Consequences justify epistemology. We both agree feminist values are important. Rather than focusing the debate on abstract goals of gender justice, it should center on whether basic income would benefit the most vulnerable women.

There is no clear way to settle those discussions, but I offer three comments to conclude this conversation on gender and UBI. First, it seems that the outcome of this debate now largely depends more on empirics than on values (Robeyns 2008). The feminists discussed in this section roughly agree that gendered social norms must be challenged and that care work must be revalued, but they disagree in their hypotheses about what would happen under UBI. This disagreement sets a research agenda for those experimenting with UBI throughout the world. They must find out, for instance, what the precise combined gender and labor effects of UBI would be in different institutional contexts. Since many jobs are alienating and precarious, it is not clear that finding a drop in employment rate among women would necessarily be regrettable, all things considered. We would need to find out more than just how many women are likely to drop out of the labor market. As Weeks (2011, p. 124) points out, “slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.” We would need to know precisely which women are likely to give up which jobs, and to do what. To help move this conversation forward, empiricists must also look at the concern that UBI would contribute to the defunding of public goods and find out how reasonable it really is. This would require also studying the framing of various UBI proposals and their reception (to find out whether progressive proposals are more popular than regressive ones, for instance).

A second comment has to do with heterogeneity among women. It is important for this debate to start from an assessment of the situation of the most vulnerable women and whether UBI would benefit them, rather than focusing the debate on whether UBI can further the more abstract goal of gender justice. For many women, lack of formal employment is actually not the main problem. The problem is rather the inability to perform the care work they want to perform without being stigmatized or condemned to a life of poverty or dependence. For some women, the problem is overwork—that they are combining several low-paying jobs to support their children and end up left with too little time to spend with them. Too often socially invisible, many domestic workers are bound to abusive employers by a lack of exit options. Lacking the economic security needed to have exit options also makes sex workers more vulnerable to abuse. The Sex Workers Open University (2017) in fact demands UBI on the basis that “[i]f every person in the UK was entitled to a universal basic income, no one would be pushed by absolute poverty into selling sex.” The conversation on whether UBI should be endorsed on grounds of gender justice should be dependent, at least to some extent, on what UBI would do to empower the women who are currently most economically insecure and most vulnerable to domination.