social stratification that the best paid jobs in the market
are the ones that require the greatest skills. This assumption has also received criticisms for
various quarters (ibid, p. 31).

2.2 Liberalism

Liberal theorists have focussed on small-scale processes which differentiate women’s

position in work from those of men. Many of these theorists use the notion of cultural
differentiation between men and women as the leading causes of disadvantages faced by
women at work. Kanter (1977) documents the disadvantages that women face in corporations
and describes the proximate mechanisms through which this takes place. She argues that
cultural pressures and organizational features results in less success among women than men
in reaching the upper echelons of these institutions. She shows how management ethic is
primarily masculine, and slots in job hierarchy are gender specific thus, preventing a person
from the other sex from gaining access to such a position. She not only describes the general
aspects of culture, but also the day to day interactions in male dominated networks that act to
exclude women from the knowledge and contact necessary for corporate success. However,
her analysis has received widespread criticism. In short, her analysis already presumes a
structure of gender inequality in the wider society. She does not confront the basic causes of
the unequal division of labour in the private and the public domain, of why women take the
major burden of work at home, and why men are a majority in the paid workforce (ibid, cf.
Walby 1990).

2.3 Marxist and Marxist Feminist Analysis

Marxist and Marxist feminist theorists have analysed the pattern of women’s employment in
the labour market as determined by capitalist relations. They argue that women’s lower pay
and lesser labour force participation are critically shaped by capital-labour relations.
Braverman (1974) emphasises the changing relationship between the household and the
market. He argues that the amount of housework has decreased because of the household
buying of goods from the market. As a result, women are now available for waged work. He
says as a result their labour force participation rates rise. At the same time the labour force
participation rates for men drop as they are expelled from skilled job and become
unemployed or seek retirement early. However, his theory has also met with criticism from
different quarters. Time budgets taken over the year have shown that amount of time spent on
housework by housewives have not declined to that great an extent as posited by Braverman
(cf. Walby 1990: 34).

Braverman also introduced the conception of women as the reserve army of labour who were
brought into employment with the development of capitalism. According to Marx, the
function of a reserve was to prevent workers from being able to bargain for wages and
conditions of employment at the time of increased demand for labour. Using Marx’s theory,
Beechey (1977, 1978) was of the opinion that women constituted flexible reserve which
could be brought to the market when labour was in demand during conditions of boom, and
lay off during times of economic recession. She argued that married women could be
included in this category. Bruegel (1979) in the context of the British experience argued that
part-time workers form a reserve army of labour. There is also some supporting evidence
from the times of the world wars when women were recruited to work in the munitions
factories, for the duration and let go at the end (Braybon 1981, cf. Walby 1990). Scholars
have argued that there are some theoretical and empirical problems with this theory. The
theory also does not specify the mechanism by which women would be let go before men
which are in the interest of the employer. Moreover, empirical evidence also does not support
this theory. Women did not leave paid employment in greater numbers than men during the
period of the great depression. In fact in Britain during the 1980, as Walby (1989) argued the
number of women in paid employment increased overall, despite a slight dip during the deep
recession (p. 36).

Humphries (1977) argues that women’s absence from the labour market is the result of a
struggle of the working class for a family wage against the opposition of capital. She
considers women to be full-time homemakers, and so the withdrawal of women from the
labour market as a victory for the working class rather than disadvantage for women. Her
theory has been widely criticised by many scholars like Barrett and McIntosh (1980) for
showing no consideration to the disadvantages faced by women. They also argue that the
concept of ‘family wage’ except as an idea has never existed in reality. Many men who earn
the so called family wage do not support their family, whereas many women who do not even
receive a family wage support their children and other dependents in the family (Walby 1990:
37).
2.4 Radical Feminist Analysis

Radical Feminists have written very little about women in paid employment, the focus of
their empirical work has been mostly on sexuality and violence. They have made important
contributions to the understanding of issues such as sexual harassment. MacKinnon (1979)
writes that sexual harassment constitutes sexual discrimination within the meaning of the law.
She argues that sexuality is central to the understanding of feminist analysis, and women are
defined by their sexuality to men. However, the problem with her analysis is that it does not
explain why women are in certain kinds of jobs and why women get paid less than men.

