See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/227802959

Integrating Gender into Government Budgets: A New Perspective

Article  in  Public Administration Review · May 2005

DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6210.2005.00452.x

CITATIONS READS

56 622

2 authors:

Marilyn Marks Rubin John R. Bartle

City University of New York - John Jay College of Criminal Justice University of Nebraska at Omaha
14 PUBLICATIONS   136 CITATIONS    43 PUBLICATIONS   281 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

NASA Aeronautics View project

Local Government Revenue Diversification View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Marilyn Marks Rubin on 14 September 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Marilyn Marks Rubin
John Jay College, City University of New York
John R. Bartle
University of Nebraska–Omaha

Special Report

Integrating Gender into Government Budgets:

A New Perspective

A government’s budget represents a statement of its priorities. During the past 25 years, the inter-
national community has recognized that gender equality is essential for sustainable economic growth
and full social development, and it has called upon nations to use their budgets to promote gender-
equitable resource allocation and revenue generation. More than 60 countries have answered this
call by implementing gender-responsive budgets at the national and subnational levels. However,
gender-responsive budgeting is virtually unheard of among public finance scholars and U.S. public
administration scholars and practitioners. Here we define gender-responsive budgeting, discuss
the need for it, describe the lessons learned, and discuss its potential as a budget reform. We hope
our commentary will bring gender-responsive budgeting into the mainstream of research in the
U.S. public administration community and into the practice of government budgeting.

Over the past 25 years, the movement toward gender
equity has gained momentum in countries throughout the
world (Elson 2002a). The international community of na-
tions has publicly committed itself to promoting gender
equity, reflecting the realization that the equality of men
and women is essential for sustainable economic growth
and full social development (Hewitt and Mukhopadhyay
2002; Klasen 1999). In 1979, the U.N. General Assembly
adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)—sometimes
referred to as the “international bill of rights for women.”
CEDAW defined what constitutes gender discrimination
and set an agenda for national action to end it (UNDAW
2004). By October 2004, 179 of the 191 U.N. member
nations were party to CEDAW, and an additional nation
had bound itself to do “nothing in contravention of its
terms” (UNDAW 2004). In 1995, representatives of 171
governments at the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women,
held in Beijing, reaffirmed CEDAW’s commitment to end
discrimination against women.
Both the CEDAW signatories and Beijing conference
participants identified the equal treatment of women and
men in government budgets as central to the achievement
of gender parity. The platform for action adopted in Beijing
specifically called on governments to “incorporate a gen-
der perspective into the design, development, adoption and
execution of all budgetary processes as appropriate in or-
der to promote equitable, effective and appropriate resource
allocation and establish adequate budgetary allocations to
support gender equality” (United Nations 1995). Several
terms, including “women’s budgets,” “gender budgets,”
“gender-sensitive budgets,” and “gender-responsive bud-
gets,” have been used to describe public budgets that in-
corporate a gender perspective into their processes.
In this article we use the term “gender-responsive bud-
get” to denote a government budget that explicitly inte-
grates gender into any or all parts of the decision-making
Marilyn Marks Rubin is a professor of public administration and economics
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, where
she is the director of the MPA program. She has published articles in Public
Administration Review and Public Budgeting and Finance and has authored
chapters in books related to public finance and economic development. She
is a former chair of the Association for Budgeting and Financial Manage-
ment. E-mail: mmr2@optonline.com.
John R. Bartle is a professor in the School of Public Administration at the
University of Nebraska–Omaha. His teaching and research focuses on pub-
lic finance policy and management, public budgeting, transportation, and
applied economics. He is the editor of Evolving Theories of Public Budgeting
(Elsevier, 2001) and chair-elect of the Association for Budgeting and Finan-
cial Management. E-mail: jbartle@mail.unomaha.edu.

