What do you understand by gender-based domestic division of labour? Is it undergoing a change in the wake of increasing participation of women in formal employment? Clarify your answer with illustrations. (Answer in 350 words)

- What do you understand by gender-based domestic division of labour? Is it undergoing a change in the wake of increasing participation of women in formal employment? Clarify your answer with illustrations. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Women's entry into paid work has changed who earns and barely changed who cooks.

Body

1. What the gendered division of household work consists of: The routine assignment of cooking, cleaning, childcare and care of the old to women, and of earning and dealings outside the house to men, held in place by upbringing rather than by negotiation. Oakley established that housework is work, with a task structure, long hours and monotony, and not an expression of affection; it is unpaid and outside the national accounts, and Walby treats household production as a patriarchal structure in its own right. India's Time Use Survey records women spending about five hours a day on unpaid domestic work against under two for men, and Leela Dube showed girls trained into it from childhood.

2. What formal employment has changed: In dual-earner urban households the allocation is now negotiated rather than assumed. Young educated men take a visible share of childcare; tasks are outsourced to paid domestic workers, creches, appliances and prepared food; smaller families and later childbirth shorten the years of intensive care. Earning gives a claim: women with independent incomes decide expenditure, delay marriage and leave bad ones. Rural self-help groups and wage employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act have done the same at a lower income. Law has followed — twenty-six weeks of maternity benefit, creche obligations on larger employers, and courts insisting that a homemaker's work be given monetary value in compensation claims.

3. What has stayed the same: Hochschild's second shift holds: employed women add paid hours without subtracting domestic ones, and the time-use gap persists across class and employment status. Delegation moves the work to poorer women rather than to men, which redistributes it among women. Men's increase concentrates in pleasant childcare rather than routine cleaning. Women withdraw from work after marriage and childbirth, which shows whose career absorbs the conflict.

4. A verdict: Changing at the margin and among a minority, and in who performs the tasks rather than in whose responsibility they remain.

Conclusion
The revolution, in Hochschild's word, is stalled, and employment alone will not finish it.