Stanko (1988) on the other hand addresses the significance of sexual harassment for
occupational segregation. Thus, sexual harassment is used as a tool to maintain occupational
closure against women.

2.5 Dual-systems Theory

Dual-systems theory attempts to combine class analysis with the theorization of patriarchy in
order to understand gender relations. It highlights two systems- capitalism and patriarchy- as
essential in the understanding of gender relations in the society. Hartman (1979) argues that
since patriarchy pre-dates capitalism, patriarchal relations in paid employment cannot simply
be understood in terms of capitalism. Central to her understanding of gender relations in
employment is job segregation by sex. She is of the opinion that men are able to exclude
women from better paid jobs and keep them at a disadvantage. And men can primarily do that
because they are better organized than women in terms of their participation in trade unions,
which exclude a large number of women. When men are in better paid jobs then they are able
to marry women on favourable terms, which would do all the housework and take care of
children. Women who are financially dependent on their husbands cannot refuse, and men’s
access to better employment opportunities also results in them earning the so-called ‘family
wage’.

Topic 3. Social and Sectoral Division of Labour

A broad distinction can be made between the ‘social’ and ‘sectoral’ division of labour
between the sexes. Social division of labour between men and women refers to the fact that,
throughout the society, women are held responsible for domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning,
raising of children, whereas men are exempted from all such tasks. Sectoral division of
labour, on the other hand, refers to the fact that within specific sectors of a given economy-
agricultural or industrial sector- a hierarchical division of labour is maintained and
perpetuated between men and women. Whereas the former is universal in nature and is fixed,
the latter changes over time according to the need to preserve male power and privilege over
women (Clusters 1997). For instance, Clusters (1997) in the chapter on rural women’s labour
in Bangladeshi agriculture has shown how the traditional division of labour between women
and men is transforming under the impact of modernization. While patriarchy in the past has
forced women to undertake processing tasks in the courtyard and home, impoverishment in
the 1970s forced women from poor families to seek paid work in the labour market. Although
this did not lead to the emancipation of village women because of the continuing wage
discrimination, it definitely brought about a landslide change in women’s employment (p.
365-366).

Men’s monopoly over the instruments of technology in production is also identified by

feminist scholars as a means to enforce male dominance and perpetuate sexual division of
labour. Maria Mies pointed out the sexual division of labour in the production of three field
crops- millet, paddy, and tobacco- in Andhra Pradesh. She argues that women’s work in
agriculture hardly involves the use of tools or equipments, whereas agricultural activities
performed by men are mostly with the use of agricultural implements and draught animals.
Besides the division of labour between home-based tasks and work outside the house, and
manual work and operations performed with the help of technology, a third ‘structural
principle’ that has formed the basis of sexual division of labour is the distinction between
skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled tasks. While most male jobs are treated as skilled jobs,
those performed by women are termed as less skilled or unskilled work as argued by Clusters
(1997) in the discussion on garment production in Bangladeshi factories.

August Bebel elaborated the theme of women as breadwinners in his book Die Frau Und der
Sozialismus. In this book he quoted various surveys to show how women frequently sought
factory employment out of sheer necessity, because their husbands’ earnings were not
sufficient to run the household. Labour inspectors in Berlin found that over 50 percent of
women who they had interviewed thought that their husbands’ income was too meagre for
survival (cf. Clusters 1997, p. 64). The other point that was extensively debated was related
to the cause of women’s extensively low wages in paid employment. The fact that women
were always paid the ‘hunger wage’, and that they invariably belonged to the worst paid
category in paid employment has led to the emergence and the rapid growth of the proletarian
women’s movement (ibid, p. 65). The answer to the question of why women’s labour was so
cheap lay in the structure of patriarchy that governed gender relations in paid work and
perpetuated job segregation on the basis of sex.

