The Gender Impact of Social Protection Policies: A Critical Review of the Evidence

† This paper is based on a background paper the authors wrote in 2012 for UN Women, entitled ‘Gender and Social Policies: A Literature Review.’

Abstract

Over the course of the neoliberal era, social protection policies have been transformed dramatically; these changes have had profound gender implications. Since the early 1980s, welfare state regimes around the world have shifted away from ‘universalism' towards ‘targeting'. More recently, there has been a further shift—especially in industrialized countries—away from the male-breadwinner to the adult worker model. Despite the progressivity implied by this latter shift, important issues of gender inequality remain unresolved (even in Nordic countries where levels of gender equity are higher than elsewhere). This paper presents a critical review of social protection policies, examined from a gender perspective. The analysis presents a conceptual framework on gender and the welfare state, and examines the experience of major industrialized and developing countries in engendering social policy. In particular, this paper provides a careful examination of care-related programs, since this domain is particularly important to understanding the gendered effects of social protection policies. Finally, the gendered implications of the global crisis and subsequent policy measures are examined.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Social Protection
• Care
• Crisis

JEL Codes:

• B54
• H53
• P16

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

† This paper is based on a background paper the authors wrote in 2012 for UN Women, entitled ‘Gender and Social Policies: A Literature Review.’

¹In the past decade, the recognition that market failures can be at the root of undesirable economic outcomes led to the establishment of the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ (PWC). While the PWC still favors liberalization and privatization, state intervention and good institutions are important complements to the functioning of markets. In line with this view, the discourse of the PWC emphasizes the social consequences of economic policies, and the need to respond to market failures with social safety nets. In the discourse, the PWC has also expressed concern for the issue of gender inequality in developing economies, but supporting a narrow interpretation that women's subordination is due to the persistence of traditional norms and customs. In this view, access to capital and market institutions represents the primary route to promote women's empowerment and gender equity. Thus, the practice of the Bretton Woods institutions has not significantly departed from the conventional neoliberal view, which hints at the existence of a clear gap between anti-poverty rhetoric and actions in the functioning of the World Bank and the IMF (Bergeron 2003; Fine and Jomo 2005; Gabor 2010; Hassim and Razavi 2006; Kuiper and Barker 2006; Weisbrot et al. 2009).

²If middle-class and upper-class households have access to market services or the informal services of domestic workers, poorer households cannot likely afford them.

³The driver of this change in thinking was the establishment of the capability associated with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This framework became the official paradigm of the United Nations Development Program (Nussbaum 2003; Sen 1999).

⁴The term ‘double burden’ describes the situation of women who perform paid work in the labor market, but who nevertheless shoulder the primary burden of caretaking and work within the household.

⁵See Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) for the most prominent welfare state classification in the literature, in which welfare states are grouped as social democratic, liberal and conservative.

⁶The male breadwinner model became the dominant approach to social protection in the second half of the 20th century; the degree of application of this model, however, varied across countries, depending on how strongly women were considered as mothers and caregivers with respect to being considered as working citizens equal to men. Following Lewis (1992, 2001), the historical evidence shows that the breadwinner model in Europe ranged from the ‘strong' case of the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands to the ‘moderate' case of France, and to the ‘weak' case of Sweden.

⁷The process through which care increasingly becomes part of the market system is referred to by Lewis and Giullari (2005) as ‘commodification of care.’

⁸The adult worker model became dominant in the 1990s even though there are differences in the size and composition of the labor force participation rate both across countries and within each country (across education levels and occupation groups) (O'Connor 2013).

⁹‘Daddy quota’ refers to a policy that assigns a share of parental leave to the father, and the family as a whole loses this portion if the father does not use it. In comparison to traditional father's parental leave programs, this program is more innovative by providing incentives to fathers to share the responsibility of infant care with the mother.

¹⁰With the introduction of individual taxation, families with a single earner paid higher taxes, hence facing a penalty for having a traditional housewife.

¹¹Social protection in the US is provided through the following three channels: (a) employers (including employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement plans; paid days off for vacation time, sick days, and parental leave; minimum wages and safety and health conditions; and workers’ compensation for injuries that occur while engaging in paid work. Tax policies and employee contributions are used to reduce the costs of these benefits for employers); (b) employer- and employee-contributed social insurance (including safety net policies for the unemployed, elderly, and severely disabled; (c) means-tested, government-provided assistance for individuals and families with very low income (Albelda 2011).

¹²Before the New Deal, there were individual programs known as the ‘Widow's Pension’ run by the individual states. Not all states provided cash assistance to single mothers. It was with the New Deal that the responsibility shifted from the state level to the federal government (Abramovitz 2006).

¹³‘Workfare’ refers to the combination of work with welfare and is the popular term used to refer to Clinton's policy change in 1996 that set formal work as a requirement to receive welfare benefits.

¹⁴It should be noted that HIV/AIDS and globalization create challenges for the extended family system, which is traditionally the main source of social security in Africa. This makes the provision of effective social protection extremely important (Osai-Boateng 2011).

