Gender Inequality, Social Reproduction and the Universal Basic Income

Abstract

Despite extensive attention being paid to the effects of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) on society at large, there has been little analysis on the relationship between gender inequality and UBI. The purpose of this article is first to reflect on the feminist arguments in favour of UBI and then to examine some of these points by also considering other available policies. By looking into the role of women’s work in both productive and reproductive activities, it is argued that UBI should not be disregarded as a social policy. However, its transformative capacity to empower women and to strengthen their role in society should not be overestimated. In order to address this gap, policy makers should address misconceptions around gender norms and acknowledge the multiple forms of women’s work across the social relations of production and reproduction.

Social Policy Without Growth: Moving Towards Sustainable Welfare States

“…Yet many also argued for an expansion of UBS: that is, in the Swedish context, beyond health and care and especially in the areas of transport, digitalisation and food provision. Complementing previous contributions expressing the tensions and contradictions between UBI and UBS (see, for the different perspectives, Lombardozzi, 2020, andCoote andPercy, 2020), this points towards a demand for exploring the institutional and financial conditions that would allow combinations of UBI and UBS to function as provisioning systems of sustainable needs satisfiers and how such mixes may look.…”

Poverty line income and fisheries subsidies in developing country fishing communities

“…At the country level, digital technology is making it easier to deliver cash transfers to rural recipients, which typify a large proportion of fishers (e.g., [77]). In terms of alleviating poverty, studies have shown that other social assistance initiatives, such as universal basic income (i.e., unconditional monetary transfers from the government to every individual in a society) can help stave off poverty for households at the margins of society [78] and address existing economic and social inequalities [79,80]. An important point here is that for any subsidy reform, there is a need to carefully consider tradeoffs, especially the impact on vulnerable groups [45].…”

Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: the Social Reproduction of Households and Labor in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…In the Global North, societal needs have been traditionally addressed by a centralized system of welfare provision managed by the state, which decades of austerity have dismantled. Welfare supports women: health, care, and education are services that, in the absence of a public system of provision, are either bought in the market or unbearably subsidized by women's reproductive and emotional work (Lombardozzi 2020). As discussed, the COVID-19 crisis has put an enormous strain on society, and a decommodified system of basic services provision would hold the potential to address gender, race, and class inequalities because it would bypass the market ideology that created the conditions for the disadvantaged and disempowered to face barriers to access these services in the first place.…”