Gendered Images of Welfare: Gender, Politics and 40 Years of British Welfare Policy

In the 1980s, feminist scholars were predicting the ‘coming welfare wars’ would be ‘wars about, even against, women’ – with the fiscal crisis of the state coinciding with the rise in female headed households and the feminisation of poverty (Fraser, 1989, p.144). Since then, the pressures predicted have played out and women have, indeed, borne the brunt. Welfare reforms have repeatedly failed to adapt to changing gender norms and realities, resulting in increasing gender inequality. This project will explain why this has happened and how to improve things going forward. Post-war welfare states were modelled on the assumption of male-breadwinner families – a model that has become increasingly out-of-step with the way people live their lives. This crumbling gender order (Fraser, 1994) is creating new types of families and recipients. Over the past 40 years in the UK there have been attempts by all major political parties to reform the welfare state; however, from Thatcher’s neo-liberal reforms in the 1980s, through the intensification of welfare-to-work measures under New Labour, to austerity from 2010, this has failed to adapt in a way which provides adequate social protection for recipients, especially women (EHRC, 2018, WBG, 2024). Indeed, reforms since 2010 have seen women lose 75% more than men on average, with women on the lowest incomes, disabled women, Black and minority ethnic women and lone parent households (88% of which are lone mother households) losing the most (WBG, 2024). This project asks how this has come about. There has been focus on analysing the differential impact of welfare reform and austerity on women and men in the UK and elsewhere (Rubery, 2015, Rummery, 2016, WBG, 2024), as well as explaining why women have been hit hardest – highlighting their disproportionate reliance on welfare benefits and services due to the gender-based division of paid and unpaid work, including care (Lewis, 2009, Pascall, 2012, WBG, 2019b). This project moves beyond this: instead, it explores the drivers behind the gendered effects of welfare reform over the past 40 years in the UK. Employing mixed methods analysis of welfare speeches, as well as qualitative analysis of welfare policies and their effects from 1979 to 2019, the objectives of the project are to: provide an over-time analysis of the extent to which, how, and by whom, gender and women are represented in welfare debate in the UK; analyse whether this has mattered for gendered welfare policies and outcomes; and develop recommendations for promoting gender equality through welfare discourse and policy. The involvement of the Women’s Budget Group (WBG) as Project Partner will maximise the societal impact of the project. Meanwhile, skills development resulting from collaboration with the PcL will facilitate the PL’s transition to an independent researcher, and the project overall will establish the PL’s reputation as an expert on gender and the welfare state. In moving beyond counting the cost of the impact of welfare reform on women – towards an understanding of the drivers behind this and how we can mitigate these – the project will be of interest to those working in the fields of gender and politics, welfare studies, social policy and policy analysis. It will also offer important insights for policymakers and organisations campaigning for gender equality on the processes necessary to promote this through welfare policy in the UK and elsewhere.