Revision summary
Gender stratifies labour, honour, and the body in its own right. Oakley, Walby, and Connell name care, patriarchy, and masculinities. It intersects class as cheap and unpaid labour. It intersects caste through endogamy and purity. Race and ethnicity police women as group boundaries. NFHS and PLFS show the joint odds.
Model answer
Introduction
Stratification is not only class. Gender organises labour, honour, and the body as a durable rank. It is a dimension because it allocates life-chances in its own right, and because it cuts every other axis. Intersection is the joint, not an add-on.
Body
Why gender is a dimension
- Ann Oakley split sex from gender and made housework labour. Unpaid care is a class-like relation inside the home.
- Sylvia Walby named patriarchy as linked structures: household, paid work, state, violence, sexuality, culture.
- R. W. Connell mapped a gender order and masculinities. Rank is relational, not a women’s residual.
- NFHS on anaemia, mobility, and decision-making, and PLFS on female work, show patterned odds, which is Weber’s life-chances in a gendered key.
Intersection with class
- A wage table that codes only the male earner hides the double day. Heidi Hartmann tied patriarchy to capitalism’s cheap flexible labour.
- Erik Olin Wright’s contradictory locations still sit on a care subsidy.
Intersection with caste
- Endogamy and purity rules, as Leela Dube showed, make caste a gender system.
- Dalit feminist work, with Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination as a cousin, refuses a single “woman”.
- Campus and labour-market exclusion stack jati with gender.
Race and ethnicity
- W. E. B. Du Bois’s colour line is lived in gendered work: domestic service, hyper-visibility, and violence.
- Ethnic honour codes often police women’s sexuality as the boundary of the group, as Fredrik Barth’s boundary thesis implies.
How to analyse, not list
- Do not add inequalities as a heap. Ask how one institution, such as marriage or a factory, organises several ranks at once.
- Census and NFHS cells become intersectional only when the question names the joint.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[Gender order] --> STRAT[Stratification] C[Class] --> STRAT K[Caste] --> STRAT R[Race ethnicity] --> STRAT G --> C G --> K G --> R
Conclusion
Gender is a dimension of stratification because it systematically allocates work, honour, and safety. It intersects caste, class, race, and ethnicity by gating who may labour, marry, and speak. Oakley, Walby, Collins, and Dube are the tools. A class-only ladder is a male public fiction.
Quick related
Students also ask
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What is the difference between natural and social inequality examples from caste and class dimensions
Next question on this syllabus topic (2018 · Q1(d)). View answer →
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Is gender only about women?
No. Masculinities and the male exemption from care are part of the rank.
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Does intersection mean class no longer matters?
Class still structures property. Intersection says it never arrives alone.
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