Feminist Perspectives on Basic Income

Eva Cox
Additional contact information
Eva Cox: University of Technology Sydney

Chapter 4 in Implementing a Basic Income in Australia, 2019, pp 69-85 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Feminist claims for equality have, for too long, been defined by dominant male criteria and values, which fail to recognise the high level of unpaid contributions made by women. Current debate on the provision of an ‘unearned’ Basic Income (BI) offers a rare opportunity to address intransigent gender pay and status gaps. Western societies’ long industrial history of paid work served to increase the established gender divide by only valuing people by their earned/owned income. There are increasingly relevant arguments for a BI as demand for paid workers diminishes. If universal, this type of payment should acknowledge the value of unpaid work time contributions, now provided mainly by women but, hopefully in the future, by more men. It would address the income inequities created by unpaid women being the main providers of services, as well as being underpaid for commercialised similar roles. Therefore, feminist lenses are required to devise more appropriate versions of the future, which are not limited by masculinised viewpoints. These alternate viewpoints return value to current unpaid social roles and contributions to citizenship that are not dependent on paid roles and can devise payments to match.

Keywords: Gender wage gap; Universal social dividend (USD); Income entitlements; Social security reform; Feminist policy; Gender equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:etbchp:978-3-030-14378-7_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783030143787

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-14378-7_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().