Women and Gender: Examining Socio-Economic and Political Status

For centuries, women have occupied a lower rung in the socio-economic and political ladder, not because of any natural inferiority, but because of power structures built and maintained by men. This subordination is not accidental or random. It is systematic, embedded in laws, customs, family arrangements, and even in the way people are raised from childhood. To understand why gender inequality persists despite decades of reform, we need to look at the concept of patriarchy and the thinkers who exposed how it works. From there, we can examine how this plays out in real terms: in wages, in workplaces, in healthcare, and in the corridors of political power.

Understanding patriarchy as a power system
Kate Millett and sexual politics
Simone de Beauvoir and the making of “woman”
How patriarchy shapes economic life
The gap in workforce participation
Unequal pay for equal work
Health, culture, and representation
Women in political power
The Women’s Reservation Act
Breaking the power dynamic

Understanding patriarchy as a power system

Patriarchy is often misunderstood as simply “men being in charge.” But feminist theorists describe it as something far more structured: a complete social, economic, and political system designed to keep men dominant and women subordinate. It operates not through one law or one institution, but through many reinforcing layers that together make male power seem normal and inevitable.

The key insight from feminist scholarship is that this hierarchy is constructed, not natural. The differences in status between men and women are produced by society, then disguised as biology or tradition. Once we see patriarchy as a man-made system, we can also see that it can be questioned, challenged, and changed.

Kate Millett and sexual politics

The American writer Kate Millett gave this analysis its sharpest political language. In her 1970 book Sexual Politics, she argued that the relationship between men and women is fundamentally a political one, a relationship of power and domination. She defined patriarchy as a system whereby the female half of the population is controlled by the male half.

Millett’s most important contribution was to show that patriarchy is not just a system of government but an ideology. It conditions both men and women to accept a particular sexual hierarchy as right and proper. Through this conditioning, women are made to internalise their own inferiority until they come to believe in it. She analysed how even literature and culture quietly reinforce these values, making domination feel like the natural order of things. For Millett, true change required dismantling these deep cultural attitudes, not just changing laws.

Simone de Beauvoir and the making of “woman”

Decades earlier, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir laid the foundation for this thinking in her landmark 1949 work The Second Sex. Her famous argument was that “woman” is not a fixed, natural category but a social construct shaped by a male-dominated world. This is captured in her best-known line: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

De Beauvoir explained that society treats men as the default human being, the norm, while women are defined only in relation to men, as the “Other.” Girls are socialised from a young age into roles of femininity that limit their freedom and ambitions. The expectation that a woman’s primary value lies in her relationship to men, in marriage, motherhood, and domestic life, confines her and excludes her from full participation in public life. De Beauvoir argued that biological differences do not justify social inequality, and that the emphasis on women’s reproductive role had historically locked them out of education, employment, and politics.

How patriarchy shapes economic life

Theory becomes concrete when we look at the economy. If women are conditioned to see domestic work as their primary duty and paid work as secondary, the effects show up clearly in employment data. India offers a stark example of how patriarchal norms translate into economic disadvantage.

The gap in workforce participation

One of the most telling indicators is how few women are in the paid workforce. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2023-24, the female labour force participation rate stood at around 41.7 per cent, compared with 78.8 per cent for men. This is not because women do not work. They work enormously, but much of that work is unpaid and invisible to official statistics.

The reasons are rooted in social expectations rather than ability or desire. Research on female labour force participation shows that gender norms that place the burden of domestic and care work on women are the primary barrier to their economic engagement. Marriage and childbirth often push women out of the workforce at critical career stages. A national time-use survey found that women spend roughly 7.5 hours a day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work, while men spend around 2.8 hours. This unequal division of household labour, exactly the structure Millett said needed revolutionising, keeps women economically dependent.

Unequal pay for equal work

Even when women do enter paid employment, they are not paid the same. The wage gap remains wide across nearly every sector. The Global Gender Gap Report 2024 ranked India poorly on wage equality, finding that women earn on average about Rs 39.8 for every Rs 100 earned by men.