Special Report 259

process regarding resource allocation and revenue genera-
tion. We use the term “gender-responsive budget initiative”
to include (1) the actual integration of a gender perspec-
tive into budget decisions at the national or subnational
level of government, and (2) an organized movement to
influence government to incorporate a gender perspective
into its budget decisions. Thus defined, more than 60 coun-
tries have undertaken gender-responsive budgeting initia-
tives at the national or subnational levels of government
(Budlender and Hewitt 2003). In the United States, the only
government to explicitly use gender-responsive budgeting
as part of its budget decision-making process is the City of
San Francisco.
The near absence of gender-responsive budgeting in the
United States is matched by the virtually nonexistent refer-
ences to it in the public budgeting and finance literature
(Orosz 2001). Neither has the emerging literature on femi-
nist approaches to public administration explicitly addressed
gender in relation to budgeting.1 The literature outside public
administration, particularly in the international arena, is
more extensive in its work on gender-responsive budget-
ing. However, gender-responsive budgeting is still a rela-
tively new topic, reliant on relatively few researchers and
in need of additional study, especially relating to its suc-
cesses and failures. Debbie Budlender, Diane Elson, and
Rhonda Sharp are three prominent contributors to the con-
cept, research, and practice of gender-responsive budget-
ing, and they are cited extensively throughout the gender
budgeting literature and in our article.2
Almost all of the research related to gender-responsive
budgeting has taken a normative approach, promoting its
use as a way to advance gender equality. Cagatay et al.
write that “the ultimate goal of these various [gender] bud-
get initiatives is to come up with reprioritization of both
expenditures and revenue-raising methods in order to pro-
mote social justice” (2000, 14). While we fully support
the use of gender-responsive budgeting to promote gender
equity, this article intends to move the discussion in a dif-
ferent direction by examining its potential for budget re-
form, following a long line of efforts to effectuate changes
in the budget decision-making process: planning program-
ming budget systems, management by objectives, zero-
based budgeting, and performance budgeting.3 The sec-
ond purpose of this article is to bring the discussion of
gender-responsive budgeting into the mainstream of de-
bate in the public finance community and in the commu-
nity of public administration scholars and practitioners in
the United States.4 The first two sections of the article de-
velop a rationale for gender-responsive budgeting and de-
scribe some of the initiatives that have already been un-
dertaken. The third section looks at gender-budgeting tools,
and the final section assesses the potential of gender-re-
sponsive budgeting as a budget reform.
260 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3
Why a Gender-Responsive Budget?
A public budget sets forth a government’s priorities by
showing what it intends to spend over a specified period of
time and how it will allocate and finance those expendi-
tures. Government budgets are generally presented in fi-
nancial aggregates, with no specific references to men or
women. As such, the budget appears to be gender neutral.
But if revenue and expenditure decisions have differential
impacts on men and women, the budget is not gender neu-
tral; to ignore the differences constitutes what has been
termed “gender blindness” (Elson 1999). Government poli-
cies that intentionally treat men and women differently ob-
viously are not meant to be gender blind. One example is
the Maternal and Child Health Services Program, estab-
lished by the U.S. Congress in 1935 as Title V of the Social
Security Act. As its name suggests, the program specifi-
cally funds programs related to the health of women and
children. Gender blindness specifically refers to the unin-
tended impacts of budget policies that occur because of
economic and social differences between men and women.
Labor Force Factors: An Illustration of
Economic Factors and Budget Impacts
Women’s more discontinuous work histories—that is,
their greater likelihood of holding part-time jobs and, when
working full-time, earning less than men—may result in
differential gender impacts on both the revenue and ex-
penditure sides of public budgets (Barnett and Grown
2004). On the expenditure side, for example, the level of
retirement payments from governments to individuals en-
rolled in mandatory participation programs is generally
determined by the number of years worked or by lifetime
earnings.5 Because women usually earn less than men (and
are more likely to have interrupted work lives), they con-
tribute less to their retirement funds and thus receive lower
average social insurance payments upon retirement. For
example, in 2003 the average monthly Social Security ben-
efit for a retired man in the United States was $1,008 and
$775 for a retired woman (NCPSSM 2004). Women may,
of course, receive overall higher lifetime retirement ben-
efits because they have longer average life spans.
A review of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Rec-
onciliation Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2001,
illustrates unintended differential gender impacts on the
revenue side of the budget. Among other changes, the 2001
law reduced personal income tax rates, cutting, for instance,
the 39.6 percent rate to 35 percent. But the cuts did not
have an equal impact across the board. They “increased …
after-tax income by 6.3 percent for households in the top
one percent of the income distribution, compared to 2.8
percent or less for other groups, and less than one percent
for the bottom quintile” (Gale and Potter 2002). In 1999,
of the 105.5 million households in the United States, only
0.5 percent of those with earnings over $200,000 were
headed by a female (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). At the
opposite end of the income spectrum, female-headed house-
holds accounted for 18.5 percent of all households with
annual incomes under $10,000. The 2001 tax reductions
were not meant to favor male-headed households; rather,
the reality of the income distribution meant they did so,
and the impact of the budget decision was not gender blind.
Family Responsibilities: An Illustration of Social
Characteristics and Budget Impacts
Worldwide and through the ages, women have gener-
ally had primary responsibility for child care and for the
care of the elderly and other dependent persons. This work,
in what is known as the “care economy,” pays very low or
no wages (Elson 1999), and the concentration of women
in it has contributed to gender inequities on both sides of
the budget (Barnett and Grown 2004). In general, the pres-
ence of children increases unpaid work more for women
than for men. For example, in New Zealand from 1995 to
1999, women with no children spent 34 hours per week on
unpaid work, but 50 hours per week if they had children.
In contrast, the hours spent by men on unpaid work were
no different whether they had children or not (Barnett and
Grown 2004). In South Africa, “women with children liv-
ing with them spend an average of 87 minutes a day on
child care, compared to seven minutes for men in this po-
sition” (Budlender, Chobokoane, and Mpetsheni 2001, 26).
In 1995, the U.N. Development Programme estimated the
annual value of women’s unpaid labor worldwide to be
$11 trillion (Balmori 2003).
Gender differences related to the care economy may
result in unintended budget impacts on men and women.
As Sharp writes, “the treatment of paid and unpaid care
activities and work has a critical bearing on whether the
government budgets and policies have positive or negative
impacts on gender equality” (2003, 47). For instance, re-
ductions in health care spending are likely to increase the
amount of time that women spend in care-related work to
compensate for lost public services. In Zambia, when real
per capita health expenditures declined 16 percent between
1983 and 1985, women reported they had to increase the
time they spent taking care of sick family members
