The past fifteen years have been an era of welfare state retrenchment, and retrenchment measures have often undercut or blunted the impact of gender equality reforms. This chapter compares the policy responses in the four countries since the early 1980s with the purpose of, first, analyzing the impact of retrenchment and related policy changes on the social rights of women and, second, elucidating the gender biases in retrenchment strategies – differences in the impact on women and men. More specifically, I examine core welfare state policies – concentrating on income maintenance programs – and strategies to divest the state of its welfare functions in this area. My discussion attempts to specify both the similarities and differences in retrenchment efforts across the four countries. The differing responses in the four countries have consequences for women's entitlements, and the interplay between retrenchment strategies and existing policy constructions has influenced the gender bias of outcomes.

Before looking at retrenchment efforts in the four countries, it is necessary to clarify what retrenchment entails and how it is analyzed here. Retrenchment is often equated with cuts in expenditure. A definition focusing on social expenditures is unsatisfactory, however, because spending is an aggregate measure which conceals important policy changes. An alternative approach has been to conceptualize retrenchment in terms of the residual and institutional models discussed in chapter 1. One variant of this approach sees retrenchment as a restructuring towards a residual model of welfare – as “residualization” (Brown 1988, Pierson 1990, Sainsbury 1992, Land 1992, Stephens et al. 1995).