Patriarchy Is the Least Noticed yet the Most Significant Structure of Social Inequality

In 1990 the economist Amartya Sen published an essay with a startling title, More than 100 Million Women Are Missing. He compared the number of women in the world with the number that would be expected if girls and boys had received the same care, and found a shortfall, most of it in Asia, of more than a hundred million. The women had not vanished in a catastrophe. They had been lost one at a time, through neglect, selective abortion, poorer food and medical care and violence, inside homes where nobody thought anything unusual had occurred. The topic suggests that patriarchy is the least noticed yet the most significant structure of social inequality, and Sen's figure is a reason to take it seriously.

Patriarchy means a system in which men hold authority over women, in the family, in property and in public life. The historian Gerda Lerner argued in The Creation of Patriarchy in 1986 that it is not a natural order but a historical development, which grew over millennia as control of women's labour and reproduction became linked to property and the state. Kate Millett in 1970 had already described it as a political relationship, rooted in the family and sanctioned by culture. The term is used less often now than caste or class, partly because the arrangement it describes seems so ordinary.

Why is it unnoticed? Because it is woven into the family, the place where inequality is most intimate and least visible. A boy who sees his mother serve the men first and eat last learns something about worth before he can speak about it. Law rarely reaches inside the house. The arrangement is also defended as love, protection or tradition, and its victims are often taught to defend it. Where inequality is experienced as affection, it is difficult to name. The very warmth of the home hides the ledger.

Its significance, however, is large. Consider work. In India's Time Use Survey of 2019, women spent about five hours a day on unpaid household services and care, against an hour and a half for men. The imbalance cuts into the time women can spend on paid work, education and leisure. It explains in part why women's participation in the labour force is far lower than men's, and why much of the economic activity of the household is uncounted in the gross domestic product. A structure that allots the unpaid work to half the population has large economic effects.

A structure that allots the unpaid work to half the population has large economic effects.

Consider also life itself. The Census of 2011 recorded 919 girls for every thousand boys under the age of six in India, the lowest figure since independence, a result of sex selective abortion and neglect in a society that valued sons. Daughters are seen as a financial burden because of dowry, which, though illegal since 1961, continues. The more recent National Family Health Survey has shown some improvement in the sex ratio at birth, which is a sign that change is possible. Violence within the home, domestic abuse and the fear of public spaces restrict many women's lives in ways that men do not experience.

Property and power show the same pattern. Women own only a small fraction of agricultural land in India, though they do much of the farm labour. The Hindu Succession Act was amended in 2005 to give daughters equal rights as coparceners in ancestral property, and the Supreme Court in 2020 confirmed that this right does not depend on the father being alive in 2005, but practice lags behind law. In Parliament and in boardrooms women are a minority. Decisions about budgets, cities and technologies are made by men, which affects what is built. Caroline Criado Perez documents in Invisible Women in 2019 that car safety tests used male dummies, that offices were set to male temperatures and that medical research often ignored female bodies.

The claim of the topic is that patriarchy is the most significant structure, and this needs care. Other structures, such as caste, class, race and religion, also create profound inequality, and in many lives they matter more at a given moment. A Dalit woman faces the combined force of caste and gender, a point made by the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 when she coined the term intersectionality. It may be best to say that patriarchy is distinctive because it cuts across all the others, existing in every caste, class and nation, so that no group is free of it.

It is also not universal in form. Among the Khasi of Meghalaya, descent and inheritance run through the mother, and the youngest daughter inherits the family property, although political authority still rests with men. Anthropologists have found societies in which women's status is higher than in the patriarchal norm. This shows that the arrangement is a human construction and may be changed. Men also suffer under patriarchy, from the pressure to provide, to suppress feeling and to prove strength, but the burdens are not equal.

Change requires making the structure visible, which is the first and often the hardest step. Laws that give equal rights are a start, but practices in the household must shift too. Counting unpaid work, teaching boys and girls to share domestic tasks, supporting women's ownership of land and ensuring their safety in public spaces all address the structure and not just its symptoms. Movements led by women, such as the self help groups of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, have shown that economic independence changes what is possible within the home.

Yet the problem of invisibility has a final twist. To see patriarchy one must stand outside it, and few people can. Those who benefit are often unaware, and those who suffer may not have a language for it. The outsiders who point it out can be dismissed as disturbing a natural order. It remains an open question whether a structure that is so deeply embedded in the way we raise children, divide work and imagine authority can be seen clearly by those whose eyes it has helped to shape.