When adults are employed and at the same time bear the main responsibility for raising and caring for children as well as looking after the household, this can be described as a double burden. As women have been significantly more affected by this constellation historically, currently and systemically, the term double burden arose in the context of political, sociological and historical debates about women's employment. The term was only spoken of when the requirements (e.g. time structures) of domestic, demand-oriented and outside-the-home, paid work began to diverge with the implementation of industrial capitalist production conditions (Ostner, 1983, p. 57). While the term was historically used in regard to consequences for husbands, after 1945 the burden on women from various forms of work, paid work and housework, increasingly came into focus (ibid.). As a result, so-called time budget studies in the former Federal Republic of Germany (Ex-BRD) regularly examined how much time working women and men spent on raising children, caring for them and doing housework. The trend that emerged has remained the same for decades: women's employment rates do not align with men's time spent raising children and doing housework.

In the GDR, both labour and family policy were aimed at working women. At the same time, employment was also the benchmark for women's equality, as enshrined in the GDR's State Treaty. However, it was also the case in the GDR that child-rearing and housework were, to a certain extent, the primary responsibility of women. In sociological terms, this meant that a doubly gendered socialisation, i.e. taking place within the production sector and private reproduction sector (cf. Becker-Schmidt, 2003), was also de-thematised in the GDR. Thus, the GDR socialism in practice had not been able to solve gender inequality, as it did not develop past a bisected equality (cf. Baader/Koch/Neumann, 2023), in which the double burden still primarily affected women. Marxist theoretical work within the GDR did not question either the naturalisation of women's responsibility for private reproduction, nor the social hierarchisation of production and reproduction.