Breaking down the question
The phrase "To what extent" is the pivot of this question. It asks you not merely to affirm that patriarchy harms women, but to assess how far patriarchy explains the range of problems women face, and where other factors such as class, caste and economy also operate. "Discuss" invites a reasoned, evaluative answer.
Patriarchy, following Sylvia Walby, is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women. Defining it as structural rather than as individual male behaviour is essential, because it lets you connect patriarchy to concrete disadvantages in work, kinship, sexuality and politics.
How to approach it
Begin by establishing patriarchy as a powerful and pervasive cause, tracing its operation across Walby's structures — household, paid work, state, sexuality, culture and violence. Then qualify the claim: many of women's problems are compounded by class and caste, so patriarchy intersects with other systems rather than acting alone.
The high-scoring move is the "extent" judgement. Argue that patriarchy is the principal but not the sole cause, and use intersectionality to show why. Our notes on patriarchy and the sexual division of labour provide the conceptual grounding.
Model answer
Patriarchy is to a very large extent the underlying cause of the problems women face, but its effects are mediated and intensified by class, caste and other structures, so it is best described as the principal rather than the exclusive cause.
Understood as a system of male domination, patriarchy operates across the whole of social life. Sylvia Walby identifies several interlocking structures. In the household, the unpaid domestic labour expected of women confines them to a subordinate role and limits their autonomy. In paid work, occupational segregation and the wage gap flow from the assumption that women's proper place is the home. Through the control of sexuality and reproduction, women's bodies and choices are regulated. Cultural institutions, including religion and media, transmit norms of female subordination through socialisation from childhood. And male violence — domestic abuse, dowry deaths, harassment — enforces this order coercively. Kate Millett's insight that the personal is political captures how domination reaches into intimate life.
In the Indian context, patriarchy is sharpened by kinship. Uma Chakravarti's concept of "Brahmanical patriarchy" shows how caste endogamy depends on controlling women's sexuality, tying gender subordination to the reproduction of caste purity. Son preference, female foeticide, restrictions on inheritance and the burden of dowry all reveal patriarchy embedded in the very structure of family and marriage.
Yet the extent of patriarchy's causal role must be qualified. Women are not a homogeneous category, and their problems are shaped by intersecting inequalities. A poor Dalit woman faces disadvantages that a privileged upper-caste woman does not, so class and caste modify how patriarchy is experienced. Some problems — poverty, displacement, unemployment — afflict women partly because of structural economic conditions that also affect men, even if patriarchy makes women more vulnerable to them. An intersectional lens therefore prevents us from reducing every difficulty to gender alone.
In conclusion, patriarchy is the dominant cause of the specific disadvantages women suffer as women — in work, kinship, sexuality and safety — but it acts in combination with class and caste rather than in isolation. The honest judgement is that patriarchy explains a great deal, though not everything, and any solution must address it alongside the other structures with which it is entangled.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for candidates who engage the words "to what extent" and reach a calibrated judgement rather than a blanket assertion. The strongest scripts define patriarchy structurally, map its operation across Walby's domains, and bring in Indian material such as Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy.
Weak answers simply list women's problems and blame men. Strong answers show patriarchy working through concrete structures, then qualify its reach with intersectionality, concluding that it is the principal but not the sole cause.