ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on how and why a comprehensive welfare state like Sweden, with far-reaching egalitarian commitments, still reproduces inequalities between men and women. The gender perspective adopted in the chapter concerns both the politics of sex equality between men and women, and the legal constructions of gender relations. This chapter explores from a Swedish perspective, why a transformed conception of social citizenship is needed in order to achieve a more inclusive social welfare regime from a gender perspective. The theoretical concept of social citizenship is commonly used in contemporary research, not always explicitly but in substance, as an instrument for analysing gender, equality, and welfare regimes. The recognition by the welfare state that certain social needs are legitimate creates a legal framework for social access. Social entitlements, following the public insurance principle, derive from labour market status and constitute a public, social insurance system providing income compensation when an individual is incapable of work.