(Budlender 2002). Implementing gender-responsive bud-
geting can help to correct gender blindness on both sides
of the budget and can “raise awareness among stakehold-
ers of gender issues and impacts embedded in budgets and
policies” (Sharp 2003, 9).
Gender-Responsive Budget Initiatives
The first gender-responsive budget initiative was under-
taken in Australia at the federal level in 1984 and fully
executed in 1985. It was implemented to address perva-
sive gender inequities by “mainstreaming” gender analy-
sis into central policy processes, including the public bud-
get process (Sawer 2002). What would come to be known
as the “Women’s Budget Statement” required all depart-
ments and agencies in the federal government to submit
in-depth reports demonstrating the impact of their programs
on women. They were also required to identify methods to
improve program outcomes in meeting the needs of women
(Budlender and Hewitt 2002). In time, all of Australia’s
states and territories would follow the central government’s
lead and implement their own gender-budgeting initiatives.
While the Australian initiative did not prove to have a last-
ing impact at the federal level, there is evidence it contin-
ues to inform budget decisions at the state and territory
levels (Sawer 2002).
The Australian experience brought international atten-
tion to gender-responsive budgeting as a way to address
gender inequities, although it took a decade before the
next initiatives were undertaken in South Africa and in
the Philippines. The initiative in South Africa was under-
taken in 1995, spearheaded by the Women’s Budget Ini-
tiative, a partnership of two policy-based research non-
governmental organizations and newly elected members
of Parliament (primarily female), along with the Gender
and Economic Policy Group of the parliamentary Com-
mittee on Finance (Budlender 1998, 2003; Budlender and
Hewitt 2002). Although it started out slowly, the Women’s
Budget Initiative analyzed budgets for all 27 ministries
covered by the national government, as well as the bud-
gets of several subnational governments, and it published
its results annually. The group also prepared materials to
inform the gender-budgeting initiative, including the
“Money Matters” guide, which would eventually be trans-
lated into several languages and used in countries through-
out the world. The collaboration of research-based non-
governmental organizations with members of Parliament
provided the latter with the information they needed to
carry the gender-responsive budgeting message to legis-
lative decision makers (Budlender 1998, 2003; Budlender
and Hewitt 2002).
The gender-responsive budgeting initiative in the Phil-
ippines also began in 1995 as part of a gender and devel-
opment movement. The nation’s General Appropriations
Act, which approves the national budget, required all na-
tional agencies to set aside 5 percent of their budgets for
gender and development. In 1998, local governments were
required to do likewise (Flor and Lizares-Si 2002). This 5
percent allocation “was meant to provide national agen-
cies and local governments … with a budget for program-
mes that would enhance the … capability for gender sen-
sitive planning and budgeting” (Flor and Lizares-Si 2002,
98).
Special Report 261
 The Australian, South African, and Philippine experi- sons relate to the following:
ences have been followed by gender-responsive budgeting • Buy-in and commitment from both government and civil
initiatives throughout the world (table 1). Some have origi- society stakeholders
nated in government, but most have been undertaken by • Level of government at which gender-responsive
civil society groups, generally nongovernmental organi- budgeting is undertaken
zations working to promote gender equity. In some coun- • Political environment in which the initiative is introduced
tries, gender-responsive budgeting has actually been inte- and sustained
grated into one or more phases of the budget cycle at the • Stage of the budget cycle into which gender-responsive
national or subnational levels of government. In other coun- budgeting is integrated
tries, the initiatives are still in their formative stages in • Availability of technical expertise and data disaggregated
which gender analysis of one or more government pro- by gender.
grams has been conducted or workshops held for groups
such as government workers, nongovernmental organiza- Preliminary Lessons Learned
tions, and other representatives of civil society. Interna- Buy-in of Government and Civil Society Stakehold-
tional and bilateral donors have funded a number of these ers. The integration of the gender perspective with public
workshops as part of their overall capacity-building efforts budgets requires government decision makers to acknowl-
in developing and in-transition countries.6 edge gender inequities in society and to see budget policy
as a way to promote equal treatment of men and
Table 1 Countries That Have Undertaken Gender-Budgeting women. Gender-responsive budgeting initia-
Initiatives at the National or Subnational Level of Government tives undertaken in Australia, the Philippines,
Africa Americas Asia Europe Middle East Pacific Rwanda, and several countries in the Andean
Botswana Barbados Afghanistan Austria Israel Australia region illustrate this point. In Australia, elec-
Egypt Belize Bangladesh Croatia Lebanon Fiji tions during the early 1970s brought a new gov-
Kenya Bolivia India France Marshall
Islands
ernment into office that was committed to mak-
Malawi Brazil Indonesia Germany Samoa ing government more responsive to women’s
Mauritius Canada Malaysia Ireland needs (Sawer 2002). Feminists, referred to as
Morocco Chile Nepal Italy “femocrats,” were recruited to work for the new
Mozambique Ecuador Pakistan Former Yugoslav
republics
government to implement its campaign com-
Namibia El Salvador Philippines Norway mitment to gender equity. The budget came to
Nigeria Mexico Sri Lanka Republic of be seen as critical to achieving this equity. Sawer
Macedonia writes, “In line with their commitment to main-
Rwanda Peru Thailand Russian
Federation streaming, Australian femocrats became in-
Senegal St. Kitts-Nevis Vietnam Scotland creasingly concerned with the need for an ef-
South Africa United States Serbia and fective way to mainstream gender perspectives
Montenegro and gender accountability into budgetary pro-
Swaziland Spain
Tanzania Switzerland
cesses” (2002, 45). The Philippines initiative
Uganda United Kingdom was also part of an overall national and subna-
Zambia tional government campaign to address ac-
Zimbabwe knowledged gender inequities in society and to
Source: Budlender and Hewitt (2003, 7). democratize government (Flor and Lizares-Si
Note: Table 1 is based on 2003 information, and therefore may not present an exact picture of current
conditions. It is difficult to determine whether other countries have undertaken gender-responsive bud- 2002).
get initiatives for several reasons, including our reliance on publicly available data and the timing of Government’s commitment to use the bud-
our research.
get to achieve gender equity has also been a criti-
Because of our reliance on publicly available sources, cal element in the Andean region, where several initiatives
many of which are not kept current, we have not yet fully are under way. And in Rwanda, the president and other
documented the initiatives by stage of implementation or leaders struggling to put their country back together after
evaluated their success. However, we have identified sev- years of civil war and genocide are using gender budget-
eral commonalities among the initiatives that have led to ing as one way to bring about government reform and to
preliminary lessons learned. While additional research is address gender inequities and poverty (Diop-Tine 2002).
needed to provide more empirical evidence relating to gen- Diop-Tine, an economist and gender expert working in
der-responsive budgeting, we believe these preliminary Rwanda, writes, “The government’s political will was il-
lessons can inform future efforts to integrate gender into lustrated … by the establishment in 1999 of the Ministry
the budget decision-making process. The preliminary les- of Gender and Women in Development” (2002, 118).