Crucially, this gap is not simply explained by differences in education or experience. Economic analysis suggests that in the urban labour market, only about one-third of the wage gap is due to differences in skills and qualifications, while two-thirds is attributable to pure discrimination. In other words, the larger part of the gap exists simply because the market devalues women’s work. This is patriarchy operating in economic form: women’s labour is treated as worth less, regardless of merit.

Health, culture, and representation

The reach of patriarchy extends well beyond paychecks. It shapes who gets access to healthcare, how women are portrayed in culture, and whose voice counts in public conversation.

In healthcare, the same hierarchy that devalues women’s labour can also deprioritise their health needs. When a family treats a daughter’s wellbeing as less important than a son’s, or when a woman’s own time and resources are consumed by caregiving for others, her access to medical attention suffers. The undervaluing of women within the household has direct consequences for their physical wellbeing.

Cultural representation reinforces all of this. As Millett demonstrated through her study of literature, the stories a society tells about women shape how women are seen and how they see themselves. When women are repeatedly portrayed as secondary characters, as objects of desire, or as defined only by their relationships to men, these images quietly justify their unequal status. De Beauvoir made the same point: the “myth of Woman” circulated through art, religion, and tradition serves to keep women in the position of the Other.

Women in political power

Perhaps nowhere is male dominance more visible than in politics, the formal arena where decisions about society are made. Globally and in India, women remain dramatically underrepresented in legislatures.

The numbers tell the story. Women make up roughly half of India’s population, yet their share of seats in Parliament and state assemblies has hovered around 14 to 15 per cent. For comparison, women constituted only 4.4 per cent of the electorate concerns addressed in the very first Lok Sabha era, and progress since has been slow. This persistent gap reflects exactly the political dimension of patriarchy that Millett identified: men have long treated governance as their domain.

The Women’s Reservation Act

A significant attempt to break this pattern is the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, passed in September 2023. The law reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, state legislative assemblies, and the Delhi assembly for women, with a sub-quota for women from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. The legislation had a long and difficult journey, with the first attempt dating back to 1996 and nearly three decades of political deadlock before it finally passed.

The Act recently came into force, reserving one-third of seats on a rotational basis. Its full implementation, however, depends on a fresh Census and a subsequent delimitation exercise. Supporters argue that proper representation will lead to more inclusive policymaking, pointing to the success of women in local government, where over 1.4 million elected women representatives in panchayats already form the world’s largest such cohort and have improved delivery of public goods like water and sanitation.

Breaking the power dynamic

Both Millett and de Beauvoir believed that because patriarchy is constructed, it can be dismantled. But they also warned that simply passing laws is not enough. Because the system works through socialisation and ideology, real change requires shifting deep-rooted attitudes about what women can be and do.

This is why India can have constitutional equality, education programmes, and reservation laws, yet still rank 129th out of 146 countries in the Global Gender Gap Report 2024. As one analysis put it, economic growth does not automatically lead to gender parity. Legal rights and policy interventions matter, but they have to be matched by changes in family life, workplaces, culture, and everyday attitudes. The undoing of patriarchy is an ongoing project, advancing in some areas while stalling in others.

The thinkers who first mapped this terrain gave us the tools to see it clearly. Recognising that the lower status of women is a product of power, not nature, is the first step toward changing it.

What do you think? If two-thirds of the gender pay gap comes from discrimination rather than differences in skill or experience, what would it actually take to close it? And do you believe reserving political seats for women can shift deep social attitudes, or must attitudes change first for representation to be meaningful?

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Table of Contents

Understanding patriarchy as a power system 🔗

Kate Millett and sexual politics 🔗

Simone de Beauvoir and the making of “woman” 🔗

How patriarchy shapes economic life 🔗

The gap in workforce participation 🔗

Unequal pay for equal work 🔗

Health, culture, and representation 🔗

Women in political power 🔗

The Women’s Reservation Act 🔗

Breaking the power dynamic 🔗