This blog was written by Mariel Soto Araya, Intern with Oxfam Novib and Henrique Alencar, Policy Advisor Tax and Inequality at Oxfam
Photo of woman buying vegetables at a market
Fiscal Justice and Gender Inequality
Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality. For centuries it has caused discrimination and exclusion of women from social, political and economic life. Despite significant advances in past decades, women continue to make-up the majority of those living in poverty, earning on average 24% less than men across the globe, with significant variation from region-to-region. Women also have less access to paid work with 700 million fewer women than men receiving payment for their work.
While progressive civil society stakeholders regularly call for governments and social institutions to address gender inequality through public policies and practices, significant discrimination. Unfortunately, national fiscal systems continue to play a negative role in the pursuit of gender equality.
Strategies for revenue collection, allocation, and spending not only fail to respond to the needs of women, but effectively entrench existing gender norms and unequal power dynamics. While laws that directly deny benefits or establish harsher norms based on gender have been mostly removed from national tax systems, fiscal policies continue to discriminate by incentivizing patterns and behaviors that reflect restrictive societal views on gender.
If properly designed, however fiscal policies have the potential to help tackle gender discrimination. Civil society and governments should not only aspire to remove gendered biases from its tax systems but should also pursue an ambitious goal of developing gender-transformative fiscal systems that contribute to shifting and transforming gender roles and power dynamics.
The Fair Tax Monitor and its approach to gender
As a joint initiative of Oxfam and Tax Justice Network-Africa, the Fair Tax Monitor (FTM) was launched a decade ago to strengthen research capacities and advocacy activities on fiscal issues at the local and global levels. The FTM provides an overview of national tax systems through its national reports, delivering reliable evidence for advocacy and influencing work.
In 2019, the FTM toolbox was expanded and strengthened in response to lessons learned in the previous years and input received from CSO partners working on national reports. As a central aspect, the gender lens of the FTM was enhanced and a paper was published establishing a framework to conduct an FTM analysis of fiscal policies with a strong gender focus.[1]
Shortly after, in 2020, the Fiscal Justice for Women and Girls in Africa project – a four-year project funded by the European Union focusing on Uganda and Zambia – provided an opportunity to further develop the FTM methodology’s gender lens. The review resulted in new gender-related questions which were incorporated to the methodology for the development of national reports in Uganda and Zambia.
Gender-focused questions of the FTM methodology
The gender-focused questions of the current methodology seek to identify the mechanisms through which fiscal policies directly and indirectly contribute to gender inequality. Moreover, the FTM framework provides guidance for the development of gender inclusive tax policies, which are capable of changing fiscal systems from gender discriminatory to gender transformative.
The methodology assesses various aspects of national fiscal systems, with questions designed to identify the specific impact that tax policy and practical implementation may have on women and girls. The key topics addressed reflect the drawbacks experienced by women, from being predominantly employed in informal sectors, providing the majority of unpaid care work and domestic work, to not having appropriate access to public services, and misrepresentation within the fiscal administration and broader government structures.
Insights from Uganda and Zambia country reports
The updated methodology with a gender focus was implemented for the first time in 2022 with national reports from CUTS in Zambia and SEATINI in Uganda. Both national reports highlight three key struggles in their fiscal systems which either exacerbate local gender inequalities or prevent progress towards gender equality.
1. Underfunding of Essential Services Due to Debt and Austerity
The first struggle centers on fiscal policy decisions related to debt servicing, illicit financial flows, and austerity measures. These factors have reduced government revenues, leaving insufficient funds for critical public expenditure. This underinvestment disproportionately impacts sectors such as health and education, which are vital to the well-being and development of women and girls.
2. Regressive Tax Systems and Lack of Progressivity
Both Zambia and Uganda’s tax systems rely heavily on indirect taxes, which are regressive by nature. This places a disproportionate tax burden on women and low-income earners. Furthermore, efforts to increase revenue collection in both countries have neglected considerations for fair and progressive taxation. As a result, there has been little evaluation of how these tax policies impact vulnerable groups, including women and girls.
3. Lack of Gender-Disaggregated Data
The third struggle identified in both reports is the absence of publicly available gender-disaggregated data (Zambia began publishing gender disaggregated data in 2022). This lack of data hampers the development of gender-transformative fiscal policies and limits the ability to conduct thorough analyses of how existing fiscal measures affect different genders. Without this data, policy-making remains blind to the unique challenges faced by women and other marginalized groups.
Want to learn more? Join the upcoming FTM Gender webinar.
The FTM is hosting a Tax and Gender webinar that will expand on our FTM tax and gender work and the lessons learned over the past years.
The presentation will take a deeper look into the importance of gender considerations in fiscal policy assessments, the development of our methodology and plans for future work. Representatives from CUTS (Zambia) and SEATINI (Uganda) will be present to share their experiences implementing the methodology and the impact the reports have had on the ground.
The webinar will take place on November 21st at 10:00 (CET). If you would like to join and learn more about FTM’s tax and gender work, please contact fairtaxmonitor@oxfamnovib.nl
[1] Oxfam Novib and Tax Justice Network-Africa. Gender and Taxes – The gendered nature of fiscal systems and the Fair Tax Monitor. 2019. Available at: https://maketaxfair.net/assets/2024/01/gd-gender-fair-tax-monitor-130919-en-1.pdf