¹⁵In Asia, it is typically men who occupy leading positions in the economy (Cho et al. 2004).

¹⁶For example, while Iran and Jordan has the patriarchal welfare state regime, Tunisia is the closest example to a more modern and woman-friendly regime of gender/social policy (Karshenas and Moghadam 2006).

¹⁷Affordability of childcare is a particularly important issue for women from low-income groups. For this reason, childcare programs help increase the employment chances of those women by releasing the financial pressure of taking care of children.

¹⁸Pension credits are another form of care support program that also indirectly contributes to childcare support in Europe. Most continental European countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg, provide pension credit for care to family members. While credits for childcare are more common, Finland, Germany, Ireland, and the UK also provide pension credits for caring for an elderly, ill, or incapacitated person (Leitner 2001).

¹⁹Familization refers to the case in which care takes place inside the family and is performed by women.

²⁰The use of cash for care at home declined over the 2000s and is now mostly used by low-educated, low-income immigrant mothers who are not part of the labor force (Bungum and Kvande 2013).

²¹De-familization refers to promoting women's employment and relieving them of the family care responsibilities through subsidies and public provisioning. Segregation of women in the public service sector, high women's employment in part-time jobs and a gender wage gap of 15 per cent are the major issues confronting Nordic countries in moving towards gender equity (Björnberg 2011).

²²The Federal Family and Medical Leave Act in the US guarantees eligible workers the right to 12 weeks unpaid leave. The states of California and New Jersey have their own paid family leave policies (Folbre 2014).

²³This finding for Greece contradicts the previous piece of evidence indicating that Greece has a low score for average pay per week of leave. The gender impact of this type of policy thus seems to be independent of the monetary contribution.

²⁴Transferable leave refers to provisions that allow transferring a share of the assigned leave between parents.

²⁵Both Cuba and Peru grant paternity leave to all male workers by law, while in Ecuador paternity leave is even a constitutional right. Venezuela provides the longest paternity leave in Latin America with 14 consecutive days granted from the day the child is born (Becerra-Moro 2011).

²⁶This is the major form of elderly care support in Italy in addition to the relatively smaller and less important care allowance scheme, which is means-tested and granted to elderly people at risk of institutionalization (Simonazzi 2009).

²⁷One of the objectives of this program was to encourage reproduction (and hence, address the country's aging crisis) by reducing the time women spent caring for the elderly.

²⁸The origins of the PACE program come from the model developed in San Francisco by On Lok Senior Health Services in 1973.

²⁹Most of the developing countries do not have well established elderly care programs that can be compared with the elderly care programs in place in industrialized countries.

³⁰This is particularly striking in countries characterized by high infant and child mortality rates and/or low female schooling (Sabarwal, Sinha and Buvinic 2009).

³¹According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) (2010), the service sector accounts for over 70 per cent of women's employment in most of the advanced countries, in Latin America and in the Caribbean.

³²The EU defines the ‘at-risk-of-poverty rate’ with reference to the availability of an income level below 60 per cent of the national median income after social transfers have been distributed.

³³In a paper written for UNICEF, Ortiz, Chai and Cummins (2011a) address how even the poorest countries can expand the fiscal space by adopting a combination of the following options: (a) re-allocation of public expenditure; (b) greater tax revenue through a change in tax policy; (c) increased international aid and income transfers; (c) use of wealth funds and/or excess foreign exchange reserves; (d) borrowing or restructuring accumulated debt; (e) adoption of an alternative macroeconomic framework in which employment and social goals have the priority over controlling inflation and fiscal deficit. In advanced countries, a change in taxation policy that includes higher tax rates on financial transactions and high incomes would help collect the required revenue, without substantially impacting on national debt.

³⁴In LDCs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, certainly the most compelling need is to increase farmers’ productivity (especially women farmers), which requires targeted public expenditure and assistance. Nonetheless, there is also urgency for investment in rural physical and social infrastructures, whose construction could employ both men and women, and would have a direct positive impact on women's well-being. Desirable projects would aim to improve access to fresh water and better sanitation, and to make available small bridges, feeder roads, upgraded traditional irrigation systems, ecological latrines, as well as services for children and home-based care for the sick, especially for households with members affected by HIV/AIDS (Agénor and Canuto 2012; Antonopoulos 2009; Seguino 2010).

³⁵Currently, more than 60 countries have adopted gender budget initiatives.

³⁶At the G20 London Summit in 2009, the G20 leaders committed to make available resources to help the poorest countries establish social protection schemes (European Union Delegation to the United Nations 2009). However, this promise has not translated into action by governments.

³⁷The Arab Spring, the growing rebellions in African countries and in other developing countries, the rising number of workers’ protests in China and the Occupy Wall Street movement are demonstrations that the legitimacy of the status quo is starting to be challenged (Ekine and Manji 2011; Wolff and Barsamian 2012).

³⁸The rise in inequality associated with the adoption of neoliberal policies constituted a prominent cause of the 2008/2009 economic crisis (Wolff 2013). Addressing inequality, including gender inequality, is thus an important component of the policy mix that is required to build a sustainable recovery.