Topic 4. Domestic Division of Labour

The domestic or the household division of labour refers to the distribution of responsibilities
and tasks between different family members necessary for the maintenance of the household
or the domestic home. Historically and currently, in many western industrialized societies the
concepts of sexual division of labour or gendered division of labour were used to recognize
the marked differences between men and women in undertaking the responsibilities for tasks
necessary for the maintenance of the family household. The traditional domestic division of
labour is that in which men have the primary responsibility for labouring outside the home in
exchange for a wage, and women undertake the responsibility of managing housework and
care work inside the home like cleaning, cooking, shopping, and caring for the children and
elderly. In contrast to men, the work done by women is unpaid, and hence considered
unproductive because it is performed within the confines of the ‘home’.

Academic debates and theories have highlighted the problems with the ‘unpaid’ nature of
domestic work mostly performed by women. The concept of the domestic division of labour
rose to prominence in academic debates in the 1970s. Using Marxist theories, feminists have
argued that domestic work that women do should also be considered as a form of productive
activity like men’s waged labour. Women’s position in the household is linked to their
position in the labour market. It is the domestic division of labour that acts to weaken
women’s position in the labour market, and similarly the hierarchical division of labour in the
household is perpetuated by the labour market. Hartman (2002) argues that segregation of
jobs by sex is the root of women’s low status in the labour market (p. 97).

Conclusion and Summing Up

This module was an attempt to explain the history and social origins of the sexual division of
labour, and understand the concept through different theoretical perspectives. Attempts have
been made to clarify and emphasise that sexual division of labour is not simply a division of
tasks between men and women, but entails a much deep rooted problem of equating women’s
work with something that is determined by nature and one that is lower in hierarchy. The
concept is thus established as a distinction between human labour and natural activity. Under
this concept, men’s work is seen as rational, productive, and human whereas women’s work
is treated as unproductive and a natural activity, something that is biologically determined.

Various schools of thought like economic and sociological functionalism, liberalism,

Marxism and Marxist Feminist analysis, and dual systems theory have offered different
explanations for the existing sexual division of labour in employment. Functional analysts
argue that gender divisions in employment are a result of the low skill and less labour market
experience of women that puts them in a disadvantageous position. The liberal school of
thought stresses on cultural differentiation between men and women as the cause of women’s
low status in the labour market. Marxists and Marxist feminists have analysed the pattern of
women’s employment in the labour market as determined by capital-labour relations. The
dual systems theory combines both, class relations and theorization of patriarchy in order to
understand women’s position in the labour market.

The concept of gender divisions in employment has also pointed towards the distinction that
is established between ‘social’ and ‘sectoral’ division of labour between sexes. While the
former refers to the domestic division of tasks inside the household mostly entrusted on
women, the latter refers to hierarchical division of labour in specific sectors of the economy,
with women occupying the lowest rung. Academic debates and theories have also highlighted
the problems of the unpaid nature of domestic work mostly performed by women. This also
suggests the distinction between ‘skilled’ and unskilled’ tasks performed by men and women
respectively in the labour market. While men are said to perform waged labour that is
considered skilled and productive in nature, women are mostly engaged in unwaged tasks that
are unproductive and unskilled in nature, like for instance domestic work. It is thus, this
segregation of jobs by sex that is the root cause of women’s low status in the society and
economy. Feminist movements across the globe have been fighting against wage
discrimination in different sectors of the economy, hierarchical divisions between the sexes,
nature of work allotted to women, system of payment, working and living conditions of
women workers, and the unpaid nature of domestic work. They have been stressing on the
importance of fighting patriarchy and global capitalism as being the root causes of the on-
going exploitation of poor women and men in different parts of the world.