Exploring Approaches to Gender and Work: From Marx to Modern Societies

Work and gender have been intertwined throughout human history. From the earliest hunter-gatherer societies to today’s globalized labor markets, the way societies organize work has consistently reflected – and reinforced – gender hierarchies. Understanding how this happened requires looking at both historical patterns and the theoretical frameworks that help explain them, beginning with the foundational ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The roots of gendered labor: early human societies 🔗

The gendered division of labor did not begin with capitalism. It stretches back to early human societies, where roles were distributed based on perceived physical differences. Men typically hunted, while women gathered, prepared food, and cared for children. Crucially, as anthropological research on groups like the Iroquois revealed, a division of labor between the sexes did not automatically mean inequality – in many pre-class societies, women exercised real authority over their domains and participated meaningfully in collective decision-making.

The problem was not the division itself but what happened to it over time. As societies developed surplus production and private property, the symbolic and material value assigned to different kinds of work began to diverge sharply along gender lines. Male activities – particularly those tied to trade, warfare, and property – came to be seen as more prestigious, while women’s contributions were increasingly treated as secondary or invisible.

Marx, Engels, and the material basis of gender inequality 🔗

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were among the first systematic thinkers to connect gender inequality to economic structures rather than nature or biology. In their writing from 1846, Marx and Engels identified the first division of labor as that between man and woman, and argued that this laid the groundwork for the first form of private property – and with it, the first form of class oppression.

Engels and The Origin of the Family 🔗

Engels developed these ideas most fully in his 1884 work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He argued that the shift from communal societies to ones based on private property fundamentally altered women’s position. When wealth began to accumulate and men sought to pass it to their biological heirs, women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity became subject to male control. As Engels framed it, women’s oppression was not natural but arose from the same historical process that created private property and class division – there was nothing inevitable about it.

Engels also noted that the rise of industrial capitalism brought women into the social workforce, which he saw as a necessary precondition for their liberation. Yet under capitalism, women remained burdened by domestic labor even as they entered paid employment – a contradiction that would later be called the double shift.

Marx on private property and labor’s gendered division 🔗

For Marx, private property and the division of labor were two expressions of the same process – one that reduced individuals to their economic function and defined women, like workers, as commodities. The separation of work into distinct physical spaces during industrialization made the gendered division of labor more rigid and deepened the devaluation of work coded as “women’s work.” Importantly, this devaluation also suppressed wages for men, since the undervaluation of women’s labor created downward pressure across the entire working class.

Women’s labor under industrial capitalism 🔗

The Industrial Revolution was a turning point. The first industrial revolution introduced the modern construct of gender roles, cementing the image of men as “breadwinners” and women as “homemakers.” As factories expanded and working conditions grew dangerous, restrictions were placed on women’s and children’s participation in industrial labor – ostensibly for their protection, but with the effect of pushing women back toward the domestic sphere. With one male wage sufficient to support a household, the ideological divide between the public (productive) and private (reproductive) spheres hardened.

Women who did work in early factories faced severe disadvantages. Married women had no legal existence in many jurisdictions, and their lack of political voice limited their ability to demand better conditions. Despite this, women workers organized strikes and demanded fair wages, laying the groundwork for later feminist labor movements.

Productive vs. reproductive labor 🔗

A central Marxist insight – later developed extensively by feminist scholars – is the distinction between productive labor (paid work that generates profit within the capitalist system) and reproductive labor (unpaid domestic work that sustains the workforce). Feminist theorists have argued persuasively that Marx’s original framework undervalued women’s labor precisely because it focused only on market transactions. Unpaid caregiving, housework, and child-rearing are not peripheral to capitalism – they are essential to it, since they reproduce the labor force at no cost to employers. Yet because this work happens outside the market, it remains economically invisible.

The capitalist system has never envisaged converting domestic tasks into salaried employment. Instead, patriarchal values – the idea that women are naturally suited to domestic care – have been used to naturalize this free labor, making it appear as an expression of femininity rather than an economic arrangement that benefits capital.

From Marxist theory to Marxist feminism 🔗

Later thinkers recognized that classical Marxism, focused on class exploitation, did not fully account for the specific forms of oppression women experienced. Marxist feminism sought to synthesize feminist analyses of gender inequality with the Marxist emphasis on capitalism and class exploitation. It made visible the ways in which reproductive labor – sustaining workers daily and generationally – has exchange value of zero under capitalism, despite its enormous use value.

