Breaking down the question

The question has two joined parts. The first is a sharp interrogative — is patriarchy universal? — inviting a reasoned yes-and-no rather than a slogan. The second directs the candidate to critically examine how patriarchy shapes the sexual division of labour, that is, the allocation of tasks and roles between men and women across the productive and domestic spheres.

The connective logic matters. Patriarchy is not merely an attitude; it is a structure of male dominance, and its most tangible mechanism is the division of labour by sex — who works where, for what reward, and with what recognition. To answer well, one must define patriarchy as a system, adjudicate its claim to universality against ethnographic and historical counter-evidence, and then trace precisely how that system produces and reproduces gendered work.

The command critically examine forbids a one-sided feminist recitation. The strongest answer weighs the universality thesis against exceptions and variation, and treats the sexual division of labour as itself contested — natural to some, wholly social to others.

How to approach it

Begin by defining patriarchy, following Walby, as a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women — distinguishing it from mere male authority. Then take up universality directly: marshal the case that patriarchy is near-universal in its historical spread, then qualify it with matrilineal and relatively egalitarian societies and, crucially, with the variation in patriarchy's form and degree across time and place.

Move to the sexual division of labour. Show how patriarchy assigns women to the private sphere of reproduction and men to the public sphere of production; how it devalues domestic and care work by rendering it unpaid and invisible; and how it segregates and subordinates women even within paid employment. Use the patriarchy and sexual division of labour note to anchor the mechanisms.

Critically weigh the naturalistic justification against the sociological view that the division is socially constructed, drawing on Oakley. Conclude that patriarchy is broadly pervasive but variable, and that its most durable expression is the gendering of work.

Model answer

Patriarchy, in its sociological sense, denotes not merely rule by fathers but a system of social structures and practices through which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women. Sylvia Walby influentially identified its several interlocking sites — the household, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality, and culture — insisting that patriarchy is a structural relation rather than a set of individual prejudices. Whether such a system is universal, and how it moulds the sexual division of labour, are among the foundational questions of the sociology of gender.

Is patriarchy universal? The case for near-universality is strong. Across the overwhelming majority of known societies, historical and contemporary, men have monopolised political authority, controlled property and inheritance, and claimed the higher-valued spheres of activity, while women's status has been subordinate. Even matrilineal societies, in which descent and inheritance pass through the mother, typically vest authority in the mother's brother rather than in women themselves, so that matriliny is not matriarchy. Friedrich Engels traced this subordination historically to the rise of private property, which converted women's reproductive capacity into an instrument for transmitting inheritance and brought about what he called the "world-historical defeat of the female sex" — implying that patriarchy, though pervasive, is a historical product rather than an eternal fact.

Yet the universality thesis must be qualified in three ways. First, genuinely egalitarian arrangements have existed: among some foraging bands and in matrilineal communities such as the Khasi and Garo of north-east India or the Nayar of Kerala, women have enjoyed considerable autonomy, property rights, and social standing. Second, and more importantly, patriarchy varies enormously in degree and in form — Walby distinguished private patriarchy, centred on the household and a controlling husband or father, from public patriarchy, in which women enter the labour market and public life but remain subordinated collectively through segregation and unequal reward. The transition from the one to the other in industrial societies shows that patriarchy mutates rather than disappears. Third, its intensity is cross-cut by class, caste, race, and region, so that no single template fits all women. The balanced conclusion is that patriarchy is near-universal but not invariant: pervasive as a tendency, variable in its structures, and historically contingent in its origins.

How patriarchy shapes the sexual division of labour. The sexual division of labour — the systematic allocation of tasks by sex — is patriarchy's most concrete and durable expression. Its workings can be traced through several mechanisms.

  1. The public–private split. Patriarchy assigns women primarily to the private domestic sphere of reproduction, child-rearing, and care, and men to the public sphere of production, politics, and paid employment. This separation, sharpened by industrialisation, physically and symbolically confines women to the home while endowing men's public activity with prestige and remuneration.

  2. The devaluation of domestic labour. The work women perform in the household — cooking, cleaning, caring, and the daily reproduction of the labour force — is unpaid, unrecorded, and treated as an expression of love or nature rather than as work. It is thereby rendered economically invisible even though the wage economy depends upon it. Feminist economists argue that this uncounted labour subsidises both capital and the male breadwinner.

  3. Segregation and subordination within paid work. Where women do enter employment, patriarchy reproduces itself through horizontal segregation — women concentrated in "caring" and service occupations that extend their domestic role — and vertical segregation, in which they cluster at the lower rungs and hit the "glass ceiling". The gender pay gap and the "double burden" of paid work added to undiminished domestic duties are the results.

  4. The naturalistic justification. Crucially, patriarchy legitimises this allocation by presenting it as natural — grounded in women's biology and reproductive capacity. Here the critical examination bites. Ann Oakley demonstrated that the sexual division of labour is overwhelmingly social, not biological: the tasks deemed "women's work" vary wildly across cultures, so that what one society treats as inescapably female another assigns to men. Housework, she argued, is a socially created role, not a natural destiny. The appeal to nature is thus an ideology that stabilises a social arrangement.

Critical assessment. The two parts of the answer converge. Patriarchy is broadly universal as a system of male dominance, but its persistence rests less on brute authority than on the everyday, naturalised organisation of work by sex. By confining women to devalued reproductive labour and subordinating them within production, the sexual division of labour both expresses patriarchy and reproduces it, generation after generation, through the ordinary routines of the household and the workplace. Because that division is socially constructed rather than biologically fixed, it is also, in principle, changeable — as rising female education, employment, and legal reform have begun to show, even while the domestic burden and occupational segregation prove stubborn. Patriarchy is therefore best described as a near-universal but historically variable structure whose most tenacious mechanism is the gendering of labour.

Examiner's perspective

The question rewards candidates who treat "is patriarchy universal" as a genuine analytical problem rather than a rhetorical question. The mark is won by a qualified answer — patriarchy is near-universal in spread but variable in form and degree — supported by matrilineal counter-examples and Walby's private-to-public distinction. Flat assertions in either direction stay average.

On the second part, examiners look for the mechanisms linking patriarchy to work: the public–private split, the devaluation of unpaid domestic labour, and occupational segregation, not merely a complaint about inequality. Naming feminist and classical sources — Walby, Engels, Oakley — and using them accurately signals command of the field.

The finest scripts honour the phrase critically examine by confronting the naturalistic defence of the sexual division of labour with the evidence of cross-cultural variation, and by noting that a socially constructed division is a changeable one. That analytical turn, tying universality to the reproduction of gendered labour, distinguishes a first-class answer.