The sociology of gender treats the difference between women and men as a social structure rather than a natural fact. It studies how societies assign work, authority, space, dress, emotion and value by gender; how individuals are made into gendered persons; how the arrangement is defended as nature; and how it is contested. Its foundational move is the claim that arrangements presented as biological destiny are historically variable, learned, and therefore alterable.
The field asks who does which work and who is paid for it; who occupies the public world and who is confined to the domestic; how gender intersects with class, caste and race to produce different women rather than one Woman; how violence functions as an instrument of gender order; and how the discipline's own categories — the household, the worker, the citizen — smuggled in a male subject. It is therefore both a substantive field and a critique of sociology as a whole.
The sex-gender distinction and its critics
Ann Oakley's Sex, Gender and Society gave the field its organising vocabulary: sex names the biological division into male and female, while gender names the cultural elaboration built upon it — the roles, temperaments and identities that vary from society to society. Margaret Mead's earlier New Guinea material and cross-cultural evidence of societies where women farm, trade or inherit were used to show that no invariant temperament follows from anatomy. The distinction was politically powerful because it separated what could not be changed from what could.
Later scholarship complicated it in two directions. Judith Butler argued that sex itself is produced within discourse and that gender is performative — an effect of repeated, regulated acts rather than an expression of an inner essence. Transgender and intersex scholarship pressed the point empirically, showing that the binary classification of bodies is itself a social operation performed by medicine and law. R. W. Connell's Masculinities extended the field to men, distinguishing hegemonic masculinity from subordinated and complicit forms and showing that men too are ranked and constrained by the gender order.
Reconstructing the discipline
Classical sociology had little to say about gender. Marx's proletarian was male and the household appeared only as consumption; Durkheim naturalised the distinction between the affective woman and the social man; Weber's rationalised bureaucracy assumed a worker with domestic support behind him; Parsons made the instrumental husband and expressive wife a functional requirement rather than a question. Feminist sociology treated these as errors of substance, not omissions of detail.
The reconstruction turned on several ideas. Patriarchy, given systematic sociological form by Sylvia Walby as a set of interlocking structures — household production, paid work, the state, violence, sexuality and culture — made male dominance an object of explanation rather than a slogan, and allowed the shift from private to public patriarchy to be described. The sexual division of labour was shown to be the pivot connecting home and market: unpaid domestic work subsidises the wage economy, and the expectation of it explains occupational segregation, wage gaps and the double burden of employed women. Oakley's study of housework treated it as work with a labour process and job satisfaction to be measured, which was itself a conceptual intervention. Gender socialisation through family, schooling, peer groups and media explained how the order reproduces itself without coercion, while the critique of the public-private divide showed how designating the home as private removed violence and unpaid labour from political scrutiny.
Intersectionality, named by Kimberlé Crenshaw, then questioned the category of women itself. Black and Third World feminists argued that an account built from the experience of white middle-class women misdescribes those whose subordination runs simultaneously through race, class or caste, and that these axes are not additive but constitutive of one another.
The Indian field
Indian scholarship gave the discipline a distinctive object: the entanglement of gender with caste. Uma Chakravarti's account of Brahmanical patriarchy argues that caste purity depends on controlling women's sexuality, since endogamy is the mechanism by which caste boundaries are maintained — so the seclusion of upper-caste women, early marriage, the prohibition on widow remarriage and the punishment of inter-caste unions are not incidental cruelties but structural requirements of the caste order. Leela Dube's comparative work on kinship showed how ideologies of seed and earth and the rituals of girlhood build gender into kinship itself.
Dalit feminism, articulated by Sharmila Rege among others, criticised mainstream Indian feminism for a savarna standpoint and the Dalit movement for treating caste as a men's question, insisting that Dalit women's labour and vulnerability to sexual violence be theorised together. A second body of work exposed the invisibility of women's work: the undercounting of unpaid family labour on farms and in home-based production by censuses and surveys, and the concentration of women in informal, insecure and low-paid employment. Demographic scholarship on son preference, the declining child sex ratio and sex-selective abortion connected kinship rules, dowry and property to the survival of girls. The women's movement — from the anti-price-rise agitations and the campaign after the Mathura judgment to the demand for political reservation — supplied both an object of study and a source of researchers.
Current directions and method
Present work runs to gendered violence and its legal regulation, unpaid care work in national accounts, digital harassment and the platform economy, masculinities in contexts of unemployment and migration, queer and trans lives after the reading down of Section 377 and the transgender legislation that followed, and the gendering of climate risk. Method has been a contribution in its own right: feminist researchers argued for standpoint epistemology, for reflexivity about the researcher's position, for the interview as dialogue rather than extraction, and for disaggregating household data — arguments that have altered social research well beyond the study of gender.
For the UPSC answer
Begin with the sex-gender distinction and attribute it to Oakley, then show that the classical canon treated the male experience as generic rather than merely ignoring women. Use patriarchy, the sexual division of labour and the public-private divide as the three working concepts, and introduce Walby's private-to-public shift when the question concerns change. On India, make Brahmanical patriarchy the hinge between caste and gender, cite Dube on kinship, Rege on Dalit feminism and the sex ratio on son preference, and close on the women's movement so that structure is matched by agency.
References & further reading
- Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Temple Smith.
- Oakley, A. (1974). The Sociology of Housework. Martin Robertson.
- Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Blackwell.
- Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Polity Press.
- Chakravarti, U. (2003). Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Stree.
- Rege, S. (1998). Dalit Women Talk Differently. Economic and Political Weekly, 33(44).