Work, welfare and gender inequalities: an analysis of activation strategies for partnered women in the UK, Australia and Denmark

In industrialized countries women have increasingly become a target group for active labour market policies, or ‘activation’. However, to date, the burgeoning literature on activation has tended to overlook its link with the highly gendered nature of welfare. This article presents the first comparative analysis of activation approaches for partnered women in the UK, Australia and Denmark. Three core arguments are put forward that emphasize how the ideas (causal claims, beliefs and assumptions) articulated by key policy actors were crucial to both the construction and delivery of activation policies. First, women’s differentiated access to benefits directly conflicted with the focus on the individual within activation policies. Second, activation was premised upon paid labour, embodying ideational assumptions about the meaning of (paid) work, in turn devaluing caring labour. Third, the ‘problematization’ of women outside the labour market resulted in their gendered ‘processing’ through the social security and activation systems.