Gender Equality: Can Taxation Make It a Reality?

Days before the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women was scheduled to meet in New York to focus on the gender equality aims promised in global agreements, goals and declarations, writes Liz Nelson, will we finally look beyond traditional thinking about how these aims can (or cannot) be funded? Are we ready to admit that progressively targeted tax is the only effective financing solution?

We’ve all done it: promised, but not delivered. And our governments are no different. But should we really be so forgiving of our elected representatives when they fail to keep their promises on issues that are fundamental to our well-being and human development?

No: for everyone’s sake, and especially this year for women during the Beijing + 25 intergovernmental review of progress towards gender equality, we should not. We must be willing to hold our governments to account when they fail to take progressive action, or when they remain politically indifferent to the need to take substantial measures to achieve gender equality. Even when governments appear to be working toward those goals, how can we make sure they are delivering on their promises? Taxation and gender impact analysis are two of the most powerful ways we can hold our politicians to account.

Platforms, plans and priorities - and very little progress

According to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a United Nations treaty signed in 1979 that is frequently described as an “international bill of human rights for women”, by ratifying international human rights treaties such as CEDAW, states assume obligations under international human rights law – and as “duty bearers” they have an obligation to “refrain from making laws, policies, regulations, programmes, administrative procedures and international structures that directly or indirectly result in the denial of the equal enjoyment by women of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights” (CEDAW/C/GC/28).

In signing this treaty, 193 UN member states in effect set themselves a plan of action to eliminate discrimination and advance gender equality. To date, the progress made towards greater gender equality, or the lack of progress, has been the direct result of governments’ political willingness to expedite these obligations, or by their failure to understand the gender impact of social and economic policies.

Fourteen years after CEDAW, there was another opportunity to address these issues via the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action that emerged from it, adopted at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Signed by 189 countries, this accord is generally considered to be a blueprint for the achievement of gender equality and the realisation of rights for women and girls. Two decades later, in 2015, the UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which, in their call to “leave no one behind”, set out a global plan to create a “sustainable future for all”.

UN Secretary-General: governments have yet to deliver on aims

Both initiatives speak to the global recognition that gender equality must be a priority. So far, however, it is a priority that has not been addressed: the UN Secretary General’s report (19-21893 (E) 24/01/20) on the review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration points to the unacceptable failure of governments to follow through on these high ideals and well-laid plans.

The Secretary General’s report, which analyses 164 IMF country reports and expenditure data, notes that the two most common areas of fiscal adjustment or consolidation – these are, of course, both euphemisms for austerity – are in reductions in pensions and social protection, and public sector cuts in wages and employment, and that these are “again likely to disproportionately hurt women”. Moreover, the report reveals that only 10% of all the countries that report having “implemented or planned austerity measures have assessed their impact on women and girls”.

Patience is wearing thin in this pivotal year for women, 25 years after the Beijing Declaration. This month, the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (UN CSW 64) is scheduled to take place in New York City, and it will focus on two critical areas of debate. First, participants will consider the progress made towards substantive gender equality and women’s rights as set out in the 12 critical areas identified in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Second, and very much aligned to the Beijing agenda, they will discuss the progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. The sub-text, of course, is how are these to be financed?

What will gender equality cost? 25 years on, the numbers don’t add up

The cost of implementing the Beijing Platform for Action has never been precisely calculated, and the United Nations believes its own estimates are insufficient to achieve the plan’s sweeping ambitions. Assessments of the bottom line for the SDGs suggest that here, too, the money available will fall short of the huge tasks at hand: estimates of the annual SDG financing gap have soared, from Oxfam’s calculation of $1.5 trillion in 2015 to the OECD’s 2020 estimate of a $2.5 trillion shortfall. By way of illustration, the SDG aims of ending preventable maternal deaths, covering all unmet needs for family planning and eliminating gender-based violence by 2030 would require some $264 billion over the next decade, but only $42 billion in overseas development aid is expected to be spent on those areas in the next ten years.

In other words, the numbers just don’t add up. Looking at them, you may assume you have discovered the reason governments are not following through on their obligations: because there are simply insufficient resources to meet these obligations, further complicated by divergent opinions on how best to deploy what money is available.

There is, however, another way to look at these issues beyond simply claiming that the problems are too big and governments’ coffers are too small. If we are serious about making “follow through” happen on the gender equity goals that so many national governments, transnational bodies and individual citizens agree are urgent and necessary, we need to act to make progressive choices using tax and financial transparency.

Why the four Rs of taxation hold the key to progress

Tax has four key purposes: revenue, redistribution, repricing and representation. All of these can make a progressive shift in the realisation of gender equality. First, because tax is the primary means by which governments raise revenue to fund essential public services, such as health and education, or to provide designed programmes that reflect the needs of women and girls, or to support the burden of care with which women are disproportionately shouldered. The type of tax regime in which it is raised and redistributed is critical. The UN Secretary General António Guterres reminds us in his UN CSW scene-setting report that “policies are never neutral in their impact on marginalised groups of women and girls”. This is also the case for tax policy.

The tax policy orthodoxy in recent decades has been to lower direct taxes – in other words, income taxes for individuals where the wealthy benefit most – and to lower corporation taxes where, once again, wealthy investors and shareholders benefit most. It’s a shift from public good to private interest, and it lacks thought or analysis of its pronounced, and negative, gendered impact. All too often, increasing indirect taxes such as VAT is part of the tax mix. This “regressive” consumption tax impacts on women disproportionately, as women are more likely to be living on low incomes, or no incomes, and are mostly likely to be responsible for purchasing the daily necessities that attract VAT. For people on higher incomes, in contrast, these tax increases mean very little.

A progressive approach to tax should also try to look at how it reprices social “bads”; for example, carbon taxing the heaviest offenders (fossil fuel industries). In a salient reminder of just how many ways women’s lives are threatened and discriminated against, there is growing evidence that increased stresses in daily lives created by climate change and ecological degradation correspondingly increases the levels of violence against women. Tax can also play a critical and targeted role in developing a sustainable future for women’s rights and for gender equality through political representation. The status quo is often one where governments that are yoked to “revenues from natural resources and foreign aid tend to undermine channels for responsive government”, as development economist Alex Cobham has pointed out in his important look at the impact of data gaps The Uncounted. But this status quo leaves governments little room to manoeuvre when attempting to meet their obligations to women, and to fulfil both tax justice and gender justice.

This month when the UN Commission on the Status of Women meets in Manhattan, it is essential that feminists, women’s rights advocates and tax justice advocates work together to rekindle the radical promise of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action to achieve substantive gender equality and speak out against policy neutrality and too many years of empty – and broken – promises. The time is now, because our world – and its women, men and children – cannot wait any longer.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.