Gender-Responsive Budgeting
A Budget Reform to Address Gender Inequity
Marilyn Marks Rubin, Rutgers University-Newark
John R. Bartle, University of Nebraska at Omaha
In recognition of gender inequities, more than 80 countries have applied a gender perspective to their budget process, initiatives that are generally referred to as gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). With few exceptions, most research on these initiatives has been conducted within a gender equity construct, focusing on whether and how they have moved women further along the road to parity with men. Achieving this goal is a critical metric of GRB success. But if it is to become integral to the administrative routines of government, we argue that GRB must reform the budget process with gender equity as a specific objective.
Some GRB initiatives have taken hold while others have not, an outcome that is similar to earlier efforts at government budget reform. However, until the introduction of GRB, these efforts have not focused on equity. Indeed, with few exceptions, budgets, themselves, have not explicitly focused on equity. This lack of focus on equity is striking given that for the last 50 years a major movement in public administration has been the incorporation of social equity as a ‘pillar’ of public administration, along with efficiency, economy, and effectiveness — the bedrocks of government budgeting.
Experts on governmental budgeting, who have studied budget reform for decades, have identified several factors that contribute to their success. Although the equity objective of GRB differentiates it from earlier budget reform efforts with their focus on efficiency and effectiveness, we find that these factors are similar to those that explain the success of GRB initiatives and use the factors to explain the variation in success. The factors are:
1. Key decision-makers in government must acknowledge gender inequities and see budget policy as a tool to promote gender equity. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of political commitment to gender equity illustrated more clearly than in Australia, the birthplace of GRB, where from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s government leaders were responsive to women’s needs and supportive of GRB initiatives. However, elections in 1996 brought into office leaders who were not committed to gender equity nor to GRB. In fact, a 2011 survey by the OECD of its member countries identified Australia as one of the worst performers in GRB related initiatives. In 2014, Australia’s GRB initiative was eliminated.
2. There has to be a legal basis for gender equity. As of 2018, three countries had embedded a gender budgeting provision into their constitutions — Austria, Bolivia, and Rwanda. Four others — Belgium, Mexico, Norway, and Spain — have gender equity imperatives in their constitutions that provide a framework for gender budgeting. Twelve countries (Rwanda, Uganda, India, South Korea, Philippines, Austria, Iceland, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Morocco) have provisions in their organic budget law, some of which require ministries to take actions that are consistent with gender budgeting.
3. The office of the Ministry of Finance, or a similar central budget office, is a crucial source of institutional support, often providing line ministries/agencies with training, guidelines, and expertise to perform the necessary gender analysis. It should be noted that the support of agencies specifically established to promote gender equity has also contributed to the success of GRB initiatives. For instance, in Sweden, the Gender Equality Agency participates in deciding how resources are allocated and assists in the implementation of gender equity efforts.
4. Gender disaggregated data must be available to assess the differential gender impacts of policies and programs. Assessments of GRB in OECD countries have found that the lack of gender disaggregated data was one of the reasons for slow implementation reform efforts.
5. Civil society organizational support can be an important factor in facilitating the implementation of GRB. In many countries, UN Women (formerly UNIFEM) has been instrumental in moving GRB along the road to success.
Although gender parity is just one dimension of social equity among other dimensions such as racial equity, the success of GRB initiatives is evidence that governments can use their budgets to meet social equity objectives. There is also a growing desire to make government budgets more than a process of resource allocation, and more of a process that both embodies and influences social choices about how resources are allocated. Increasingly, governments see a need for their budget process to embrace the inherent subjectivity of the way issues are framed, and to recognize that the process informing decision-making is not gender neutral.
On his first day in office, President Biden issued an Executive Order calling for the federal government to ‘allocate resources to address the historic failure to invest sufficiently, justly, and equally in under-served communities, as well as individuals from those communities.’ This is evidence of the growing recognition of the budget as a tool to promote equity and of the acceptance that government budgets are something other than a tool for controlling agency operations and managing service delivery. It is also evidence of the realization that it is time for governments to consider budget reform within the broader context of social and economic policy, in recognition that budgets are the direct manifestation of public policy.
