A UBI will not reinforce existing gendered roles in labor – it is the greatest step toward eliminating those roles based on caregiving.

Most importantly, basic income indirectly compensates care and society’s other unpaid work without reinforcing the existing gendered distribution of labour or the primacy of the public sphere by equating care with work. Although basic income is often characterised as allowing people not to work, its most radical feature in comparison to current forms of welfare state redistribution is that it allows people to work without losing benefits immediately at a punitively high effective rate of taxation, which they do in the ‘poverty trap’ effect of conditional or means-tested benefits. Because of its universality and its unconditionality, basic income preserves work incentives; at low levels of income it is not a substitute for earned income, but a complement, and operates as a wage subsidy (Van Parijs, 2001). This means that low-wage jobs, or the volunteer work that can provide some of the non-financial benefits of paid employment, for both the individual and society, can become feasible in a way they are not under conditional or means-tested forms of redistribution. Together with other strategies to increase the flexibility of paid employment, basic income promotes the ability of individuals to choose the mix of paid work, care and leisure that best meets their needs at any given time (Roebyns, 2000). Because no one – man or woman – has to choose between being a ‘worker’ or a ‘caregiver’ to receive income, basic income has the most potential of any redistributive scheme to transform over time the relation of both men and women to the provision of care and to the world of paid employment.