A basic income would not solve gender inequality – it is insufficient to overcome social norms and structures. Belgium empirically proves.

Basic income seeks to support our ambitions, without dictating what these should be. It makes the assumption that the power differential would be sufficiently shifted by the individualised payment to women for them to negotiate different domestic arrangements, and that norms would be flexible enough to accommodate a greater—and less gendered—range of ‘life options’. The experience of the Belgium time credit scheme does not bode well in this regard. The time credit scheme allowed people a limited amount of paid time away from work, for any purpose. It was a seemingly gender-neutral scheme. However, it has seen extremely gendered use in practice. Mothers (but not fathers) in Belgium have overwhelmingly used their time credit account to care for children, in effect as an extension of parenting leave (Deven & Merla, 2019). Perhaps another example is the completely gender-neutral parental leave in Sweden: despite there being individual parallel rights for two parents, gendered practice endures, with women using the lion’s share of leave. These experiences suggest that for a basic income to have an impact on the gendered practices of parenting, further thought would have to be given to how to achieve that specific goal. Gender equality is not a primary aim of a basic income, but it is a hoped for secondary consequence. Parental leave scholarship suggests that gender equality is most efficiently a consequence when it is an explicit policy aim, but that, as described above, even then it might fail to materialise. Perhaps considering the distinction between gender equality and gender equity is helpful here. Gender equity is the value-laden concept that stems from the socially constructed expectations of female and male behaviour, which is based both on gender stratification and gender roles (Fraser, 1994). Gender equity is thus based on the experience of fairness and whose values are valuable, whereas gender equality would be easier defined by quantitative measures of gendered division of time and rewards of paid and unpaid work. Fraser (1994) would say that gender equality depends on female behaviour becoming the norm. Basic income has the potential to change the meaning of gender equity, either reversing back towards traditional gendered expectations, or alternatively liberating us from such stratifications and norms that limit our behaviour. There are many factors in hypothesising is such outcomes, but it seems clear that a basic income set at too low a payment rate would reverse development by necessity. Firestone (1970, p. 1) observed that: Sex class is so deep as to be invisible…the reaction of the common man, woman, and child—That? Why you can’t change that!....This gut reaction, the assumption about changing a fundamental biological condition, is an honest one….That so profound a change cannot be easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g., “political,” is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. 8 As with other big political movements, the basic income project does not appear to be ‘big enough’, remaining relatively conservative and essentialist with regard to its understanding of gender equalities. Perhaps it is precisely because a basic income would be such a revolutionary expansion of freedom, that this core unchallenged gender binary worldview is all the more disappointing. An independent source of income is a good start on the road to freedom, but, it is not a sufficient condition to challenge the persistent norms and prevailing gendered structures. To the extent that gender is based on norms and structures, which have to be challenged, basic income, as a gender-neutral idea that hides gender, could be argued to be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition to see female behaviour becoming the norm, thus leading us towards gender equality (Fraser, 1994).