Introduction

In this chapter, we examine in detail minority women's institutionalised precarity in pre- and post-crisis France, England and Scotland. Even though minority women experience systemic social and economic inequalities, too often their experiences are erased or devalued by social movement allies and policy makers alike. This is political racelessness enacted through both political discourse and empirical data gathering and analysis.

We argue that minority women experience a paradox of misrecognition – they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisible in the constructions of poverty, the economic crisis and austerity. As Heidi Mirza (2015: 4) notes, minority women are caught between what Ann Phoenix has termed ‘normative absence and pathological presence’ (Phoenix 1987) in how we think about social problems and policy interventions. Using an intersectional framework, we will demonstrate how minority women, a heterogeneous group, experience systematic discrimination and multidimensional inequalities based on their race, class, gender and legal status. In this chapter, we focus specifically on minority women's experiences in the labour market, as access to the labour market and the quality of available work is a key determinant of poverty and inequality. We also explore the particular ways in which minority women are rendered either invisible or hypervisible in key social policies meant to address their routinised inequalities.

The countries examined in this book are case studies, which differ in relation to the gender patterns of work and care. France is often placed under the category of ‘continental’ model of welfare state (Eydoux 2014: 154). According to different authors who focus primarily on the effects of the economic crisis on gender equality in France, the policies implemented as a response tended to ‘reinforce the traditional male (main) breadwinner model’ (Eydoux 2014: 155; see also Smith and Villa 2014). Britain, in contrast, is characterised as a ‘liberal welfare state’, closer in resemblance to the United States than its European neighbours because of its relatively minimalist approach to provision, which focuses more on means-tested social welfare than on universal programmes (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999; Clarke and Newman 1997).

Our intention in this chapter is to provide the context for the activism by and with minority women in our subsequent chapters.