Gender Responsive Budgets

What is the budget?

The budget is one of the most important areas of economic policy in any country. It is, in effect, a policy statement reflecting the social and economic priorities of the government.

A government budget is a financial statement of fiscal policy: the expected revenue and intended expenditure of the government over a given period, usually a year. Revenue is the money that government thinks it will receive in a year. It includes taxes, social security contributions, fees or charges for services. Expenditure is the money that the government intends to spend. It includes current expenditure (e.g. spending on provision of goods and services, social security and salaries for civil servants); and capital expenditure, which is expenditure on infrastructure, such as roads and public buildings.

On the face of it, the budget appears to be a gender neutral policy instrument. It is set out in terms of financial aggregates, i.e. the totals and sub-totals of expenditure and revenue, with no particular mention of women or of men. However, this appearance of gender neutrality is more accurately described as gender blindness, since the national budget generally ignores the different socially determined roles, responsibilities and capabilities of women and men, and usually overlooks the different impacts that policies have on men and women in a country.

What is gender budgeting?

Gender-responsive budget initiatives aim to provide mechanisms by which governments, in collaboration with parliamentarians, civil society groups, donor and other development agencies, can integrate gender considerations into budgets. They break down, or disaggregate, the government's entire budget according to its impact on different groups of women and men taking into account the society's underpinning gender relations, roles and opportunities to access and control resources.

A gender responsive budget can be an important mechanism for ensuring greater consistency between economic goals and social commitments. The Beijing Platform for Action recognises women’ s role in the economy and lists a number of actions for governments under the heading ‘Women and the Economy’. The Platform for Action specifically refers to ‘gender sensitive budgets’ and stresses the need for an active policy of gender mainstreaming in all policies as a means of promoting equality between women and men. It lists a number of strategic objectives for governments, which should all be part of a gender sensitive budget, as well as recommendations for governments to include a gender perspective in trade policy.

Gender responsive budgets lead to a more effective use of resources by ensuring that expenditure benefits those who need it most. Gender budget analysis shows the ways in which policies that are not gender sensitive impact negatively on women relative to men, and how, through perpetuating gender inequality, such policies impact on the achievement of a government’s economic goals. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are goals in themselves: but if women have more control over resources, there will be gains for society as a whole. Gender sensitive budgets could potentially improve the effectiveness, efficiency, accountability and transparency of government policy, as well as making significant contributions towards gender equality and the realisation of women's rights.

Looking at budgets through a gender lens can illustrate where the collection and distribution of public money is unequal and inefficient. It can also show how discrimination against women affects national development. A gender responsive budget is not a separate budget for women, but an attempt to disaggregate expenditure and revenue according to their different impacts on women and men. It is about costing gender equality policy: showing the costs to women of current budget inefficiencies and inequalities, and costing the specific policies required to redress these inequalities. For example, the fact that unpaid labour, such as childcare or elder care, is missing in economic models means that it is often ignored in policy making. Most economists assume that women’s time is available in unlimited quantities, and that it has no cost to the individual. Gender budget initiatives can make unpaid work visible, and reveal the time-costs to women of cuts in social spending.

Challenges in engaging in gender budget initiatives

The ultimate aim of gender budgeting is that the formulation of national economic policy making will reflect gender equality objectives. Clearly, this requires a radical shift in budgetary planning, and is necessarily a slow process. Organisations such as the Forum of Women in Democracy (FOWODE) in Uganda and the UK Women’s Budget Group have found that gender budget programmes are more likely to succeed if they involve a wide range of stakeholders including politicians, researchers, government planners, civil society organisations and the media. Gender budgeting involves expertise in both budgeting and gender relations. Capacity building among actors (civil society and government officials) is needed to ensure effective partnership. Convincing officials who insist that budgets are ‘for everyone’ that public resources should be allocated in a way that recognises the different roles that women and men play in the economy as well as the different needs and constraints they have is a big challenge. However, technical knowledge alone will not produce significant change or sustainable results. The effectiveness of any programme depends on the level of political will and support that it is able to secure from the highest levels. Ultimately, gender budget work is about politics. Gender budgeting can be a first step towards challenging broader economic policy issues such as the emphasis on neo-liberal economics with its focus on productivity, economic growth and efficiency as measurements of economic success.

Gender budgeting: a strategy towards transformation?

Gender budget initiatives are not a substitute for an approach of challenging and critiquing economic policy, and the current dominance of neoliberalism. Gender budgeting is potentially a powerful tool for women to challenge how seriously gender equality is taken by governments. But only potentially. While the idea of gender budgeting is gaining acceptance within some governments, and is being adopted as an approach to lobbying by some feminist NGOs, policy makers have been slow to make changes in budgetary processes. Like gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting could be a radical and transformative strategy towards the full realisation of women’s human rights, but only if it is part of an approach that aims to change systemic and structural discrimination, unequal gender power relations, to and women’s unequal access to and control of resources.

Banúlacht and Gender Budgeting

A special issue of our newsletter, Making Connections, was published in March 2004, focusing gender budget initiatives. It featured the successful use of gender budget tools by some organisations in the South. But we also raised some critical questions about gender budgeting as a strategy towards women’s empowerment and as a tool to challenge the dominance of neoliberalism in macroeconomic policy.

Gemma Akilimali of the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme has twice visited Ireland at Banúlacht’s invitation and carried out a number of workshops and seminars with women’s community based organisations, policy makers at Development Cooperation Ireland and the Gender Equality Unit and members of Dóchas, the umbrella body of Irish development NGOs.

Links

Our economic literacy manual includes a module on gender budgets.

Download articles from the special issue of Making Connections.