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Division of labour or division of labor is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase efficiency of output.

Division of labour in domestic settings[]

Sexual division of labour[]

The clearest exposition of the principles of sexual division of labour across the full range of human societies can be summarised by a large number of logically complementary implicational constraints of the following form: if women of childbearing ages in a given community tend to do X (e.g., preparing soil for planting) they will also do Y (e.g., the planting) while for men the logical reversal in this example would be that if men plant they will prepare the soil. The 'Cross Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor ' by White, Brudner and Burton (1977, public domain), using statistical entailment analysis, shows that tasks more frequently chosen by women in these order relations are those more convenient in relation to childrearing. This type of finding has been replicated in a variety of studies, including modern industrial economies. These entailments do not restrict how much work for any given task could be done by men (e.g., in cooking) or by women (e.g., in clearing forests) but are only least-effort or role-consistent tendencies. To the extent that women clear forests for agriculture, for example, they tend to do the entire agricultural sequence of tasks on those clearings. In theory, these types of constraints could be removed by provisions of child care, but ethnographic examples are lacking.

Division of labour in organizational and industrial settings[]

Main article: Division of labour in organizational and industrial settings


Further reading[]

  • Stephanie Coontz & Peta Henderson, Women's Work, Men's Property: The Origins of Gender and Class.


See also[]

References[]


This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
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