UBI alone fails to redress gender inequality

Basic income as a form of universal and unconditional social assistance has significant appeal to many groups of women currently frustrated by punitive and patchy systems.110 It offers unencumbered access to income for unpaid carers and precarious workers, groups that are women dominated and face challenges under many social security systems. These groups may struggle to meet activation requirements such as job seeking while balancing caring obligations; and may also be burdened with responsibilities that are sometimes attached via conditions to cash transfers.111 These arguments suggest that in some contexts a basic income will enhance equality and rights to social protection by bringing poor women and carers into the social protection fold without additional demands being placed on them. 112 But this alone will not undo the structural disadvantage that these groups face and will not necessarily be transformative in altering the gendered responsibilities for care; nor will it necessarily remove all the barriers to, and within, the labour market facing women and carers. This suggests that a substantive gender equality approach could endorse a basic income if it offered more to women in a given society than already existed. But it would also require further social policy measures to redress the sexual division of labour at work and home. These changes are unlikely to flow automatically from a basic income where structural inequalities along gender lines are embedded in society. Other measures will be needed, whether through state provision, market regulation or norm realignments or combinations of these to spread caring in more gender equal ways. A basic income would need to sit alongside state support to realise other interdependent human rights including health care, housing, social services and worker rights, themselves developed in accordance with substantive gender equality.