Gender Budget Analysis

Scottish Women’s Budget Group Voluntary, unfunded, academic; public, private, third sector; Pressing for gender analysis in public finance and policy processes Identifying impact and restructuring resource allocation to eliminate unequal impact and advance equality Influencing Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government; informing women in communities.

Gender Budget Analysis “Can you imagine the nation’s annual budget becoming a realistic description of the wellbeing of the community and its environment, a reflection of real wealth and different values? The budget would answer all of the following. Who does what work and where – paid and unpaid? What is the position of the nation’s children and the aged? Who is not housed adequately? Who has the poorest health?...” (Marilyn Waring (1988) If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics )

Gender Budget Analysis Challenge assumption that budgets are gender-neutral Examination of allocation of public resources for impact on women and men Redistribution of resources to advance equality Gender impact assessment and gender policy analysis reveal different and unequal outcomes for women and men from public spending decisions Challenge system of national accounts - making care and unpaid work visible

Impact of public finance decisions Women as public sector workers and service users Women entered the current era of austerity in a position of longstanding economic disadvantage compared to men Combined effects of reduction in public spending, tax and benefit reforms - women, older women, lone parents, disabled people.

Gender budgeting as feminist policy change Improves women’s rights, status or situation relative to men’s Reduces gender-based hierarchies Avoids distinction between public and private spheres Focuses on women and men Can be identified with recognised feminist movements Is a “gender status” policies - remedy disadvantage and discrimination against women as women “class-based” policies - target the unequal distribution of resources and sexual division of labour n of resources and sexual division of labour

Factors of feminist policy change Active and engaged feminist organisations Open government structures Effective gender equality architecture/women’s policy agencies External influences Policy learning and diffusion through transnational networking Constellation of engaged actors Access to strategic actors in key policy venues Favourable economic conditions (?) Time and temporal dimensions Critical framing of feminist policy change arguments and demands Maximising political change Mix of engaged actors Feminist policy change and policy analysis literature explores the factors supporting and contributing to feminist policy change and the introduction and progression of gender equality policy. Sally Kenney, Louise Chappell, Amy Mazur, Karen Beckwith, This analytical basis had not featured in the gender budgeting literature and offered a useful framework and bridge between the descriptive accounts of attempts to introduce and implement gender budgeting in earlier experiences in Australia and South Africa and other initiatives in the global south. There was an undeclared overlap between the feminist political analysis and the feminist economics accounts which had not been developed previously.

Scottish Budget £37bn Draft Budget October Budget Bill mid-January Equality Budget Statement (since 2009) Equality Budget Advisory Group