From maternity wards to unpaid care, Britain thrives on Black women’s silence

Misogynoir is not just a cultural bias — it’s embedded in the UK’s institutions. Two recent scandals show this by systematically dismissing Black women’s pain and exploiting their labour.

Misogynoir — a term coined by scholar Moya Bailey to describe the intersection of racism and misogyny that targets Black women — operates as structural logic in Britain. It shows up not just in media stereotypes but in policy decisions and daily encounters with state institutions.

Two recent developments expose this clearly. The Black Maternity Experiences survey, conducted by campaign group Five X More and published in July 2025, reported that almost a quarter of Black women were denied pain relief during labour. Nearly half received no explanation. This was not anecdote but evidence — data from more than a thousand women across the country.

At the same time, the Carer’s Allowance scandal exposed the situation of nearly 90,000 unpaid carers. They were disproportionately women, many from Black working-class backgrounds .The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) pursued them for repayments after minor administrative breaches. And, the state relied on their unpaid labour to sustain a collapsing care system, yet penalised them for earning just pounds over the threshold.

Taken together, these cases show how Britain institutionalises misogynoir. The state extracts unpaid labour as economic strategy. It dismisses Black women’s pain as a healthcare norm. These are not isolated failings. They prove the British state functions through silencing and exploiting Black women.

Black women’s pain ignored: misogynoir in maternity care

The Black Maternity Experiences survey, published in July 2025 by Five X More, provides one of the clearest examples of misogynoir in action. The survey gathered responses from more than 1,100 Black and mixed-heritage women who gave birth in the UK between 2021 and 2025. The results confirm what campaigners have long argued: systemic neglect of Black women is not an accident, but a pattern.

• 23% of women were denied pain relief they requested during labour.

• 40% of those denied were not given an explanation.

• More than half reported difficulties when dealing with healthcare professionals.

One respondent summarised the consequences: “I was in agonising pain and I was treated poorly.” This is not only about bedside manner. The refusal of pain relief, and the dismissal of requests for it, reflect a historic stereotype. The stereotype suggests Black women are naturally stronger, more resilient, and therefore less deserving of medical intervention.

Such assumptions have material consequences. The UK’s maternal mortality figures show that Black people are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth as white people. Despite years of inquiries, the disparities remain. This persistence indicates that the issue is not lack of awareness, but lack of institutional will to change.

In this sense, misogynoir sets the norm in healthcare. Staff do not treat pain as a symptom to relieve — they treat it as something Black women should endure. By refusing care, the system enforces silence. It discourages women from asking for help because it has already shown it will ignore them.

Labour exploited: Misogynoir in the care economy

The maternity data exposes how misogynoir dismisses Black women’s pain. The Carer’s Allowance scandal exposes how it exploits their labour. In September 2025, the Department for Work and Pensions admitted wrongly pursuing almost 90,000 unpaid carers for overpayments, forcing them to fight for compensation.

Strict earnings rules drove the scandal. When carers earned just a few pounds over the weekly threshold — often because of irregular shifts or payroll errors — the DWP hit them with demands to repay thousands. In many cases, the repayments drove families into debt.

Most unpaid carers are women. Black women and women from migrant communities, concentrated in low-paid work, bore the brunt of these penalties. The state relied on their unpaid labour to keep the social care system from collapse, even as it punished the very people holding it together.

Carers described the policy as punitive. Some cut back paid hours to stay below the threshold, sinking further into financial insecurity.  Others revealed how the state treated them as fraudsters while they carried out essential care it refused to fund. Misogynoir underpinned the system: it positioned Black women as an inexhaustible resource, forced to absorb both the unpaid care burden and the financial penalties.

The same logic links this to maternity care. In both hospitals and benefit offices, institutions undervalue Black women’s contributions. They disregard Black women’s voices — whether raised in pain or protest — and treat their labour as endlessly renewable, no matter the cost to their health or security.

Misogynoir as policy – Silence as infrastructure

Taken together, these cases reveal misogynoir not as an accident of prejudice, but rather as a deliberate organising principle within British institutions. In maternity wards, it operates through the dismissal of pain. In welfare offices, it operates through the exploitation of unpaid care. Across both, it enforces a silence that benefits the state.

These patterns keep repeating, and in doing so, they dismantle any claim that they are isolated failings. Researchers have documented maternal mortality disparities for years. Campaigners and auditors have repeatedly flagged the hostile design of Carer’s Allowance rules. Yet policymakers delivered only piecemeal reforms. Their repetition shows that institutions not only predict these outcomes — they tolerate them.

This is why euphemisms like “disparities” or “oversights” fail to capture the reality. Misogynoir in Britain is structural. It keeps healthcare costs down by dismissing requests for care. It sustains the care economy by extracting unpaid labour. And it neutralises resistance by labelling Black women’s testimony as anecdotal rather than systemic.

Ultimately, this makes misogynoir a form of statecraft. It is an economic strategy as much as a cultural prejudice. And its effects are measurable in both the statistics of maternal deaths and the financial precarity of carers.

Featured image via Unsplash/freestocks