Framework controls the size of the UBI - a gendered lens pushes a UBI to adequate levels rather than minimally sufficient ones because it recognizes that unpaid labor is necessary to make the minimal income sufficient.

Adequacy is an essential element of the right to social security. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights explained that: Benefits, whether in cash or in kind, must be adequate in amount and duration in order that everyone may realize his or her rights to family protection and assistance, an adequate standard of living and adequate access to health care … States parties must also pay full respect to the principle of human dignity contained in the preamble of the Covenant, and the principle of non-discrimination, so as to avoid any adverse effect on the levels of benefits and the form in which they are provided. 31 Adequate social protection that is attentive to gender must ensure that income support takes account of the position of women within households, women’s unpaid work and care obligations, women’s lower earnings and savings, and women’s position in the workforce which is often informal and precarious. What constitutes adequacy and whether there are minimum core levels of provision required by rights has been debated within the field of social and economic rights .32 In addition, valid concerns have been raised with a human rights emphasis on sufficiency leading to efforts to tackle poverty without also ensuring distributive equality.33 A substantive equality approach to social protection rights requires structural responses to systemic inequality via social, economic and political reconfigurations that lead to fundamental changes to gender, class and other relations.34 It thus requires policies aimed at overcoming inequality rather than just providing minimum levels of poverty relief. This idea of adequacy should be central to the human rights lens used to consider questions of the theory, design and politics of a basic income. In addition, adequacy must be understood as a global issue since affordability and economic choices facing states require international cooperation and assistance, as required by the ICESCR.35