Gendered Images of Welfare?: The Representation of Women and Gender in Welfare Speeches in the UK House of Commons 1979-2019

This paper presents findings from the first phase of the ESRC-funded project Gendered Images of Welfare: Gender, Politics and 40 Years of British Welfare Policy. This two-year mixed-methods project aims to explore the drivers behind the gendered effects of welfare reform over the past 40 years. Over this period all major political parties have attempted to reform the welfare state; however, from Thatcher’s neo-liberal reforms in the 1980s, through New Labour’s intensification of welfare-to-work, to austerity from 2010, this has failed to adapt in a way which provides adequate social protection for women. Indeed, since 2010 women have lost significantly more than men on average, with women on the lowest incomes, disabled women, Black and minority ethnic women and lone-parent households losing the most. This project asks how this has come about through an analysis of how women and gender have been represented in welfare debate and whether this has mattered for gendered welfare policies and outcomes. Findings from phase one, presented here, focus on the representation of women and gender in political welfare discourse. These are based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of c.120,000 welfare-related speeches from the UK House of Commons 1979-2019. A dictionary approach, using a pre-defined list of welfare-related terms, was used to explore whether, over time: there has been a de-gendering of welfare discourse (helping to legitimise disproportionately gendered impacts); there has been a shift in whether gender is referenced implicitly or explicitly; the proportion of speeches explicitly referencing women has declined; and women are more or less likely to be referenced in relation to their family roles/responsibilities. Findings from topic modelling (of all gender-related speeches within the corpus) are also presented, providing the contexts in which gender and women have been spoken about over time, including variation by party and sex of MP. In doing so, this paper makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the substantive and constitutive representation of gender and women in this deeply gendered policy area, paving the way for further insights into the relationship between political representation and gendered policy outcomes later in this project.