262 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3

 However, if government’s commitment to gender eq-
uity is crucial for gender-responsive budgeting acceptance,
so, too, is the need for stakeholders outside government to
take ownership of and advocate for its acceptance. When
gender-responsive budgeting initiatives begin outside gov-
ernment, it is obvious that support exists, at least in its
early stages. However, when a gender-budgeting initiative
is undertaken by the government, this is not always the
case. For example, gender-responsive budgeting was initi-
ated in Australia by the government, but was never really
able to coalesce Australia’s feminist nongovernmental or-
ganizations and women in civil society (Sawer 2002). This
lack of support was one of the main reasons that gender-
responsive budgeting was eventually watered down, at least
at the federal level (Sawer 2002)
Level of Government. Most gender-responsive budget-
ing initiatives have been introduced at the national level
of government. However, initiatives have also been un-
dertaken at the subnational level in Australia, South Af-
rica, and the Philippines. In Australia, states and territo-
ries followed the lead of the national government in
establishing gender-budgeting initiatives, and, even when
the national initiative faltered, there is evidence that lower
levels of government continued their own initiatives
(Sawer 2002). The South African experience is generally
cited as one of the more successful gender-responsive
budgeting initiatives, although Budlender wrote in 2002
that “at this stage there is very little activity inside gov-
ernment” (Budlender and Hewitt 2002, 129). More re-
cently, she has stated that gender-responsive budgeting is
beginning to gain momentum in South Africa, especially
at the subnational level. Gauteng Province, the wealthiest
in South Africa, has used a gender-responsive budget ap-
proach for its last two budgets. 7
Several gender-responsive budgeting initiatives are un-
der way in local governments in the Andean region of South
America (Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) as part of overall
government reform and decentralization (UNIFEM 2003).
In 2001, the city parliament in Berlin, Germany, introduced
gender budgeting starting in selected city districts and for
selected expenditures (German Agency for Technical Co-
operation 2004).
The implementation of gender-responsive budgeting at
the subnational level is consistent with the worldwide
movement toward the decentralization of budgeting func-
tions from the national to subnational levels of govern-
ment, where residents are more likely to engage with deci-
sion makers (Bellemy 2002; World Bank 2005). In many
countries where decentralization involves devolution, a lack
of technical capacity at the subnational level may make it
more difficult to implement gender-responsive budgeting.
And in countries where decentralization involves deconcen-
tration, national government priorities concerning gender-
responsive budgeting (or lack thereof) obviously will af-
fect what happens at the subnational level.8
Political Environment. The political environment and
social values that are in place when gender-budgeting ini-
tiatives are undertaken is an important factor affecting its
acceptance. South Africa’s gender-responsive budgeting
initiative was undertaken at the same time that apartheid
was ending, bringing massive social and political changes
to the country and a substantial increase in the number of
members of Parliament (especially women) who saw bud-
geting as a way to increase gender and racial equality. As
mentioned earlier, gender budgeting has also made inroads
in Rwanda, where a new president is struggling to put to-
gether a government in the wake of years of civil war and
genocide (Diop-Tine 2002).
In the United States, the only government to implement
a gender-responsive budget is San Francisco, a city that is
generally recognized for its progressive policies toward
women and minorities and the only government in the
United States to adopt a CEDAW ordinance. Adopted in
1998 by the Board of Supervisors (the city’s legislative
branch), San Francisco’s CEDAW ordinance requires the
city to protect human rights and to act to eliminate dis-
crimination against women and girls. The 1998 ordinance
also established a CEDAW task force to assist in the imple-
mentation of all aspects of the law (San Francisco Com-
mittee on the Status of Women 2000).
In 2003, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution
specifically requesting that city departments integrate, ana-
lyze, and quantify, where possible, the impact of proposed
fiscal year 2004 budget cuts on selected groups, including
women (City and County of San Francisco 2003a). While
most departments responded that they did not expect dis-
parate gender impacts, some reported they did. For instance,
the Department of Human Services estimated that about
two out of every three persons affected by the projected
budget cuts would be women (City and County of San Fran-
cisco 2003b).
Stages of the Budget Cycle. Each of the four phases of
the budget process—preparation, legislative consideration,
execution, and audit and evaluation—provides the poten-
tial for integrating gender budgeting into the decision-mak-
ing process (table 2). Budget preparation, the first phase
of the budget process, is generally the responsibility of the
executive branch of government. Gender-responsive bud-
geting may enter this phase in a number of ways: in bud-
get preparation guidelines to departments, in agency de-
liberations, and in final decision making by the chief
executive.
Several governments, including those in India, Nepal,
Mexico, Tanzania, Uganda, and Egypt, have included gen-
der-specific language in their general budget guidelines
(UNIFEM 2003). In Tanzania, for example,
Special Report 263
 Table 2 Integrating Gender-Responsive Budgeting into the Budget taken hold in legislative decision making
Process (UNIFEM 2003). However, several efforts are
Stage of the Potential under way to bring gender-responsive budget-
budget process ing into the legislative budget process. For
Budget preparation 1. Gender-specific budget initiatives set forth in the chief example, the U.N. Development Fund for
executive’s budget policy
2. Gender policies incorporated into overall budget guidelines
Women (UNIFEM) is working with India’s
and instructions from the central budget office national parliament to formulate gender-re-
3. Gender-specific priorities set for budget allocations within sponsive guidelines for the disbursement of
departments for specific agencies.
discretionary resources to members of parlia-
Budget approval 1. Creation of specific gender guidelines for expenditure and
revenue legislation in the overall framework for legislative
ment (UNIFEM 2003). It has also worked with
decision making the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the World
2. Integration of gender-specific language in legislation establish- Bank Institute to publish a handbook for par-
ing new programs and agencies
3. Use of gender-responsive budgeting guidelines in allocating
liaments that are interested in bringing gen-
discretionary resources der into the decision-making process. Accord-
4. Incorporation of gender outcomes into fiscal notes accompany- ing to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an
ing new spending and revenue legislation.
international organization of 140 sovereign
Budget execution 1. Creation of guidelines for spending where there is discretion
given to departments by legislative bodies states’ parliaments (and five affiliate mem-
2. Development of gender guidelines for outsourcing, procure- bers), the handbook is “[i]ntended as a refer-
ment, and grant disbursement ence tool … sets out practical examples of
3. Implementation of gender goals in staffing.
parliament’s active engagement in the budget-
Audit and evaluation 1. Incorporation of a gender dimension into financial audits that ary process. It seeks to advance parliament’s
focus on expenditures and compliance
2. Incorporation of a gender dimension into performance audits own institutional capacity to make a positive
that focus on outputs and outcomes impact on the budget, and to equip parliament,
3. Audit for compliance with gender goals and guidelines. its members and parliamentary staff with the
necessary tools to examine the budget from a
[T]he Year 2000–01 budget guidelines gave the man- gender perspective” (IPU 2004).
date to all Ministries, Department and Agency After the budget has been approved, it enters the third
(MDA) to prepare their budgets with gender phase, budget execution, when budget plans are put into
mainstreaming objectives in mind. A Checklist docu- operation. To the extent that departments have discretion
ment … was also developed for the Ministry of Fi- to allocate resources among programs, gender-responsive
nance to guide budgetary planners and technocrats budgeting can inform allocation and other decisions dur-
in the government to mainstream gender into all parts ing the execution phase. Administrative directives may also
of the process and tools were developed … to guide influence the allocation of funds. Gender-responsive bud-
planners and Budget Officers in the collection of geting initiatives have yet to achieve major success in en-
gender-disaggregated data for budgeting purposes.”
tering this phase of the budget cycle, although efforts are
(TGNP 2004)
under way in several countries, such as Mexico and India,
Once the budget is prepared, it enters the approval or to bring gender explicitly into decisions regarding budget
legislative phase, when gender-responsive budgeting again execution (UNIFEM 2003).
has the potential to be integrated in several ways. Specific Most gender-responsive initiatives have focused on au-
gender guidelines could be promulgated for expenditure dit and evaluation, the fourth and final phase of the budget
and revenue legislation within the overall framework of cycle. A gender dimension can be incorporated into finan-
legislative action or in language establishing new programs cial audits that focus on expenditures and compliance and
and agencies. During this phase of the budget cycle, deci- into performance audits that focus on results. Katherine
sions may entail extensive debate over the executive plan, Rake of the U.K. Women’s Budget Group writes, “a gen-
or they may be largely pro forma. The latter is more likely der audit of policy and expenditures offers a unique op-
to be the case in parliamentary governments, where the portunity to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the
same political party controls the executive and legislative Government’s social and economic programme” (2000,
functions. 117). In Victoria, Australia, for example, “community-
While members of legislatures, especially women, have based gender audits have achieved some success” (Sawer
played important advocacy roles in several gender-respon- 2002, 63). And in South Africa, a 1997 evaluation of the
sive budgeting initiatives, including those in South Africa, Community Based Public Works Program “formed the ba-
Uganda, and Scotland (Budlender and Hewitt 2002), there sis of the Department’s current plans to fine-tune the pro-
is little evidence that gender-responsive budgeting has yet gram and further improve targeting” (Elson 2002b).

