City Research Online

Abstract

In November 2020, the UK government admitted that the European Union (EU) Settlement Scheme (EUSS) is likely to discriminate against some groups protected by the Equality Act 2010, concluding that any discriminatory effects are justifiable, and published its official assessment in a Policy Equality Statement. This article will scrutinise a specific group of individuals discriminated not for their single‐axis characteristics, but at the intersection of multiple identities. We focus specifically on the intersection of gender, migrant status and lower socio‐economic status to claim that the EUSS disproportionately affects migrant women of a lower socio‐economic status, who are more likely to interrupt full‐time employment to assume carer roles. Hence, our focus is on migrant women in atypical work, and we argue that they are at risk of greater gendered susceptibility to discrimination under the EUSS given the scheme's reliance on automatic data checks of a continuous employment footprint. By using UK labour market data and analysing the Policy Equality Statement, we show that the EUSS fails to account for the intersection of multiple identities that render these women more vulnerable. We also argue that the disadvantages faced by migrant women in atypical work derive from the legacy of EU law and the legal framework of EU citizenship and its related rights.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	EU Settlement Scheme, gender, intersectionality, market citizenship, migrant status
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) K Law > K Law (General)
Departments:	The City Law School The City Law School > Academic Programmes
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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