Introduction

Women have a marginalised position in the UK social security system. This ongoing disadvantaged position is related to the dominant gendered concept of citizenship, which is based around masculine activities, attributes and interactions with the paid labour market. To create a more inclusive citizenship framework, some feminists have argued that citizenship needs to be redefined to recognise the importance of unpaid care (Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Sevenhuijsen, 2000; Tronto, 2001; Pateman, 2005). This would entail the implementation of social security policies that support parents financially so they can carry out unpaid care (Pateman, 2005; Gillies, 2007; Lynch and Walsh, 2009). However, in the UK and beyond, there has been an increasing application of conditionality, which may work against feminist aims to create citizenship frameworks that promote unpaid care as a valid societal contribution (see Chapter Two). To investigate concerns that the conditionality within Universal Credit fails to recognise and value unpaid care (Deacon and Patrick, 2011; Whitworth and Griggs, 2013; Davies, 2015; Cain, 2016), this chapter explores how, and why, the conditionality for lead carers within Universal Credit affects women's roles and responsibilities regarding unpaid care over time. The chapter begins by outlining the participants’ caring responsibilities. It continues by discussing the extent to which caring responsibilities were taken into account during the Universal Credit claim. It then explores the effects of the conditionality within Universal Credit on the mothers’ caring responsibilities. The final section discusses the mothers’ commitment to unpaid care and their views on whether unpaid care is valued within the Universal Credit system.

Overview of the participants’ caring responsibilities

Women remain disproportionately responsible for unpaid care despite their entrance in significant numbers into the paid labour market (Lewis, 2009; Orloff, 2009; Boyer et al, 2017; Jupp et al, 2019). The gendered imbalance in responsibility for unpaid care was strongly evident across the sample. At the first wave of interviews, the fathers had regular contact time with their children in only 5 of the 21 single-parent families. For the rest of the single-parent families, there was either no contact time at all or irregular contact between the fathers and children. In some cases, contact with the father was not possible – for example, due to previous domestic abuse (experienced by six of the mothers) or because the father lived far away.