Sociologist Veronica Beechey argued in 1977 that women should be understood as an unrecognized reserve army of labor – drawn into the workforce during economic booms and pushed back into domestic roles during downturns. During periods of economic expansion, women have historically been called upon as cheap labor in manufacturing and service industries, only to be released when economic conditions change. This cyclical exploitation reflects how gender norms serve capitalist flexibility.

Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor – the managed emotional performances required in service roles like nursing, teaching, or flight attendants – added another dimension. Marxist feminists identify this as part of the social reproduction of labor, which reinforces both gender and racial hierarchies, since these roles are disproportionately filled by women, and often by women of color.

Gender and work in modern industrial societies 🔗

Despite major shifts in women’s workforce participation over the past century, the patterns established under early capitalism persist. As of 2023, women hold only 30 percent of managerial positions globally – a figure that has improved by only 3.5 percentage points over two decades. Collectively, women received only 52 cents for every dollar received by men in 2025, a ratio that, while improved from 47 cents in 2004, remains stark.

Horizontal and vertical segregation 🔗

The labor market today exhibits two persistent forms of gender segregation. Horizontal segregation refers to the concentration of different genders in different occupations – men dominating construction and engineering, women overrepresented in caregiving, education, and retail. Vertical segregation refers to the underrepresentation of women at senior levels within any given field. Both forms reinforce stereotypical notions about “gender-appropriate” roles and help explain why the gender pay gap persists even when women and men hold the same occupational titles.

Women are paid less than men due to occupational segregation, the devaluation of women’s work, societal norms, and discrimination – many of which take root well before women enter the labor market. Occupational gender stereotyping results in certain jobs being held predominantly by women, and those jobs become undervalued for wage-setting purposes, dragging down pay across all feminized occupations.

The “maternity penalty” and the double burden 🔗

One of the most persistent mechanisms reinforcing gender inequality at work is what researchers call the maternity penalty. Women with children face reduced earnings, fewer promotion opportunities, and are more likely to work in family-friendly but lower-paying roles – a penalty that intensifies with each additional child. Meanwhile, men often experience a “fatherhood bonus,” with their wages and perceived competence rising after having children. This asymmetry reflects deep-seated assumptions about who is responsible for care work, assumptions that trace directly back to the gendered division of labor theorized by Engels.

Reinforcement of gender stereotypes through capitalist structures 🔗

Industrial capitalism did not just reflect pre-existing gender norms – it actively reinforced and reproduced them. In early capitalist societies, men were positioned as breadwinners and women as homemakers, reinforcing rigid divisions of labor that became embedded in wage structures, legal systems, and cultural expectations. As a result of industrial development throughout the 19th century, many women began working in factories and earning wages, but were still pressured to manage household tasks – the original double shift.

The gender stereotype that women are naturally predisposed to caregiving while men are suited to physical and intellectual work has served a structural economic function: it justified women’s exclusion from higher-paying roles and their assignment to unpaid labor in the home. These norms were not simply cultural accidents – they were shaped by the material interests of a system that benefited from a supply of free reproductive labor.

Today, the fourth industrial revolution – driven by digital and biological convergence – has the potential to dismantle these stereotypes by shifting value away from physical strength and toward human talent regardless of gender. Whether this potential is realized depends, however, on whether structural inequalities are addressed alongside technological change.

What the Marxist tradition still offers 🔗

Despite its limitations – classical Marxism largely overlooked the specific exploitation of women – the Marxist tradition provides tools that remain relevant. Its insistence that gender inequality has material, not natural, roots means it can be changed. Its identification of unpaid domestic labor as economically productive challenges the assumption that only paid work “counts.” And its linking of gender oppression to private property and class structure points toward why gender inequality tends to persist even in formally egalitarian legal systems: the economic incentives that sustain it have not been dismantled.

In recent decades, there has been an extraordinary feminization of the workforce alongside increased labor precarity for both men and women. Women have won formal rights while the underlying structures that assign them disproportionate burdens of unpaid care work remain largely intact. As the ILO notes, unpaid care work remains a primary obstacle to women accessing quality employment, and its economic value must be recognized if the burden it places on women is to be addressed.

What do you think? If the gendered division of labor has its roots in economic structures rather than biology, what would a society need to change – beyond laws and policies – to genuinely redistribute unpaid care work? And given that occupational segregation reinforces the gender pay gap, should certain industries be actively restructured, or is it enough to ensure equal opportunity within them?

References

1. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/smith-s/1997/xx/engels.htm
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism
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8. https://www.cadtm.org/How-Patriarchy-and-Capitalism-Combine-to-Aggravate-the-Oppression-of-Women
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17. https://www.leftvoice.org/on-reproductive-labor-wage-slavery-and-the-new-working-class/
18. https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/women/