Raising Resources

Achieving gender equality and women’s rights requires expenditure on public services such as care, but also on social protection schemes or programmes that, for example, support women in old age, prevent violence against women and girls, provide reproductive healthcare, or promote a change in social norms related to gender roles and stereotypes.

Raising the necessary resources should be promoted as a deliberate political decision, reflecting the priority given to women’s lives to achieve gender equality.

GADN recommends that governments

• Raise revenue through progressive taxation designed from a gender equality perspective, and by curbing tax dodging by wealthy individuals and corporations.

• Evaluate spending, taxation and monetary policy for their effects on gender equality and women’s rights, and remedy if found to be detrimental.

• Use countercyclical macroeconomic policies to reduce the risk and impact of economic shocks, which disproportionately hit women.

• In negotiating trade and investment agreements, conduct ex ante and ex post gender impact assessments and ensure sufficient policy space is maintained for policies that protect and promote women’s rights.

More on the issue

• Making trade work for gender equality

• What needs to change to make trade policy work for gender equality?

• Realising women's rights: the role of public debt in Africa

GADN partners

• Gender and Trade Coalition

• Tax and Gender Working Group of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice

📷 Khamhla Tongburan and 15 other former factory garment workers now run their own enterprise. Bangkok, Thailand (September 2015) © Paula Bronstein/Getty Images