Good for women? Advantages and risks of Basic income from a gender perspective

• Autores: Elgarte, Julieta
• Año de publicación: 2006
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: documento de conferencia
• Fuente: 11th Basic Income European Network Congress; Cape Town, Sudáfrica, 2-4 de noviembre de 2006
• Materia: Filosofía
• Institución: Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación

The purpose of this paper is to present a gender analysis of a universal basic income (henceforth, UBI), its aim being to assess UBI's performance in overcoming or softening the main injustices suffered by women given their distinct position in society. By UBI I mean an unconditional income paid by a government to each citizen or permanent resident from the cradle to the grave, its level only varying according to age (with lower UBIs for children being paid to their mothers or main carers). A central element in women's distinctive position in society is the gendered division of labour. While men tend to specialize in paid "productive" labour (regarded as masculine and to which social recognition is attached), women tend to specialize in unpaid "reproductive" labour (regarded as feminine and seldom recognized as work, let alone as being as valuable as paid labour). Women are housewives or double shifters and expected to be so; while men are breadwinners who do little housework and caring work, and this too is expected from them. The fact that women are seen and behave as having (exclusive or main) responsibility for socially useful yet unpaid and misrecognized household and caring work has several adverse consequences for women. The most immediate and apparent is deprivation of a (livable and dependable) independent income while living with a (male) partner, and grave risk of poverty after a breakup or death of partner, especially when children are involved. More "immaterial" consequences due to the misrecognition of traditionally female work are the lower status of women and their lower chances to achieve self-esteem, the former being linked to such tangible consequences as increased rates of violence against women, while the latter affects women's ability to develop and sustain a life plan. Introducing a universal basic income in this context could have both positive and negative effects on women's situation. In what follows, I shall expose the ways in which I think basic income could achieve greater fairness to women (section one), and the ways it could work to the detriment of women's interests (section two). Finally, I shall assess alternative arrangements to see if they could do better (section three). I shall argue that while the introduction of a UBI in the present context could have some important undesirable effects from a gender perspective, these could be mitigated by side-arrangements accompanying the UBI. Furthermore, I shall argue that alternatives such as a homemaker's wage -intended to make women's difference from men less costly- or free and easily available high quality child and elderly care -intended to discharge women from their caring responsibilities so as to allow them to be men's equals in the labour market- have deeper flaws.
Fil: Elgarte, Julieta. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina.