If the UBI is set too low, it will reinforce gendered work stereotypes by making it easier to rely on breadwinners while women stay home.

McLean (2015, p. 2) notes that ‘basic Income is in some ways a microcosm of wider feminist controversies regarding how the state can recognise the unpaid work women largely do without reinforcing existing inequalities, also known as Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma (Lister, 1995; Pateman, 1988)’. Indeed, feminists involved with policy making sometimes find themselves falling into one of two camps: that of a more pragmatic approach and that of a more idealistic approach. The former aim to take the situation they see at a current time in front of them, such as mothers doing most of the childcare, and to support women in that situation. The latter might rather take issue with the root imbalance of this situation and aim to create a new situation where fathers are doing more childcare. Arguably, many aspects of the current Swedish welfare state are more radically ambitious than the idea of basic income in that it seeks change to the gendered division of both paid and unpaid work. The implementation of a basic income would be gender-neutral and so, in theory, fathers and mothers would have the same support. In practice, however, and especially given the likely low level of basic income, this policy might have the (unintended) consequence of encouraging a return to the breadwinner model of parenting, with one parent better able to stay at home, but another parent still needing to remain firmly attached to the labour market. Once again, we have a political movement, which has not fully embraced the challenge from radical feminism to move us beyond the ‘fundamental biological condition’ as observed by Shulamith Firestone (1970, p. 1) towards an equal distribution of care work.