ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that capturing the social ill in a descriptive sense requires attending carefully to the way gender plays out across the lives of girls and women. Vulnerability theory provides a potential framework for thinking through the regulatory challenges of addressing women's lifetime disadvantage. Vulnerability theory acknowledges the inherent fragility of and dependence within the human condition, and places responsibility on the state for individuals' resilience in the face of inevitable, capacity-limiting events. Working women lead gendered lives within a system that creates lifetime disadvantage and results in poorer outcomes for them in old age. One important aspect of our vulnerability theory-inspired arguments is that they are responsive to women's gendered lives, and hence attentive to our model of lifetime disadvantage. Vulnerability theory, when paired with our model of lifetime disadvantage, assists in imagining a reconfigured workplace that acknowledges but transcends gender.
