Sciences & Technology
Q&A: How women and girls are changing gaming
Why do women still have less status and power than men?
A new book, Patriarchy Inc., makes the case for a new approach to gender equality in work – one that’s fairer, more secure, and more rewarding for all of us
Published 11 April 2025
What’s your vision of gender equality?
Whatever it is, it needs to take a stand on divisions of labour. Work – who does what tasks in society, and what they get in return – is at the heart of social justice.
Among those concerned with social hierarchies, in which certain groups enjoy higher status and more power than others, there is a long and distinguished tradition of turning a beady eye on divisions of labour attached to the social identities people are born into.
‘You be the serf, I’ll be the landowner’, for example, does not offer fertile ground for egalitarian relations between those two social categories.
Little wonder that in the general scheme of things, these are matters that can inspire philosophical treatises and political manifestos, strikes and protests, campaigns and cries of ‘Oil the guillotine, Pierre!’.
When it comes to the gendered division of labour, just about everyone is familiar with the basic statistics. We know that along the ‘vertical’ dimension of prestige and pay, men remain firmly installed at the top.
For example, in 2022 men still held more than 80 per cent of the top ‘C-suite’ roles in North American and European financial services firms. According to upcoming research, among the world’s 40 largest banks, all but one had a man as chief executive officer at the beginning of 2024.
But men are also overrepresented in jobs on the bottom two rungs of the occupational ladder, in roles like caretaker, garbage collector, and process, plant and machine operative.
Clear ‘horizontal’ divisions of labour also remain.
These divisions only partly line up with our stereotypes about differences between women and men in terms of traits, abilities, values and motivations.
Females’ (modest) advantage in language abilities and supposed keen interest in people rather than things are sometimes used to explain their lower representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations.
Yet turn to film screenwriting, a job seemingly custom-built for stereotypical feminine skills and interests, and you will find that 81 per cent of screenwriters are men – an even steeper gender imbalance than is seen among people with PhDs in computer and mathematical science.
Less often commented on is that these horizontal divisions are linked to men’s much higher rates of fatal work-related injuries compared to women.
Finally, we all know there are marked differences between women and men when it comes to the amount of time spent in paid work in the market versus unpaid work taking care of the home and its occupants.
The average woman in the UK spends about 24 hours per week doing unpaid childcare, adult care and household chores, and 21 hours per week in paid work or education.
For the average UK man, the priorities are reversed, with about 27 hours of paid work or study per week and 18 hours of unpaid work. He also enjoys three more hours of leisure every week than his female counterpart.
Unpaid domestic labour takes gendered patterns too.
Women are more likely to do the time-sensitive chores-without-end like cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry and routine childcare.
In contrast, men are more likely to do more sporadic, time-flexible activities, like playing with the kids, and tasks like mowing the lawn or mending the gate that can be held off until a convenient moment, such as the weekend, the new year or the end of time.
These divisions are both cause and consequence of the sex-based hierarchy of status and power over resources, aka patriarchy, that we see in the advanced economies of the Global North. But our progress in dismantling these arrangements have been stymied by two false visions that pervade mainstream debate and discussion.
The first is what I call the Different But Equal perspective.
The ‘Equal’ part holds that women and men now rightly enjoy equal opportunities in education, work and family life. They are therefore both largely free to fully develop their skills, talents and other potential as they choose.
This human capital can then be fairly exchanged in the labour market, in return for status, income and other rewards, via the gender-neutral market mechanisms of supply and demand.
It’s not difficult to see why the Different But Equal viewpoint is an obstacle to tackling inequalities relating to the gendered division of labour.
According to this vision of gender equality, there is no real problem to solve.
The second major obstacle to dismantling patriarchy is the vision offered by the business case Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) approach. The main reason to value diversity, according to the contemporary DEI approach, is because it can create more competitive, profitable, high-performing, innovative businesses.
The problem with the DEI approach is that it pivots us away from what most of us believe is the most important reason for caring about the equality and inclusion of marginalised groups – that we want to create a fairer society.
The DEI approach may well be successful at making a profit out of women’s labour. It has failed to create workplaces that offer genuine gender equality for women (or men), because that was never the goal.
It is time for a new vision, grounded in a deeper understanding of the social processes that give rise to the gendered division of labour, and the inefficiencies, harms and injustices that this division creates.
The starting point of Patriarchy Inc. is that humans have been using sex to divide labour for at least tens of thousands of years, and perhaps much longer.
We have evolved both minds and culturally constructed niches that shape us into social roles. We are sensitive to norms, imitate some but not others, and are adept learners and teachers, alert to the matter of what it means to be someone like me.
We create social categories and load them with cultural baggage concerning the skills and knowledge these kinds of people should have, how they should behave, their status, and their rights and responsibilities.
These same processes, acting on and through individuals, interactions and institutions, also explain the gendered division of labour.
Patriarchy Inc. continues to perpetuate real harm and injustice for both sexes.
It limits what we can do and who we can be, and its fat thumb unfairly tips the scales when it comes to what we get in return.
It creates gendered distortions of competence and productivity, and irrational resistance to reforms that would make our workplaces not only more productive but also fairer.
In workplaces where it is given the loosest rein, Patriarchy Inc. destroys organisational cultures, by corrupting those at the top of the ladder and creating upside-down value systems.
But Patriarchy Inc.’s effects seep well beyond workplaces, contributing to economic insecurity, undermining health, putting pressure on family life and preserving females’ second-class status.
My hope is that a deeper understanding of how Patriarchy Inc. really operates will dispel the false visions that distract us and inspire effective, common-sense reforms that will make workplaces and society fairer and freer for everyone.
Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work by Professor Cordelia Fine is published by Atlantic Books and is available to buy online.