20 - Poverty and Inequality: Austerity, Welfare Reforms and Insecurity

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores how austerity-driven poverty and inequality in the Global North impact women and mothers, and the engagement with the topic in some of the contemporary economic geography literature. The link is made between these policies, the values underlying them and the impact they have on poorer communities, as well as the connection to invisible care work and how it increases exposure to the risk of poverty. The chapter draws on research into mothers’ experiences of deprivation and inequality to illustrate how gendered care work and caring is more than incidental to ‘the economic’, how it facilitates and precedes it. This is particularly relevant in the context of the paradox of recent prolonged austerity measures, which have reframed choice and depleted opportunities, reconfigured community capacities and diminished agency. The peripheralization of care work in the field of economic geography echoes its invisibility – in understanding economy and of society in the field it is seen as incidental and not preceding (see also Chapter 27 in this volume).

The invisibility of socially reproductive labour is one of the core issues at the heart of the gendered inequalities women experience in contemporary UK society, one that drives higher rates of poverty and experiences of deprivation among women. This experience is consistently demonstrated by university research and by the government's own data (DWP, 2019). As feminist geographers in the recent past have indicated, there is an ongoing need to include formal and informal care work in discussions of work, the economy and value, so often notable in its absence (Strauss and Meehan, 2015; Teeple Hopkins, 2015; Horton, 2022; see also Chapters 6 and 24 in this volume). This need is more urgent than ever, as we see diminishing redistribution and rising geographic inequality. The field of economic geography can benefit from more complex understanding of what constitutes ‘the economic’. By attending to the impacts of deprivation, poverty and inequality, economic geography can incorporate more completely a fuller range of types of work, the role of social reproduction, and account for how care work plays a central role in sustaining the life of communities, families and individual workers.

In the first section of this chapter, I discuss a range of economic geography literature on poverty and inequality, focusing on Western states with liberal economic and social policies.