According to the World Economic Forum, it will take until 2158 to reach full gender parity at the current rate of progress, which is why this year’s International Women’s Day theme is focused on Accelerating Action. Today, we are looking back at the International Centre for Tax and Development’s (ICTD) research and policy work on gender and tax and how the Centre’s efforts are helping to shift the debate in international policy debates.
Two new ICTD publications (Working Paper 186 and Policy Brief 5) published last March, alongside a series of blogs and videos, kick-started our ambition to accelerate this shift. The impact has been immediate: we saw this work cited in high level policy documents and the authors of the policy briefing, ICTD Executive Director Giulia Mascagni and Caren Grown, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, have been invited to numerous events to set out how gender and tax need to be addressed differently from previous approaches. By the end of 2024, these publications ranked as two of the most downloaded ICTD publications that year, a testament to the demand for and interest in this work.
Proposing an alternative approach to the implicit-explicit gender framework
Grown and Mascagni’s policy brief sets out how international debates and policy framed around explicit and implicit tax biases are no longer fit for purpose, proposing an alternative approach.
They argue that, instead of developing new methods to identify tax biases, key stakeholders should focus on the root causes of gender inequalities – limitations related to care work or underlying social norms that affect entrepreneurship and women’s taxpaying experience – and how the tax system can help.
Their findings nurtured discussions at the European Commission’s Taxation and Customs Union Directorate (TAXUD) and the Addis Tax Initiative’s (ATI) General Assembly. Grown also shared these insights at the Financing for Development Dialogues: from Evidence to Action while Mascagni presented on the briefings to a francophone African audience at the CREDAF and Gabon Tax Administration seminar in Libreville on gender issue in tax administrations. The proposed alternative approach was also developed into an application to tax expenditures in a blog co-published with the Council on Economic Policies, Addressing Gender Disparities in Tax Expenditures building on the discussion from the ATI event.
Furthermore, the policy brief’s key messages were embraced, for example, by UN WOMEN in a flagship report on the role of women in development which echoes its argument that the current biases framework “confined potential policy solutions to a narrow set of issues” and explicitly recommends “mobilising resources for gender-responsive social protection at scale also requires attention to larger issues” beyond individual tax policies. We expect this shift in the debate to focus stakeholders’ attention to a more practical agenda to improve the way the tax system works for women, focused on equitable tax policy, better tax administration, and a stronger connection with fiscal policy and politics.
A new Community of Practice on Gender and Tax
ICTD also launched a new gender and tax Community of Practice (CoP) in June 2024, co-convened with the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. The CoP offers a unique opportunity for those working on gender and tax across international organisations to discuss technical and policy solutions based on research and provide more practical guidance to policymakers who want to make a difference towards gender equality in tax systems.
The CoP has now held three meetings: the first saw Jalia Kangave and Vanessa van den Boogaard present the paper, Engendering Taxation: A Research and Policy Agenda, the second discussed microsimulation models as a tool to understand the gendered effects of tax policies in the context of the wider fiscal system; whilst the most recent explored the role of administrative data to uncover gendered patterns in taxation and compliance.
New research on Uganda’s female parliamentarians and their impact on tax policies
With the number of women in parliament increasing from two at Uganda’s independence in 1962 to 189 in the current parliament, Jalia Kangave and Solomon Rukundo looked into the impact of this increase on gender-sensitive tax debates and policies. Through the analysis of the contents of 72 tax debates held between 1995 and 2022, they found that it was not until 2014 that gender became a more frequent component in these discussions.
But what prompted this change? In addition to the increase in the number of women in parliament, three other factors are to be credited: the introduction of the Certificate of Gender and Equity Compliance in 2014, the efforts of the Uganda Women’s Parliamentary Association, and the presence of the first female Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga.
And yet, female parliamentarians’ capacity to raise gender in tax debates remains limited by several challenges, namely, their access to conduct research and consequent lack of data and evidence to support their claims; and scarce technical capacity to both understand tax issues and manoeuvre parliamentary rules and procedures.
More research and insights on gender and tax still to come in 2025
2025 promises to be another important year for research on tax and gender with upcoming research studying the intersectionality of gender with the informal sector, tax compliance and digitisation. Don’t miss out – and sign up to our newsletter and follow us on BlueSky, Facebook and LinkedIn to stay up to date with our latest news, event and research.
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