Explain how the pattern of patriarchy is being altered in a family and at the workplace in the present context.

Family: what has altered

• Talcott Parsons’s male-earner nuclear type is no longer the only official script. Dual earning, delayed marriage, and female-headed households appear in Census and NFHS files.
• Education and later age at marriage raise women’s bargaining in some classes. Giddens’s “pure relationship” is a limited urban possibility.
• Law on inheritance, domestic violence, and divorce opened exits that earlier household patriarchy denied.

Family: what persists

• Unpaid care, which Ann Oakley named as labour, still falls on women. Work from home during COVID-19 intensified the double day.
• Sex ratio, spousal violence, and decision-making items in NFHS show constraint inside “modern” homes.
• Kin control of marriage, often caste-endogamous, still organises honour.

Workplace: what has altered

• Women have entered professions, public office, and some factory and service lines. SHGs made credit and public meeting visible.
• Formal equal-pay rules and maternity provisions exist for a thin organised sector.

Workplace: what persists and mutates

• Informal sector dominance: no contract, home-based piece work, domestic service, and gig tasks without a career.
• Occupational segregation and a glass ceiling keep command posts male.
• WFH dashboards did not socialise childcare. They often moved the office into a gendered house.
• Lockdown dismissed informal women first and sent migrants walking; another class kept salaried screens.

How to read “altered”

• Walby’s shift from private patriarchy (husband as direct boss) to public patriarchy (state and labour market as bosses) fits much of the evidence.
• Friedrich Engels tied the family to property. Property in land and firm still skews male, so alteration is incomplete.
• Intersection with caste and class: Dalit and migrant women face a harsher workplace patriarchy than the professional dual-earner story.