Division of Labour and Gendered Work: Exploring Women’s Economic Roles

Ask most people what counts as “work,” and they will picture a job that pays a salary. Farming a family plot, walking kilometres to fetch water, or cooking three meals a day rarely comes to mind, even though someone spends hours doing exactly this every single day. That someone, in most households across the world, is a woman. This gap between what women actually do and what gets counted as work is not accidental. It comes from how societies divide labour along gender lines, and that division shapes everything from who owns land to who gets paid.

What is the sexual division of labour? 🔗

The sexual division of labour refers to how tasks, responsibilities, and resources get split between men and women within a household, community, or economy. It is not a natural or neutral arrangement. It is built on social norms about what men and women are “supposed” to do, and it creates unequal access to income, land, and recognition. Anthropologists studying gender relations argue that this division often generates conflict, because the tasks assigned to women tend to be undervalued even when they sustain the household and the wider economy.

Nowhere is this clearer than in African agriculture, which has long been described as a female system of farming. Here, the sphere of work is split sharply along gender lines, and this split is not just about who does what. It also creates an entire system of social exchange, where women’s labour comes bound up with obligations, claims, and expectations that men’s labour rarely carries.

Women’s obligations and rights in African agriculture 🔗

The anthropologist Ann Whitehead studied how women’s economic activity in African farming communities is governed by two very different social arrangements. On one hand, women typically have access to land and share what they grow with their children and other family members. On the other hand, women are also obligated to work on their husband’s or family’s land, and this labour often comes with no direct return of its own.

This means a woman’s work is never just a private economic choice. It sits inside a web of rights and obligations tied to broader ideas about welfare and maintenance within the family. She contributes labour because she is expected to, not necessarily because she is compensated for it. Her right to draw on family resources for food or support exists alongside a duty to labour for others, and the two are rarely balanced in her favour. This structure is common across rural farming communities where women’s labour underpins household food security and farm productivity, even as formal recognition of that labour remains limited.

Boserup’s theory of farming systems 🔗

The economist Ester Boserup offered a framework that anthropologists still use to compare how different regions organise farm labour by gender. She identified two broad systems.

The female system 🔗

In much of Africa, farming relies heavily on family labour, with women contributing a large share of the agricultural workforce. Boserup noted that in these systems, women tend to have relatively more freedom, bride price is common rather than dowry, and son preference is comparatively weaker. Because women are central to production, their labour carries visible economic weight within the household.

The male system and its exclusions 🔗

In much of Asia, including India, farming has historically depended on plough-based cultivation, where waged male labour dominates and women are pushed to the margins of farm work. This exclusion is not incidental. It is reproduced and reinforced through social norms such as denying women inheritance rights, the practice of dowry rather than bride price, a strong preference for sons, and skewed sex ratios. These practices are not separate cultural quirks. They work together to keep women dependent on male relatives for access to land, a pattern documented across South Asia where women’s ownership of agricultural land remains far lower than men’s in most countries surveyed.

Modernisation and the gendered reorganisation of farming 🔗

As economies developed and agriculture became more commercialised, the “female system” in Africa was gradually pushed to the periphery. A pattern emerged where the cash crop sector, the part of farming that generated income, came to be managed by men, while the food crop sector, largely subsistence-based and unpaid, remained organised through women’s labour. This division reinforced the idea that women were not equipped to participate in “modern” or profitable farming.

Whitehead pushed back on this narrative. She showed that women were, in fact, significant contributors to cash cropping and trading, often working within family labour arrangements to meet the household’s rising need for cash. Their contribution was simply not recorded or acknowledged in the same way male cash-crop labour was. This mirrors a broader pattern seen across agricultural economies undergoing structural change, where women’s responsibilities expand even as their recognition does not keep pace.

Emotional labour and the “labour of love” 🔗

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the term emotional labour to describe the work of managing feelings and providing care, work that is disproportionately expected of women both at home and in paid occupations. Hochschild’s original idea focused on workers who must display particular emotions as part of their job, but the concept has since expanded to describe the caregiving women perform within families as well.

Within the household, this unpaid effort is sometimes described as a “labour of love.” It is unremunerated, yet it remains fully expected and accountable under patriarchal norms. A woman is not paid to cook, clean, nurture children, or manage the emotional wellbeing of her family, but she is judged harshly if she does not.

The scale of this invisible workload becomes clear when you look at how much of a woman’s day it actually consumes. Data compiled by the International Labour Organization shows that women perform more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work globally, and care responsibilities remain the single biggest reason women stay outside the paid labour force. In rural households, this typically includes fetching water and firewood, cooking, washing clothes, carrying meals out to the fields, tending livestock, and caring for children, none of which male family members usually count as “real work.”

Why women’s work stays invisible 🔗

Gender, used as an analytical tool, helps explain why these patterns of inequality persist. It reveals how tasks get ranked in a hierarchy, with women’s work sitting lower even when it takes more hours or sustains more people. It exposes unequal access to land, credit, and tools. And it shows how women’s contribution to subsistence farming, caregiving, and domestic labour remains chronically undervalued.

India offers a useful illustration of this invisibility at a national scale. The government’s Time Use Survey, conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, found that women spend several times more hours than men on unpaid domestic and caregiving work every single day, regardless of whether they also hold a paid job. Analysis of this data by policy researchers has found that women’s education level or income status makes little difference to how much unpaid work they end up doing. A woman with a college degree and a full-time job still tends to carry the same domestic load as one without either.

This is the practical consequence of the sexual division of labour discussed throughout this piece. It is not confined to African farms or historical anthropology texts. It shapes daily life in Indian households too, where women’s labour, paid or unpaid, agricultural or domestic, continues to be treated as secondary to men’s, even when it is essential to keeping the household and the economy running.

What do you think? Do you notice this pattern of unpaid, unrecognised labour in your own household or community? And what would it take to make this work genuinely visible in the way we measure economic contribution?

References

1. https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/285524/
2. https://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals-data-portal/data/indicators/5a1-women-ownership-of-agricultural-land/en
3. https://www.fao.org/4/w8376e/w8376e03.htm
4. https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/basics/emotional-labor
5. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/unpaid-care-work-prevents-708-million-women-participating-labour-market
6. https://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/Report%20of%20the%20Time%20Use%20Survey-Final.pdf
7. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data