Blackwell Reference Online

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The earner–carer model is a fundamentally gender egalitarian welfare state approach, which assumes that men and women equally engage in both caregiving and paid employment ( Gornick & Meyers 2003 ). Welfare state structures always rest on gendered assumptions about men's and women's roles in the family and workplace. Through social policies, such gender ideologies reflect but also reinforce supposed roles of men and women as citizens, workers, and carers. The dominant vision of the western welfare state during the twentieth century was the “male breadwinner–female caregiver” or “family wage” model ( Sainsbury 1999 ). According to this model, families were presumed to be composed of a man working outside the home, a woman providing care within the home, and children. In order for this model to operate effectively, men needed to earn a wage large enough to support all of the members of this family. The welfare state would only intervene to replace the male breadwinner's wage in case of unemployment, disability, sickness, or old age, or occasionally to support women's caretaking within the home ( Fraser 1994 ). However, by the late twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that the male breadwinner model, which had never been accurate for most working-class and poor families, was no longer tenable for even middle-class families – both because few jobs pay enough to support ... log in or subscribe to read full text