264 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3

 Technical Expertise and Data Availability. Most coun-
tries do not collect disaggregated revenue or expenditure
data, a basic requirement if gender-responsive budgeting
is to be incorporated into the budget process. Without gen-
der-disaggregated data, changes in government budget
policies can have unintended gender impacts. For example,
if women depend on public transport more than men, de-
creased spending on government-supported buses and
trains will have a differential gender impact. In develop-
ing countries, the lack of relevant data, particularly gen-
der-disaggregated data, has been identified as a serious
impediment to implementing gender-responsive budget-
ing (Balmoni 2003).
Not only is the lack of disaggregated data a challenge,
so, too, is the lack of budget expertise in government and
civil society. In many cases, outside experts have to be
brought in to lead gender-responsive budgeting initiatives;
these experts are not necessarily familiar with the internal
culture and politics of a country or region. For example, in
Sri Lanka, participants in an externally funded gender-bud-
geting workshop (some of whom were already familiar with
gender-responsive budgeting) felt the information presented
by the outside consultants was not specifically tailored to
their needs (Budlender 2003).
Gender-Budgeting Tools
Once a decision has been made to integrate gender into
the budget, analytical tools must be developed and applied
to determine the differential impact of spending and rev-
enue decisions on men and women. In this section, we
briefly describe some of these tools and provide some il-
lustrations of where they have been used.
Expenditures
Gender-responsive budgeting initiatives have generally
focused on the expenditure side of the budget (UNIFEM
2003). In fact, the “Beijing platform” explicitly encour-
ages governments to “make efforts to systematically re-
view how women benefit from public sector expenditures;
and adjust budgets to ensure equality of access to public
sector expenditures, both for enhancing productive capac-
ity and for meeting social needs” (United Nations 1995).
The conceptual framework for analyzing the impact of gov-
ernment expenditures on different groups dates back more
than 100 years, when Knut Wicksell pioneered differential
incidence analysis to analyze the impact of government
spending by income group (Musgrave 1959). In recent
years, this technique has been extended to analyze the dif-
ferential impacts of government spending by gender.
Budlender and Sharp (1998) were pioneers in establish-
ing a framework for analyzing the gender impact of gov-
ernment expenditures. They use three spending categories
to determine how women benefit from public-sector ex-
penditures: (1) expenditures that are specifically identified
as gender based; (2) equal opportunity expenditures that
are designed to change the gender profile of the workforce;
and (3) mainstream expenditures. The differential impacts
of the first two spending categories should be obvious. The
third category, which constitutes the bulk of government
spending, is the primary challenge. Elson (2002a) suggests
a variety of techniques to address this challenge, including
expenditure incidence analysis, gender-aware policy ap-
praisal, gender-responsive budget statements, beneficiary
assessments, and time-use studies.
Expenditure Incidence Analysis. Expenditure inci-
dence analysis compares the impact of specific govern-
ment expenditures on women and girls with the impact
on men and boys. When applied to public expenditures
on education in Ghana, expenditure incidence analysis
found that “women … benefit less from spending at all
levels of education” (Budlender and Sharp 1998). This
differential impact was also found in Pakistan and in Kenya
(Budlender and Sharp 1998). When undertaking expendi-
ture incidence analysis, a difference must be drawn be-
tween the initial impact of a public expenditure and its
incidence, or actual economic effect.9 Failure to consider
this difference may result in a misleading assessment of
gender impacts. For instance, in a maternal and child health
care clinic that is staffed entirely by men, the initial im-
pact would be direct spending on wages—100 percent
male, 0 percent female. However, the primary beneficia-
ries of the expenditure are women and children, so the
incidence would reflect the economic benefit of the pro-
gram to these beneficiaries.
Gender-Aware Policy Appraisal. Gender-aware policy
appraisal determines whether current policies are likely to
reduce or increase gender inequities. One illustration of
this technique is the analysis undertaken in South Africa
to identify the gender impact of that country’s land reform
program. The policy failed to recognize the legal restric-
tions that prevented many women from having effective
access to land, as well as the financial resources needed to
develop the land. As a result, women were not able to ben-
efit from the land reform policy as it was originally en-
acted. In response to this concern, the Department of Land
Affairs began to integrate gender concerns into its policy
monitoring and evaluation systems (Elson 2002a, 44).
Gender-Responsive Budget Statements. Gender-re-
sponsive budget statements require departments to iden-
tify how expenditures affect gender equality using a vari-
ety of indicators. The Commonwealth Secretariat has
identified several indicators that can be used for gender-
responsive budgeting statements to monitor resource allo-
cation and to link resources to policies and goals (Elson
2002a, 47).
Special Report 265
 Beneficiary Assessments. Beneficiary assessments ask
potential or actual program beneficiaries to assess how well
programs have or will meet their needs. This can be done
using focus groups, surveys, interviews, or polls. In Sri
Lanka, for example, focus group meetings with poor
women living in urban and rural areas revealed that while
educational facilities were available, poverty constrained
their access to good schools and vocational training
(Budlender and Sharp 1998).
Time-Use Studies. Gender analysis incorporating time-
use studies relies on surveys to calculate the effect of bud-
getary changes on the daily time use of men and women.
This can identify the false economies of a budgetary re-
duction in which care costs are shifted from the public sec-
tor to individuals. As mentioned previously, the reduction
in public spending on health care in Zambia between 1983
and 1985 caused women to increase their time spent as
care givers.
Generally, gender-responsive budgeting initiatives have
not been comprehensive, but have analyzed specific parts
of the budget using these techniques. A full-fledged gen-
der-responsive budget would require measuring gender
impacts for all functions of government, including seem-
ingly gender-neutral expenditures such as fire protection
and infrastructure construction and repair. “The Gender
Impact of Government Spending” box shows the results
of a gender-responsive budgeting effort in San Francisco
that assessed the gender dimensions of spending in its
Department of Public Works.
Box 1 The Gender Impact of Government Spending:
An Illustration from the City of San Francisco
In April 1998, departments of the City and County of San Francisco gov-
ernment were required to apply gender analysis to budget allocations,
service delivery, and employment practices (San Francisco Commission
on the Status of Women 2000). Two departments were selected as pilot
cases: the Department of Public Works and the Juvenile Probation Depart-
ment, both examples of Elson and Sharp’s “mainstream” government spend-
ing. The San Francisco CEDAW Task Force and the Commission on the
Status of Women jointly authored Guidelines for a Gender Analysis for
departments’ use in implementing the ordinance. The guidelines identified
five steps: (1) collecting disaggregated data, (2) conducting the gender
analysis, (3) formulating recommendations, (4) implementing recommen-
dations through an action plan, and (5) monitoring the action plan and
CEDAW implementation. Step two required departments to “Identify prac-
tices that promote the human rights of women and girls.… Identify prac-
tices that may limit the human rights of women and girls” (San Francisco
Committee on the Status of Women 2000, 10). This is essentially the appli-
cation of Elson’s gender-aware policy appraisal.
The San Francisco Department of Public Works has completed two gender-
analysis reports, the original in 1999 and an update in 2001. The depart-
ment reported that “[s]ince the department conducted its gender analysis in
1999, there has been more awareness of the gender effects of service deliv-
ery” (San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women 2001, 1).
Himmelweit further suggests that a comprehensive gen-
der-responsive budget analysis would “require examining
not only a policy’s direct distributional effects on gender
inequalities, but also its higher-order impacts on men’s and
266 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3
women’s behavior” (2001, 2). As far as we are aware, no
gender analyses have done this, although they certainly could
in the future, as this is a standard tool of tax incidence analy-
sis. The tools of expenditure analysis are, therefore, devel-
oping as expected for a relatively new reform. While there
is room for improvement, the goal is not to develop perfect
techniques for expenditure analysis, but to improve the gen-
der equity of service delivery and budget determination.
Revenues
