Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being…she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other. Simone de Beauvoir, 1949.
The otherness of women that Simone de Beauvoir described more than sixty-five years ago still plays out in international, global and UK economic and fiscal policy as lost opportunities, grinding poverty and premature death for millions of women and girls. The latest edition of Tax Justice Focus is concerned with raising the visibility of gender in the context of tax justice issues.
It is important to stress that gender inequality in relation to fiscal policy and tax is not an ‘untold’ story. On the contrary feminist commentators, economists, and lawyers have been writing about these issues for many years. Among them, Diane Elson has written extensively on gender and economic policy; Kathleen Lahey has drawn up blueprints for tax policy that takes gender justice seriously; and Mae Buenaventura has campaigned to give gender justice its proper weight in both national policy-making and in the global institutions. But too often policy-makers and the experts and lobbyists on whom they depend for advice have been able to ignore this work. Back in 2007 Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia argued in Tax Justice Focus that, while some progressive regimes acknowledged the importance of gender-sensitive budgeting, there were too few examples where revenue raising initiatives articulated equality. Gender, they argued, was ‘overlooked’ in favour of administrative simplification or goals set by the institutions of financial liberalisation.
