Patriarchy is the least noticed yet the most significant structure of social inequality

The Water We Swim In

In a commencement speech in 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace told a parable about two young fish swimming along who meet an older fish. The older one nods and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" The two swim on for a while, and then one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?" Patriarchy is the water of human society. It surrounds the girl whose birth is greeted with a sigh, the bride whose surname changes and the widow told where she may not go. Because it is everywhere, it is rarely seen. Patriarchy is the least noticed structure of inequality precisely because it is the most pervasive one: it begins inside the family, wears the mask of tradition and love, and quietly underwrites every other hierarchy of caste, class and power.

Patriarchy, simply put, is a system in which men as a group hold authority over women as a group in the family, the economy, the state and the realm of ideas. Its strength lies in its claim to be natural. Simone de Beauvoir answered that claim in The Second Sex (1949):

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

The historian Gerda Lerner showed in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) that male dominance was a historical creation of early agrarian states, not a law of biology. Pierre Bourdieu called its method symbolic violence: a domination so internalised that the dominated accept it as common sense. A mother who feeds her son first, or a woman who thanks her husband for "allowing" her to work, is not a victim of open coercion. They are participants in a naturalised order, and that is exactly why it escapes notice.

The family, the first school of every human being, is also patriarchy's first classroom. Son preference begins before birth. Amartya Sen estimated in 1990 that more than 100 million women were "missing" from the world's population because of neglect, abuse and sex-selective practices, and India's Census of 2011 recorded a child sex ratio of just 918 girls per 1,000 boys. After birth, the division of labour does the rest. The first Time Use Survey of the National Statistical Office, conducted in 2019, found that women spent about 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work against 97 minutes for men. This labour sustains the entire economy, yet it is counted in no GDP, because it is called duty rather than work.

Moreover, patriarchy shapes the economy in ways that appear to be the free choices of women. The female labour force participation rate in India was just 23.3 per cent in the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18. It has since risen to about 41.7 per cent in 2023-24, but much of the rise lies in unpaid help on family farms and enterprises. Property follows the same pattern. Daughters received equal coparcenary rights only through the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005, and the Supreme Court had to confirm in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) that this right exists by birth. The glass ceiling in boardrooms and the "sticky floor" in fields are not separate problems. They are the same structure seen from two floors.

Why is patriarchy the most significant structure of inequality, and not merely one among many? Because it is the oldest and the most universal, and because it is the scaffolding on which other hierarchies stand. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar argued in Castes in India (1916) that endogamy is the essence of caste, and that endogamy can survive only by controlling women: through child marriage, enforced widowhood and the policing of whom a woman may love. The historian Uma Chakravarti named this fusion Brahmanical patriarchy. Honour killings of couples who marry across caste lines are therefore not only crimes of caste; they are crimes of patriarchy enforcing caste. Other inequalities divide society into groups; patriarchy runs through every one of them, so that a Dalit woman, a poor woman or a minority woman bears a double or triple burden, what Kimberlé Crenshaw called intersectionality.

The State and the law, which should correct this order, have often carried it within them. Until the Supreme Court struck down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code in Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018), the law on adultery treated a wife almost as the property of her husband. Violence remains the enforcer of last resort: the fifth National Family Health Survey (2019-21) found that about 29 per cent of ever-married women aged 18-49 had faced physical or sexual violence from their husbands. Political power tells the same story. Only 74 women were elected to the Lok Sabha in 2024, about 14 per cent of the House, and the one-third reservation promised by the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam of 2023 awaits the next delimitation.

Building upon this, patriarchy also wounds the men it appears to privilege. The writer bell hooks argued in The Will to Change (2004) that patriarchy demands of boys that they kill off their emotional selves. The boy told that "men do not cry" grows into a man who cannot seek help and who measures his worth by control. Rigid masculinity also excludes transgender and gender non-conforming persons, whose dignity the Supreme Court had to affirm in NALSA v. Union of India (2014). A structure that cripples both its beneficiaries and its victims is not a women's issue; it is a human issue.

Yet the statement invites honest scrutiny. Is patriarchy really "least noticed"? Women's movements have noticed it loudly for two centuries. Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848; the outrage over the Mathura custodial rape judgment led to the criminal law amendments of 1983; the Supreme Court's Vishaka guidelines of 1997 and the protests after the Delhi gang rape of December 2012 placed sexual violence at the centre of national debate. Change is visible too: the All India Survey on Higher Education for 2021-22 found the gross enrolment ratio of women in higher education slightly above that of men. Matrilineal communities such as the Khasis of Meghalaya remind us that patriarchy is a choice societies made, not a destiny. Some would add that for a landless Dalit labourer, caste and class may hurt more immediately than gender. These objections are real, but they refine rather than refute the claim. What has been noticed is patriarchy's most violent face; its everyday face, in the kitchen, the will, the marriage negotiation and the joke, still passes as normal. A structure is least noticed not when no one ever names it, but when most people stop seeing it the moment the protest ends.

Making the water visible is therefore the first task of reform. Education must teach children, boys above all, to question roles rather than inherit them. The economy must recognise care work through public creches, paid paternity leave and gender budgeting, which India adopted in its Union Budget in 2005-06. Women's collectives such as Kerala's Kudumbashree show that when women control credit and assets, they also gain a voice in the gram sabha. Laws on inheritance, dowry and workplace harassment must be enforced, not merely enacted. Above all, men must see themselves as stakeholders in equality.

The older fish in Wallace's parable did not change the water; he only made the young fish notice it. That is where every transformation begins. Patriarchy survived for millennia because it was invisible, and it weakens each time a daughter inherits land, a father takes leave to care for a newborn or a village elects a woman sarpanch who actually wields power. Redeeming the promise of Articles 14 and 15 means seeing the structure that hides in the most ordinary of places, the home, and having the courage to redesign it. When the water itself becomes clear, the inequality that it carries can no longer hide.