Most gender-responsive budgeting initiatives have not
focused on the revenue side of the budget, with a few
exceptions such as the United Kingdom. When the U.K.
budget is initially released, the media focuses on revenues,
while spending is announced later with less publicity. In
addition, taxes are more broadly based and affect more
of the population than in most other countries (Budlender
2002). When countries do decide to focus on the revenue
side, they find that some revenues are more amenable to
gender-specific analysis than others. The following dis-
cussion looks at gender-responsive analysis as it relates
to the four major types of government revenues: direct
and indirect taxes, user charges and fees, intergovernmen-
tal revenues, and debt.
Direct Taxes. A gender-specific analysis of taxes that
are imposed directly on the taxpayer (such as the personal
income tax) reveal that unequal treatment of men and
women may result explicitly from the tax laws or implic-
itly through the differential impact of taxes on women and
men (Stoksky 1997). For example, an explicit gender bias
is evident in many countries where nonlabor income is al-
located only to the husband for income tax purposes. An
implicit bias may result from excise taxes if there are dif-
ferential patterns among men and women in the consump-
tion of taxed and untaxed goods. A comprehensive gender
analysis of taxes would have to disaggregate the gender
impact of every tax imposed by the government by under-
taking gender-responsive budgeting. Obviously, such an
analysis would be easiest for governments that impose only
one or a few taxes. For governments that impose several
taxes, the initial focus could be identifying major provi-
sions of the tax code that, a priori, have differential gender
impacts, such as child care deductions and marriage penal-
ties or bonuses as in the U.S. income tax code. In fact, as
Elson writes, “The … revenues to be covered are generally
selected in the light of analysis of the pattern of gender
inequality, women’s priorities, and government policy on
gender inequality in the country concerned” (2002b, 2).
Calculating the impact of direct taxes by gender requires
disaggregating data by taxpayer. Personal income taxes are
assessed on the taxpaying unit, which in some cases is the
individual, but in other cases is the family. When the fam-
ily is the taxpaying unit, total family income must be dis-
aggregated for individual family members, as well as ex-
emptions, credits, and other components of the tax. Be-
cause the U.S. government does not do this with income
taxes, current federal tax policy and data-collection meth-
ods do not permit the disaggregation of married-family tax
treatment by gender. However, nine states allow individual
filing and have these data available (Wisconsin Legisla-
tive Fiscal Bureau 2001).
Indirect Taxes. Indirect taxes are not imposed directly
on persons. They include the general sales tax; excise taxes
on alcohol, tobacco products, and gasoline; and all taxes
imposed on trade and businesses, such as the corporate
income tax. Because they are not imposed on the individual,
their gender impact is much more difficult to establish.
When applying gender analysis to the sales tax, for ex-
ample, the gender of the purchaser would have to be deter-
mined. This information is not usually recorded by the tax
collector (in most cases, the vendor). Samples of taxable
purchases could be used to compile this information. Again,
this analysis could be undertaken if there were a time and
funding commitment.
An interesting effort to estimate the gender impact of
indirect taxes was undertaken by Goldman (2000), who
looked at the proposed elimination of tariffs on certain
goods in South Africa. She found that industries with pro-
tective tariffs (such as clothing, agriculture, and food pro-
ducers) were likely to be most adversely affected by the
elimination of the tariffs. Because many of the workers in
these industries are women, there would be a differential,
if unintended, gender impact.
In the United States, a gender analysis of other indirect
taxes could be undertaken using the consumption patterns
of taxed goods by gender. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta-
tistics produces the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which
could be used as the data source for such an analysis. How-
ever, these data report consumption by household units,
which are disaggregated by gender for single persons but
not for households with two or more adults. The data for
single persons could be used with their limitations, or
samples or surveys of individuals could be undertaken.
For some indirect taxes it may not be possible to deter-
mine differential gender impacts. This is true not only with
gender analysis, but with tax incidence analysis in gen-
eral. For example, there is a long-standing, unresolved
debate among public finance experts about the incidence
of the corporate income tax. As Mikesell writes, “Neither
theoretical nor empirical evidence is clear” on the inci-
dence of this tax (2003, 345). Just as with traditional fiscal
analysis, we may have to accept that, with regard to gen-
der budgeting, some conceptual issues may take time to
resolve or may remain unresolved.
User Charges and Fees. Government revenues also
come from user fees and charges, that is, payments for vol-
untarily purchased goods and services sold or rented by
the government. User charges are becoming more preva-
lent throughout the world, and the International Monetary
Fund has even suggested they be used as a way to finance
basic social services such as water and electricity, in de-
veloping countries (Barnett and Grown 2004). Some pub-
lic finance experts have expressed the opinion that for lo-
cal governments, “the first rule … should be wherever
possible charge” (Bird 1993, 21).
Bird’s dictum is based on the potential of charges to
promote efficiency in service delivery. However, user
charges are generally regressive. Given that women’s in-
comes are usually lower than those of men, the decision to
impose user charges is not gender neutral. Additionally,
according to Palmer, in developing countries user charges
frequently exacerbate discrimination against girls with re-
spect to the provision of health care and education (Palmer
1995).
For some user charges, assessing the gender-specific
impact is possible, albeit time-consuming, if the data are
available to disaggregate payments by men and women.
For example, charges by state public universities—the
single largest source of user charge revenues for states in
the United States—could be disaggregated by gender
rather easily. On the other hand, admissions fees paid in
cash for the use of municipal facilities would require ei-
ther disaggregation at the collection level or, if this is not
feasible, estimation by random counts or analysis of con-
sumption data.
Intergovernmental Revenues. In countries with mul-
tiple levels of government, the central government usually
provides some form of financial assistance to subnational
governments. This assistance may take the form of trans-
fers and tax-base sharing, as well as direct spending. Inter-
governmental transfers can be subdivided into two catego-
ries: conditional grants (requiring the recipient government
to use the grant for specified purposes) and unconditional
grants.
Gender-impact analysis is more straightforward for con-
ditional grants. In some cases, the gender of the beneficia-
ries is actually set forth in the terms of the grant. For in-
stance, in a maternal care grant, the donor government may
specify which populations qualify for the grant and may
require the recipient government to report demographic
information. Thus, both the donor and recipient govern-
ments could tabulate the gender impact of this spending.
The recipient government can estimate the gender impact
of the grant revenue only if the gender impact of the donor
government’s budget is known. In other cases, the recipi-
ent government will have to identify the gender of the ben-
eficiaries. In both cases, gender-responsive analysis re-
quires a distinction to be made between the impact of the
grant and its incidence.
Special Report 267
 For unconditional aid the analysis can be even more
complicated. For example, tax sharing, a type of uncondi-
tional aid, distributes revenues from a specific central gov-
ernment tax to subnational governments based on the ori-
gin of collections of the national tax. The distribution can
be based on a statutory formula or on negotiations with
subnational governments. Both raise issues of transparency
and participation that are intensified when bringing in the
gender overlay.
The degree of decentralization of expenditure and rev-
enue responsibilities can also have important gender im-
pacts. Central governments generally use different types
of taxes than state, provincial, or municipal governments,
and the distribution of taxes and services is heavily influ-
enced by the degree of centralization. Barnett and Grown
(2004) state that in many countries, decentralization may
cause serious inequities because the taxes that subnational
governments use tend to be more regressive than those used
by central governments.
Debt. Throughout the world, central governments and
subnational governments, when permitted, borrow money
to finance public facilities and infrastructure, and some-
times to cover budget deficits. Of all types of revenues, the
differential gender impact of debt may be the most diffi-
cult to estimate. For general-obligation debt, a gender-im-
pact assessment would require estimates of the future tax
