Gender budgeting

Gender budgeting means preparing budgets or analyzing them from a gender perspective. Also referred to as gender-sensitive budgeting, this practice does not entail dividing budgets for women. It aims at dealing with budgetary gender inequality issues, including gender hierarchies and the discrepancies between women's and men's salaries. At its core, gender budgeting is a feminist policy with a primary goal of re-orienting the allocation of public resources, advocating for an advanced decision-making role for women in important issues, and securing equity in the distribution of resources between men and women. Gender budgeting allows governments to promote equality through fiscal policies by taking analyses of a budget's differing impacts on the sexes as well as setting goals or targets for equality and allocating funds to support those goals. This practice does not always target intentional discrimination but rather forces an awareness of the effects of financial schemes on all genders.

OECD notes that gender budgeting is a way for governments to promote equality through the budget process against persistent gender disparities in education, employment, entrepreneurship, and public life opportunities and outcomes. Planning budgets with the promotion of gender equality in mind has the potential to help policymakers address a range of inequalities embedded in public policy and resource allocation.

Gender budgeting is set up to help close the gender gap. Gender budgeting helps achieve important standards of public financial management. Equality is a fundamental value of the European Union and a major goal of the European Commission. Equality for all and equality in every sense of the word play a central role in achieving a prosperous and social Europe.

Promoting equality is important not only from a moral argument but also from an economic perspective. Studies have highlighted that more equal economies benefit from higher employment rates in terms of income distribution and access to education and other services. Several studies have demonstrated that inequality has significant economic costs and that improving equality can boost EU growth. Budgets are an important means of increasing equity in all dimensions. Budget allocations are a central means of achieving these goals.

Gender budgeting can be characterized as a gender-status and class-based policy. As a gender status policy, gender budgeting has the purpose of doing away with power hierarchies that have conferred privileges to men and devalued the contributions made by women. Gender budgeting remedies the disadvantages and discrimination against women by incorporating them in the budgetary process and fighting marginalization and exclusion from economic, political, and constitutional processes. As a class-based policy, it visualizes the sexual division of labor and exposes the consequent economic and social marginalization of women. Gender budgeting exposes such inequalities and sets the stage for the equalization of the status of women through the advancement of resources and civic rights to facilitate better access to services funded by governments.

In public finance, there is insufficient evidence paid by policymakers and gender activists regarding the taxation section as gender activists should certainly be concerned about the revenue side of the budget. There is a direct relationship between government expenditure and taxation; when there are no sufficient revenues, the expenditure programs will be unfunded and the chances to reach gender equity are less since taxes are the essence of government profits. Henceforth, countries with insufficiently low revenues are generally unable to enhance public and social services which increases the burden on women to provide more care and social provision. In turn, women tend to fall outside the income tax threshold as they earn lower incomes than men. It is implemented by the ministry of women and child development.