EDITORIALS & ARTICLES
What is the impact of gender division of labour on the development of society?. (UPSC CSE Mains 2020 - Sociology, Paper 1)
- The way work is divided between men and women according to their gender roles is usually referred to as the ‘gender division of labour’. This does not necessarily concern only paid employment, but more generally the work, tasks and responsibilities that are assigned to women and men in their daily lives, and which may, on their turn, also determine certain patterns in the labour market. Within the division of labor, there are several types of roles:
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- Productive roles: Activities carried out by men and women in order to produce goods and services either for sale, exchange, or to meet the subsistence needs of the family.
- Reproductive roles: Activities needed to ensure the reproduction of society’s labor force. This includes house work like cleaning, cooking, childbearing, rearing, and caring for family members. These tasks are done mostly by women.
- Community managing role: Activities undertaken primarily by women at the community level, as an extension of their reproductive role, to ensure the provision and maintenance of scarce resources of collective consumption such as water, health care and education. This is voluntary unpaid work performed during “free” time.
- Community politics role: Activities undertaken primarily by men at the community level, often within the framework of national politics. This officially-recognized leadership role may be paid directly or result in increased power or status.
- Triple role: This refers to the fact that women tend to work longer and more fragmented days than men as they are usually involved in three different roles: reproductive, productive and community work.
- The labour market (as well as education and training) is heavily segregated along gender lines, with differences between regions and cultures. Also some generalizations about gender divisions in the labour force are quite truthful, as men dominate certain sectors and occupations and women others. For example, there is a concentration of women in services and of men in manufacturing. By sub-sector there is also a gender division: in manufacturing, for instance, there are more women concentrated in the electronics and garments industries, and men in the car industry. This is called ‘occupational segregation’, which is commonly split into a horizontal and a vertical dimension. In the context of gender, horizontal segregation refers to the extent to which men and women are located in different occupational sectors.
- Women are usually highly concentrated in the sectors that require lesser skills (e.g. agriculture), that promise little chance for career advancements (e.g. services) and that are related to care-giving (e.g.: nursing), which often coincide also with low wages. On the other hand, vertical segregation refers to the extent to which men and women occupy different hierarchical positions within the same occupational sector. Within the same sector, women tend to occupy the lower ranks of the hierarchical ladder (and consequently the lower salary ranges). Statistics show that the higher the position the wider the gender gap, so that on average women hold less than 5% of the top jobs in corporations.
- The gender division of labour is not fixed for all time; it changes in response to wider economic, political and social changes. For example, men and women follow different migration patterns, and engage in different occupations when they migrate. Migration may also result in men taking on tasks that they would not normally consider within their socially ascribed role, like having to cook for themselves. Some migrants often have to accept occupations for which they are overqualified. The employment of immigrant women in industrialized countries, as maids or care-providers, may not make it possible for them to advance their professional area of work.
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