burdens borne by men and women. This is possible, even
though it would be speculative; however, any financial
analysis of long-term debt is inherently speculative. The
gender impact may be easier to estimate in the case of rev-
enue-backed debt because the revenue sources that repay
this type of debt are generally related to the project being
financed.
Most of the research related to the gender–debt nexus
has not focused on these and other analytical issues; in-
stead, it has focused on a more immediate problem in many
developing countries, especially in Africa—the impact on
women of staggering debt repayments to external lenders
(Kalima 2002).
Gender-Responsive Budgeting:
A Potential Budget Reform?
To this point, we have focused our discussion on gen-
der-responsive budgeting issues to provide a background
for considering the question posed at the beginning of this
article: Does gender-responsive budgeting have potential
as a budget reform? Our response is placed in the context
of the experiences of other budget reforms, particularly
those in the United States.
A key question for any budget reform is, “did the inno-
vation alter the basis for making budget decisions?” (Schick
1992, 91). Although conventional wisdom says that bud-
268 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3
get reform is difficult to implement, if not downright
“doomed to failure” (Wildavsky 1961), many reforms have
been implemented, in whole or in part, with varying names
and adaptations. Some have had lasting and fundamental
influence on government (Alexrod 1995). For example,
Schick and other budget experts believe that zero-based
budgeting, a reform introduced in the U.S. federal govern-
ment in 1972, “changed the terminology of budgeting but
nothing else” (Schick 1978, 178). But, elements of zero-
based budgeting continue to inform decision making in
the federal government’s budget in a number of agencies,
such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency
(Niu 2005), and in a number of ways, including “internal
priority ranking” (Mikesell 2003, 205). Additionally, 13
states and several local governments in the United States
use zero-based budgeting as part of their annual budget
process (NASBO 2002; Niu 2005).
Similarly, performance budgeting as a budget reform
has not always won accolades among public finance schol-
ars. However, in the United States in 2002, it was the for-
mat used by 21 states for compiling their budgets (NASBO
2002). On the federal level, Joyce found that when look-
ing at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget—the
executive branch agency responsible for preparing the
president’s budget—it would appear that performance bud-
geting has not altered decision making (Joyce 2003). His
examination of the other three phases of the federal bud-
get cycle showed otherwise. For example, at the budget-
execution phase, Joyce found that “agencies are using their
discretion to allocate resources in part based on perfor-
mance considerations. While congressional and presiden-
tial buy-in are important to performance-informed budget-
ing … substantial effects … can come from an agency’s
focus on performance during budget execution, with or
without the support of the Congress and the President” (32).
Joyce concludes that to know whether performance-in-
formed budgeting is reforming the federal budget process,
you have to look at decision making in all phases of the
budget cycle and within each phase. This also applies to
gender-responsive budgeting, which can enter into each
phase of the budget cycle. For example, during the legisla-
tive approval phase, gender-specific guidelines could be
included in the congressional budget resolution10 or as a
criterion in decisions to allocate discretionary resources.
Gender-responsive budgeting could also be brought into
the legislative decision-making process in the preparation
of “scorekeeping” or fiscal notes that are required at the
federal level and by many state and local governments to
accompany new legislation.
Joyce’s use of the term “performance-informed budget-
ing” is intentional, suggesting that it brings performance
information into the budget decision-making process, mak-
ing choices more informed but not necessarily making them
easier. So, too, could gender budgeting make choices more cal climate that is conducive to and accepting of change.
informed if not easier. A performance-based approach may We believe gender-responsive budgeting has the poten-
lend itself to the inclusion of gender concerns better than tial to address continuing gender inequities in our nation.11
the traditional line-item approach because the former per- We hope our commentary will open the discussion of gen-
mits the specific inclusion of the gender impacts of spend- der budgeting in the public finance community, among public
ing through performance measures. However, gender-re- administration feminist scholars, and among practitioners
sponsive budgeting can be integrated into all major budget of government budgeting. Further, we believe inequities that
formats—herein lies the critical difference between gen- are attributable to race, ethnicity, caste, class, and age can
der-responsive budgeting as a potential budget reform com- lead to economic and social disparities that may benefit from
pared with earlier reforms such as zero-based budgeting directed budget analysis. As Elson writes, “The focus on
(table 3). Gender-responsive budgeting does not require a gender inequality can be structured so as to take account of
totally new format; it requires that gender be included in other forms of inequality, such as class, race…. The key
the decision-making process regardless of the format. question might be reformulated, for example, as: does this
fiscal measure improve, worsen, or leave un-
Table 3 Illustration of Gender Integration into Various Budget Formats changed, the position of the most disadvantaged
Budget format Organizing mechanism Gender integration women?” (2002b, 1).
Line item Expenditures organized by Percentage of wages and How will we know whether gender-respon-
object of expenditure (inputs salaries to women
or resources purchased) sive budgeting has succeeded? This question
Percentage of contracts to
women-owned firms can be answered by using process and outcome
Performance Expenditures organized by Percentage of program measures that are focused on gender equity,
tasks, activities, outputs, or recipients who are female similar to measures that are already employed
outcomes Gender goals and objectives
incorporated into performance in performance budgeting. While Rhonda
measures Sharp (2003) has opened the discussion, ad-
Program Expenditure organized by Program impact by gender ditional work has to be undertaken to deter-
broad government objectives Program impact on gender-
(such as education or equity goals
mine exactly how we can define and measure
transportation) gender-responsive budgeting success.
Zero-based budgeting Expenditures organized by Gender impact at various Every budget reform has a normative em-
decision packages associated decision-making levels
with varying levels of funding phasis that seeks to reorient the budget pro-
cess and perhaps tilt budget outcomes in fa-
Forrester and Adams (1997, 472) write that “the suc- vor of those norms. The normative value of the current
cess of the budgetary reform, then, is dependent on indi- emphasis on performance budgeting seeks to reorient the
viduals’ acceptance of the reform as well as on their own budget process toward greater efficiency and accountabil-
willingness to change how they think and behave.” This ity in attaining program goals. The incorporation of gen-
statement, modified to include a political climate condu- der-equity objectives into performance measures may bal-
cive to change and acceptance on the part of stakeholders ance efficiency and equity more explicitly and, in the words
inside and outside government, is consistent with what we of Arthur Okun, “put some rationality into equality and
have learned from gender-responsive budgeting initiatives some humanity into efficiency” (1975, 120).
throughout the world. If stakeholders inside and outside
government see an equity gap and agree that it should be
closed; and if they are willing to change their thinking and Acknowledgments
behavior to close the gap; and if they are willing to assure
The authors wish to thank Debbie Budlender, Diane Elson,
the necessary funds and time to support gender-disaggre- Jeanne Marie Col, Philip Joyce, John Forrester, Marc Holzer,
gated data collection and analysis, then there is the poten- and Paul Posner for their comments on earlier drafts of this ar-
tial for gender-responsive budgeting to change budget de- ticle. Thanks also go to Shawyn Howard, a student in the John
cision making and to be a budget reform in the “Schick Jay College MPA program, for her many hours of research on
sense.” While there is potential for gender-responsive bud- gender-responsive budgeting initiatives throughout the world,
geting to provide a more gender-equitable distribution of and to anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.
government revenues and expenditures, so, too, are there The observations and conclusions presented here, however, do
significant challenges to its implementation. These include not necessarily represent any of the above.
the need for technical expertise and for gender-disaggre-
gated data that are not currently collected. Critical to the
success of gender-responsive budgeting is the buy-in of
stakeholders inside and outside government and a politi-

