How can governments ensure that their economic policy benefits both men and women, and examine their progress towards gender equality? Over 40 countries, including Australia, France, and Israel, produce gender audits, or analyses of the effect of national budgets on women’s status. These audits are performed by governmental agencies, NGOs, or by the cooperative efforts of both governmental and non-governmental bodies.
This report from the Adva Centre in Tel Aviv argues that gender audits are crucial worldwide. They ensure that national budgets work towards improving women’s status and economic power, and that differences between work done by men and women are taken into account. More careful attention to gender audit results would highlight the dangers of cutting state support systems and depending on women’s unpaid work to compensate.
Public policy impacts differently on men and women due to their different family roles and women’s lower economic status. Gender audits aim to increase gender equality by influencing public policy. Government budgets are analysed from a gender perspective to determine whether they benefit both men and women, particularly women from disadvantaged groups. In addition:
- Gender audits raise women’s awareness of economic issues and encourage their participation
- International bodies, including the UN, encourage gender audits, and promote the implementation of audit conclusions
- Gender audits examine both income (taxation) and expenditure (budget)
- An income audit considers how the tax burden is divided between men and women, and how taxes affect women’s unpaid caring and household work (the “care economy”)
- An expenditure audit examines whether men or women benefit more from budget allocations
- Key questions include: how does taxation policy affect women? Who are the intended beneficiaries of each budget line? Will the budget line benefit disadvantaged groups? How will the care economy be affected? Are there better alternatives?
Women’s unpaid work is often neglected in orthodox economics. GDP does not include the three areas in which women are especially active: informal markets, volunteer work, and the care economy. The UN recommends expanding definitions of GDP to include these areas. Other issues include:
- Several countries prepare “satellite accounts”, using time use studies to measure the value of women’s unpaid work
- According to estimates in developed countries, this work could represent a value equivalent to up to 40% of GDP
- The care economy contributes to the wider economy by supplying human resources and maintaining the social framework
- The care economy is limited by inadequate state support, and by changes in women’s roles
- There is often a misfit between the state support needed by the care economy and the private sector’s readiness to pay for it through taxation. This results in reduced social services, transferring care costs from the public sector to the care economy
- The care economy’s “productivity” depends on services such as support payments. When too heavy a burden is placed on it, problems arise, reflected in, for example, decreased productivity and increased need for health services.
