In most Western societies, biological sexual differences have provided a pretext for various forms of discrimination against women. Women’s bodies, especially in regard to motherhood and reproduction, have been used to justify inequalities in the labour market. Indeed, the extensive debate among feminist scholars to distinguish and define sexual differences and gender has centred in part on the link between the biological ability to reproduce and the social norms that have developed that link this ability to women’s roles in societies, their values and attitudes, and their skills (de Beauvoir 1949; Gilligan 1982; Scott 1986). Motherhood, then, is understood as both a defining characteristic of women based upon biological differences and a gendered form of parenting.

Development of the modern welfare state was based, in part, upon agendered division of work within the family, in which a male breadwinner was in the paid workforce and a female partner was responsible for unpaid labour in the home. Contribution-based state welfare programs such as employment insurance were in place to support the household through the male breadwinner (Fraser 1994) and arguably garnered some of their support because of their association with popularly accepted gender norms and a view of the worker as both white and male (Winter 2008). Yet, as more women entered the workforce, there was a corresponding development of maternity benefits, family allowances, and childcare regimes that disproportionately benefited women, and these benefits were often tied to their