Special Report 269

 Notes
11. See, for example, Stivers (1993, 2000), White and Adams
(1995), and Hendricks (1995).
12. Debbie Budlender is a specialist researcher with the Com-
munity Agency for Social Enquiry in South Africa, a policy
research nongovernmental organization. She has been the
coordinator and editor of the South African Women’s Bud-
get Initiative since its inception and has acted as a consult-
ant on gender-responsive budgeting in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and Europe. Diane Elson, a professor at Essex
University in the United Kingdom, came to Essex in 2000
from a chair in development studies at Manchester Univer-
sity, via two years in New York working for UNIFEM. She
has authored numerous articles on women’s economic is-
sues, including gender budgeting, and has served as a con-
sultant to several countries in their gender-responsive bud-
geting efforts. Rhonda Sharp, a professor of economics at
the University of South Australia, is a leader in the interna-
tional and national field of feminist economics, both in
academia and applied policy work. She has authored many
articles and case studies on gender budgets and public ex-
penditure policy.
13. Several other “advocacy budgets” have been initiated in the
United States over the past 30 years, such as the children’s
budget in New York State during the 1970s and the “green
budgets” that have been proposed to evaluate the environ-
mental and ecological impact of governmental revenue and
expenditure decisions. (See www.iisd.org/greenbud/default.
htm for a summary of the green budget effort.)
14. Our discussion and correspondence with many public fi-
nance and public administration colleagues reveals that vir-
tually none had ever heard of gender budgeting.
References
Axelrod, Donald. 1995. Budgeting for Modern Government. 2nd
ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Balmori, Helena Hofbauer. 2003. Gender and Budgets: Over-
view Report. Brighton, UK: BRIDGE. www.ids.ac.uk/bridge/
reports/CEP-Budgets-reportw2.doc.
Barnett, Kathleen, and Caren Grown. 2004. Gender Impacts of
Government Revenue Collection—The Case of Taxation.
Economic Paper No. 62, Commonwealth Secretariat.
Bellemy, Kate. 2002. Gender Budgeting. Background Paper,
Council of Europe’s Informal Network of Experts on Gender
Budgeting. www.wbg.org.uk/GBA_Present.htm.
Bird, Richard. 1993. Threading the Fiscal Labyrinth: Some Is-
sues in Fiscal Decentralization. National Tax Journal 46(2):
207–27.
Budlender, Debbie. 1998. The South African Women’s Budget
Initiative. Background Paper No. 2, Community Agency for
Social Enquiry.
270 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3
15. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and
Medicare (2004) summarizes the retirement payment pro-
grams of various countries (see www.ncpssm.org).
16. Multinational funders include UNIFEM, the United Nations
Development Programme, the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the
Asian Development Bank. Bilateral donors include the U.K.
Department for International Development, the International
Development Research Center (Canada), the Swedish In-
ternational Development Agency, the Swiss Development
Corporation, and the German Technical Corporation. Pri-
vate funders include the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation,
and Mott Foundation.
17. Debbie Budlender e-mail correspondence to authors, Au-
gust 2004.
18. Devolution is a form of decentralization in which indepen-
dent subnational governments are given substantial respon-
sibility for service delivery and funding. With deconcentra-
tion, the responsibilities are distributed among different
levels of the central government.
19. See Rosen (1995, 274) and (Stiglitz, 2000, 483–84).
10. The congressional budget resolution is the U.S. budget for a
specific fiscal year, as set forth by Congress in a concurrent
resolution on the budget. The resolution includes the an-
nual congressional determination of the appropriate level
of federal revenues and expenditures.
11. The National Committee on Pay Equity (2004) presents an
informative discussion of gender inequities in income on its
Web site at www.pay-equity.org.
———. 2002. A Profile of Country Activities. In Gender Bud-
gets Make Cents: Understanding Gender Responsive Bud-
gets, edited by Debbie Budlender, Diane Elson, Guy Hewitt,
and Tanni Mukhopadhyay, 131–64. London: Commonwealth
Secretariat.
———. 2003. Review of Budget Initiatives. Cape Town, South
Africa: Community Agency for Social Enquiry.
Budlender, Debbie, N. Chobokoane, and Y. Mpetsheni. 2001. A
Survey of Time Use: How South African Women and Men
Spend Their Time. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa.
———. 2003. Engendering Budgets: A Practitioner’s Guide to
Understanding and Implementing Gender-Responsive Bud-
gets. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.
Budlender, Debbie, and Guy Hewitt. 2002. Gender Budgets Make
More Cents: Country Studies and Good Practices. London:
Commonwealth Secretariat.
Budlender, Debbie, and Rhonda Sharp, with Kerri Allen. 1998.
How to Do a Gender-Sensitive Budget Analysis. Canberra/
London: Australian Agency for International Development/
Commonwealth Secretariat.
Cagatay Nilufer, Mumtaz Keklik, Radhika Lal, and James Lang.
2000. Budgets as if People Mattered: Democratizing Macro-
economic Policies. Conference Paper No. 4, U.N. Develop-
ment Programme, Social Development and Poverty Elimina-
tion Division. www.undp.org/seped/publications/conf_pub.
htm.
City and County of San Francisco, Board of Supervisors. 2003a.
Resolution Urging City Departments to Consider a CEDAW
Gender Analysis and Impact on the City’s Equal Access to
City Services for Limited English Speakers Ordinance Prior
to Proposing Departmental Budget Cuts and/or Staff Cuts.
www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/resolutions03/
r0249-03.pdf.
———. 2003b. Summary of CEDAW Gender Analyses of Bud-
get Cuts. www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/uploadedfiles/dosw/programs/
CEDAW/Gender_Analysis_Reports/Departments%20
Summary%20Budget%20Cuts6-17-03.doc.
Diop-Tine, Ngone. 2002. Rwanda: Translating Government
Commitments into Action. In Gender Budgets Make More
Cents: Country Studies and Good Practices, edited by Debbie
Budlender and Guy Hewitt, 117–31. London: Commonwealth
Secretariat.
Elson, Diane. 1999. Gender-Neutral, Gender-Blind, or Gender-
Sensitive Budgets? Changing the Conceptual Framework to
Include Women’s Empowerment and the Economy of Care.
Gender Budget Initiative Background Papers. London: Com-
monwealth Secretariat.
———. 2002a. Integrating Gender into Government Budgets in
the Context of Economic Reform. In Gender Budgets Make
Cents: Understanding Gender Responsive Budgets, edited by
Debbie Budlender, Diane Elson, Guy Hewitt, and Tanni
Mukhopadhyay, 23–47. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.
———. 2002b. Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives: Some Key
Dimensions and Practical Examples. Paper presented at the
conference on Gender Budgets, Financial Markets, Financ-
ing for Development, February 19–20, Berlin, Germany. http:/
/e-education.uni muenster.de/boell/Elson.doc.
Flor, Celia, and Andrea Lizares-Si. 2002. The Philippines: Get-
ting Smart with Local Budgets. In Gender Budgets Make More
Cents: Country Studies and Good Practices, edited by Debbie
Budlender and Guy Hewitt, 98–116. London: Commonwealth
Secretariat.
Forrester, John P., and Guy B. Adams. 1997. Budget Reform
through Organizational Learning: Toward an Organizational
Theory of Budgeting. Administration and Society 28(4): 466–
88.
Gale, William G., and Samara R. Potter. 2002. The Bush Tax
Cut: One Year Later. Policy Brief No. 101, Brookings Insti-
tution. www.brookings.edu/comm/policybriefs/pb101.htm.
German Agency for Technical Co-operation. 2004. Gender Ad-
visory Project: The Berlin Initiative. www2.gtz.de/gender-
budgets/english/budgetinitiative_berlin.html.
Goldman, Tanya. 2000. Customs and Excise. In The Fifth
Women’s Budget, edited by Debbie Budlender. Cape Town,
South Africa: Idasa. www.idasa.org.za/pdf/940.pdf.
Hendricks J. J. 1995. A Response to Manichean Feminism. Ad-
ministration and Society 27(2): 290–95.
Hewitt, Guy, and Tanni Mukhopadhyay. 2002. Promoting Gen-
der Equality through Public Expenditure. In Gender Budgets
Make Cents: Understanding Gender Responsive Budgets,
edited by Debbie Budlender, Diane Elson, Guy Hewitt, and
Tanni Mukhopadhyay, 49–81. London: Commonwealth Sec-
retariat.
Himmelweit, Susan. 2001. Tools for Budget Impact Analysis:
Taxes and Benefits. Paper prepared for the UNIFEM-OECD-
Nordic Council-Government of Belgium High Level Confer-
ence, October 16–17, Brussels. www.worldbank.org/wbi/
publicfinance/documents/gender/himmelweit.pdf.
Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). 2004. Handbook: Parliament,
the Budget and Gender. Geneva, Switzerland: IPU. www.ipu.
org/english/handbks.htm#budget.
Joyce, Philip. 2003. Linking Performance and Budgeting: Op-
portunities in the Federal Budget Process. Managing for Per-
formance and Results Series. Washington, DC: IBM Center
for the Business of Government.
Kalima, Barbara. 2002. Gender and Debt. Paper presented at the
African Forum and Network on Debt and Development, June
27. www.genderandtrade.net/Africa/Gender_Debt.htm.
Klasen, Stephan. 1999. Does Gender Inequality Reduce Growth
and Development? Evidence From Cross-Country Regres-
sions. Gender and Development Working Paper No. 7, World
Bank. www.worldbank.org/gender/prr/wp7.pdf.
Mikesell, John L. 2003. Fiscal Administration: Analysis and
Applications for the Public Sector. 6th ed. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishers.
Musgrave, Richard A. 1959. The Theory of Public Finance. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO). 2002.
Budget Processes in the States. www.nasbo.org/Publications/
PDFs/budpro2002.pdf.
National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE). 2004. Still a Man’s
Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap. www.iwpr.org/
pdf/C355.pdf.
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
(NCPSSM). 2004. Women’s Social Security Benefits.
www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/vp_womenandss/.
Niu, Meili. 2005. Zero-Based Budgeting in China’s Local Gov-
ernments: A Multiple Case Study. Phd diss., University of
Nebraska–Omaha, School of Public Administration.
Okun, Arthur. 1975. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Orosz, Janet Foley. 2001. The Truth Is Out There: Is Post-Mod-
ern Budgeting the Real Deal? In Evolving Theories of Public
Budgeting, edited by John R. Bartle, 125–55. Amsterdam,
Netherlands: Elsevier Science.
Palmer, Ingrid. 1995. Public Finance from a Gender Perspec-
tive. World Development 23(11): 1981–86.
Rake, Katherine. 2000. Into the Mainstream? New Economy 7(2):
107–10.
Special Report 271
Rosen, Harvey S. 1995. Public Finance. 4th ed. Chicago: Irwin.
San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. 2000. Lo-
cal Implementation of the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/cosw_page.asp?id=10849.
———. 2001. Department of Public Works, Survey Update 2001.
sfgov.org/site/cosw_page.asp?id=11456.
Sawer, Marian. 2002. Australia: The Mandarin Approach to
Gender Budgets. In Gender Budgets Make More Cents: Coun-
try Studies and Good Practices, edited by Debbie Budlender
and Guy Hewitt, 43–64. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.
Schick, Allan. 1978. The Road from ZBB. Public Administra-
tion Review 38(2): 177–80.
———. 1992. The Road to PPB: The Stages of Budget Reform.
Reprinted in Government Budgeting: Theory, Process, Poli-
tics, 2nd ed., edited by Albert C. Hyde, 46–60. Pacific Grove,
CA: Brooks/Cole.
Sharp, Rhonda. 2003. Budgeting for Equity: Gender Budget Ini-
tiatives within a Framework of Performance Oriented Bud-
geting. New York: U.N. Development Fund for Women.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2000. Economics of the Public Sector. 3rd ed.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Stivers, Camilla. 1993. Gender Images in Public Administra-
tion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
———. 2000. Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing
Public Administration in the Progressive Era. Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press.
Stoksky, Janet. 1997. Gender Bias in Tax Systems. Tax Notes
International, June 9, 1913.
Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP). 2004. The
Case of Gender Budget Initiative. www.tgnp.co.tz/gbi.htm.
United Nations. 1995. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Ac-
tion. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/
plat2.htm.
United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). 2003.
A Learning Programme in Action: UNIFEM Gender Respon-
sive Budgeting Programme. Midterm Review Summary Re-
port.
United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women
(UNDAW). 2004. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women. www.un.org/womenwatch/
daw/cedaw/.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2000. American Factfinder. http://
factfinder.census.gov/home.
White, Jay, and Guy B. Adams. 1994. Reason and Postmodernity:
The Historical and Social Context of Public Administration
Research and Theory. Administrative Theory and Praxis 17(1):
1–19.
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1961. Political Implications of Budgetary
Reform. Public Administration Review 21(4): 183–90.
Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau. 2001. Individual Income
Tax Provisions in the States. Information Paper No. 4. Madi-
son, WI: Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
World Bank. 2005. WBI Programs: Gender, Decentralization and
Public Finance. www.worldbank.org/wbi/publicfinance/de-
centralization/gender.htm.

272 Public Administration Review • May/June 2005, Vol. 65, No. 3

View publication stats