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Science as an object of knowledge has been a central concern of the social sciences since the first decades of the 20th century. However, the object itself is neither static nor unchanging, and has been transformed over time. In recent decades, the innovative approach of gender studies has gained considerable ground in the social studies of science. While some of them have paid attention to the relations of the professional field with the family sphere and have investigated the ways in which structural factors of the life course play an important role in research careers, there are still few theoretical and empirical contributions that think of science as productive work highly articulated with social reproduction. Although this axis of enquiry is still incipient in social studies of science, it is consolidated within the social sciences hand in hand with labour studies and feminist economics. Within the framework of the important contributions made, this paper seeks to review the existing literature and a conceptual approach to the understanding of scientific work and its articulations with reproductive work, taking gender as a category of analysis. The paper is organised in four parts: in the first section we will review the critiques of the concept of work inherited from modernity and we will focus on thinking of science as work with specificities; in the second section we will address the processes of social reproduction in terms of the articulation of spheres; in the third section we will consider the study of gender and science; in the fourth section, we will describe the way in which this conceptual proposal operates in the empirical study carried out; finally, we will present a systematisation of the concepts developed throughout the paper and a conceptual approach to their approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]