(a) Explain how the pattern of patriarchy is being altered in a family and at the workplace in the present context. 20 (b)…

(a) Changing patterns of patriarchy in the family and at the workplace

Patriarchy is not disappearing; it is changing form, and Sylvia Walby's shift from private (household-based) to public (market- and state-based) patriarchy captures this.

Family:

• Dual-earner and nuclear households, delayed marriage, more women choosing partners (including inter-caste unions) give women greater financial and personal agency.
• Daughter preference is growing among some urban middle-class families, while sex-selective practices persist in specific regions; state schemes such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao target this.
• Yet time-use surveys show women still carry a far larger share of unpaid domestic and care work, the "double burden", whatever their employment status.

Workplace:

• Laws such as the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, and movements such as #MeToo, have challenged harassment and the glass ceiling.
• Patriarchy adapts through gendered segmentation: women cluster in low-paid informal, care and home-based work, and in platform and gig work flexibility often means precarity and weak protection.

(b) Contribution of dependency theories to understanding the present global scenario

Dependency theorists (Prebisch's structuralism, Andre Gunder Frank's "development of underdevelopment", Samir Amin, and Wallerstein's world-systems view) argue that unequal exchange locks the periphery into subordination to the core.

Contributions:

• They explain unequal terms of trade, debt and aid conditionalities, and the concentration of high-value design and finance in core economies within global value chains.
• They help read newer asymmetries: control of data and digital platforms by a few multinational firms, intellectual property regimes, and the unequal burden of climate change on poorer countries.

Criticisms:

• They overstate core-periphery rigidity and underplay internal factors: class structure, state capacity and institutions.
• They cannot explain the rise of East Asian newly industrialised economies or China's manufacturing growth, nor India's services-led growth.
• Modernisation and capability approaches (Rostow, Sen) stress internal reform and human development, though they in turn ignore external constraints.

Dependency theory therefore remains useful for global inequality, but only as one lens alongside internal analysis.

(c) Growing salience of ethnicity in the contemporary world

Ethnicity has not faded with modernisation; it is increasingly a political resource. Instrumentalists see elites mobilising ethnic identity for power and resources, against the primordialist view of fixed bonds.

Illustrations:

• Ethnic conflict and genocide: the Rohingya in Myanmar; the Sri Lankan civil war.
• Autonomy and identity movements in India's North-East, such as Naga and Bodo assertions.
• Nativist and anti-immigrant politics in Western democracies, and the backlash against multiculturalism.
• Diaspora politics and transnational ethnic networks.

Globalisation has not produced homogenisation: competition for resources, migration and instant communication often strengthen ethnic boundaries.