The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability benefit cuts affect all disabled people – there’s no doubt about that. They will plunge thousands into poverty, isolate individuals, and without the ability to fund their disability aids, care, or therapies, impact their independence, and this is true for those across the community. However, for disabled women and marginalised genders and their families, it’s critical to understand the ways that the cuts are even more of a threat.
To comprehend the context of the cuts as a gender issue, it must first be understood that disability itself is a feminist issue across the board. Women are more likely to be disabled, and often left undiagnosed or without the support they need for longer. It is also women who commonly bear the brunt of state underfunding.
DWP disability benefit cuts: women are providing more care
Just as women are more likely to perform household tasks and take on the burden of social reproduction – the unpaid and unseen work to keep society functioning – they are more likely to be providing care. Whilst social reproduction refers to a wider profile of tasks, without proper social care funding, the responsibility of care for disabled individuals often falls on the shoulders of families. Notably, this heavily primarily impacts women, who make up 59% of unpaid carers.
For families providing care themselves, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) can be what keeps them afloat, to make up the difference in funds where they are caring rather than working. This is particularly true because Carer’s Allowance is still criminally low, and still places limits on how many hours can be worked to top up funds, as well as often being tied to eligibility of other benefits.
In 2024, the Centre for Care found that the economic contribution of unpaid carers in the UK was £184 billion a year – whilst the combined NHS budget in 2021/22 was £189 billion. This makes unpaid care provision equivalent to a second NHS: to cut support to the bone to these families is shameful.
For many, the disability benefit cuts will push them even further away from employment due to having to provide further unpaid care, or stop their ability to undertake part-time work. It means the impact on employment rates may have the opposite effect to what Reeves intends. When the reasoning for the cuts supposedly surrounds boosting employment, this is absurd: the cuts are not only to benefits, but to gender equality.
The additional threats to disabled women
For disabled women and marginalised genders, the disability benefit cuts also pose additional threats. Disabled women and marginalised genders are more than twice more likely to experience domestic abuse, and the cuts mean that these individuals are much less likely to be able to leave such a situation without access to funds.
In particular, disabled women and marginalised genders are more likely to experience economic abuse, and are four times more likely than their non-disabled peers to have a partner or ex-partner stop them, or try to stop them, accessing benefit payments that they or their children are entitled to receive.
Similarly, disabled women are over three times more likely to have a partner or ex-partner refuse to give child support or maintenance (or pay it unreliably) when they can afford to pay it normally. For many, PIP or similar benefits are a lifeline that keep themselves and their children out of poverty.
290,000 of children in poverty are living in families on PIP, and children living in a family with a disabled person are more likely to be in poverty than those without. This shows the further devastating impact for families, and particularly the women within them, who are bearing the burden of care and labour much more heavily.
It is fundamentally reprehensible for the chancellor to allow these cuts to have such impacts across vulnerable populations, and leave those who are multiply marginalised behind, in search of ‘savings’. While the government’s argument that they have inherited a difficult financial position is true, the reality is that this is not the only way they can fix that. Hitting disabled people, and particularly women and marginalised people the hardest, is something utterly unnecessary.
The disability benefit cuts must be seen intersectionally
It’s key for the cuts to be understood from an intersectional lens, and to be aware of the double burden these changes will have on women and those of marginalised genders.
Similarly, it must be acknowledged that those who are also marginalised by their race will be more heavily impacted, and are often more likely to experience some of the issues discussed in this article. This includes living with certain conditions such as autoimmune diseases, and being less likely to receive needed painkillers and support.
Disabled Black and brown women will also be hit harder by the disability benefit cuts. They experience the additional burden of racism that is often seen in the medical and benefit system, as well as lower standards of living than both their non-disabled or white peers.
When discussing the cuts and advocating against them, we must understand this as not isolated to disability: this is an issue that feminists and those working in gender equality must also be a part of pushing back on.
Featured image via the Canary
