Learning from Social Protection Experience: Reaching and Transforming Women’s Lives

Imagine a woman named Priya. She sells vegetables in a local market, working 12-hour days. She’s the primary caregiver for her two children and her elderly mother-in-law. Her income is unpredictable; a bad monsoon or a short illness can wipe out her meager savings. Now, imagine a new government program is launched-a “social protection” scheme. Will it actually help Priya? Or will it be another piece of paper, another set of rules designed for a life she doesn’t live?

This is the central challenge of social protection today. While these systems-which include everything from cash transfers and food rations to pensions and healthcare-are designed to protect people from risk and vulnerability, they often fail the very people who need them most: women. We have decades of experience with these programs, but learning from that experience requires us to ask some very tough, very specific questions about whether they are just patching holes or actually helping to build a more equal foundation.

Asking the right questions: A gendered look at social protection 🔗

For a long time, designing social protection was treated as a gender-neutral exercise. The assumption was, if you provide a benefit to a “household,” everyone in that household benefits equally. Experience has shown us this is dangerously false. To understand if a program is truly working, we need to apply a gendered analysis, which starts with three core questions.

1. Does it actually reach low-income working women? 🔗

This is the most fundamental question: access. A program might look great on paper, but low-income women, particularly those in the informal economy like Priya, face a unique set of barriers. They may lack official identification documents, which are often the first hurdle. They might not have a formal bank account in their own name.

Furthermore, program offices are often located in towns, requiring time and money for travel-luxuries a working mother cannot afford. Information about programs might be spread through male-dominated community meetings or digital platforms she can’t access. Simply put, a program that isn’t designed with these realities in mind will fail to reach its target.

2. Does it address their specific vulnerabilities? 🔗

Women’s and men’s lives are, on average, still structured very differently, leading to different vulnerabilities. Much of women’s work is unpaid and unrecognized-caring for children, the elderly, and the sick. This “care burden” is a massive economic vulnerability that traditional social protection often ignores.

For example, an unemployment benefit tied to formal employment history is useless to a woman who has spent her life in informal piece-rate work or unpaid care. Her primary risks might be a lack of childcare, poor maternal health services, or vulnerability to economic shocks that force her to pull a daughter out of school. A pension scheme that kicks in at age 65 offers no help for these immediate, gender-specific risks. The program must match the problem.

3. Does it tackle the underlying causes? 🔗

This is the hardest, and most important, question. It’s one thing to give Priya a cash handout when she’s sick (which is vital). It’s another thing entirely to change the conditions that *make* her so vulnerable in the first place. These underlying causes are the deep-seated social norms and structures that hold women back: unequal property rights, a disproportionate share of domestic work, limited access to education and skills training, and exclusion from financial systems.

A truly effective social protection system doesn’t just ask “How do we help Priya cope?” It asks, “How do we ensure Priya has the same power, resources, and opportunities as her male counterparts?”

The life jacket vs. learning to swim: Protective vs. transformative impact 🔗

This leads to a crucial distinction in how we evaluate social protection: its immediate (protective) impact versus its long-term (transformative) potential. We need both, but for decades, we’ve focused almost entirely on the former.

Immediate relief: The protective ‘life jacket’ 🔗

Protective measures are the life jacket. They are designed to help women and their families cope with immediate risks and shocks. They are absolutely essential for survival. Examples include:

• Cash transfers: Giving families money to buy food or pay rent.
• Food rations: Systems like India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) that ensure basic food security.
• Health insurance schemes: Protecting families from catastrophic medical bills.
• Fee waivers: Ensuring children (especially girls) can stay in school during a crisis.

These measures save lives. They reduce immediate poverty and can give a woman like Priya the breathing room to survive a bad week without falling into deeper debt. According to the International Labour Organization, these social protection floors are a key tool in fighting poverty. However, a life jacket is only meant for emergencies; it’s not meant to be a permanent solution. You can’t build a future while just trying to stay afloat.

Long-term change: The ‘transformative’ power to swim 🔗

Transformative potential is about teaching people to swim-and, just as importantly, cleaning up the polluted water and challenging the currents that pull them under. These measures aim to alter the root causes of vulnerability and empower women. They seek to change the rules of the game.

Transformative social protection has a few key features:

• It builds assets: It doesn’t just provide consumption support; it helps women build financial or physical assets. This could mean linking cash transfers to savings accounts in their own name or promoting women’s land ownership.
• It challenges norms: It actively works to change discriminatory social norms. For example, some programs in India have successfully used Self-Help Groups (SHGs) alongside social protection to build women’s confidence, solidarity, and voice in the community.
• It recognizes and redistributes care: A truly transformative system provides public support for childcare (like anganwadis or crèches) or eldercare. This frees up women’s time, allowing them to pursue education, employment, or political participation.

The goal here is structural change. It’s the difference between giving a woman a pension (protective) and ensuring she had a safe, well-paid job with a pension plan in the first place (transformative).

The ghost in the policy machine: The ‘male breadwinner’ norm 🔗

If the need for transformative change is so obvious, why is so much social protection still stuck in a purely protective mode? A large part of the answer is a powerful, persistent, and outdated idea: the ‘male breadwinner’ norm.

This is the ideology, born in the industrial era, that a family consists of a man who goes out to earn (the breadwinner) and a woman who stays home to care (the dependent). Despite the fact that this model no longer reflects the reality of millions of households worldwide-where women are often the sole or primary earners-it remains deeply entrenched in policymaking.

A history of exclusion 🔗

Modern social protection systems (like pensions and unemployment) were designed *by* men, *for* men. They were built for a worker with a 40-year, full-time, uninterrupted career in the formal sector. Women, with their fragmented careers due to caregiving, were expected to gain access to these benefits *through their husbands*. They were covered as dependents, not as individuals or workers in their own right.

How this outdated idea still causes harm 🔗

This “ghost in the machine” continues to marginalize women and reinforce gender disadvantage in several ways:

1. Flawed program design: Many pension systems still reward long, continuous employment, effectively penalizing women for the time they spend out of the workforce raising children.
2. Reinforcing dependency: Some cash transfer programs, while well-intentioned, give the money to the “head of household,” who is almost always assumed to be a man. This can disempower women within their own homes.
3. Ignoring women’s work: By focusing only on formal-sector “work,” these systems treat the vital, unpaid care work that women do as economically worthless. This justifies a lack of state support for childcare, which in turn keeps women trapped in that role.

As long as policymakers, consciously or not, view women as dependents instead of as economic actors, social protection will continue to fall short. It will provide a temporary patch without ever fixing the systemic leak. Learning from our experience means seeing, and finally rejecting, this outdated norm. It means designing systems for women like Priya, not for a non-existent “ideal worker” from a bygone era.

What do you think? When you look at social protection schemes in your own community (like subsidized food, healthcare access, or pensions), do you see them reinforcing the ‘male breadwinner’ idea, or challenging it? What is one change that could make a local program more ‘transformative’ for women?

References

1. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/socialprotection/brief/what-is-social-protection
2. https://www.niti.gov.in/vertical/women-and-child-development
3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw63/social-protection