Changes to the tax and benefit system between 2008 and 2018 led to greater income reductions for women than for men, according to new research by the ESRI.
The study found that gender differences were most pronounced during austerity budgets. More gender neutral policy reforms occurred in the past five budgets. The report was commissioned by the Parliamentary Budget Office and it was done so in the framework of the Programme for Government's commitment to gender proofing and equality proofing budgets in future.
Dr Karina Doorley is one of the authors of the report. "What we did as part of this research was take a historic look at the last ten years of budgetary policy in Ireland to see if there was a gender difference in the impact of budgets and if so why," Dr Doorley said.
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The research found that there was a gender difference in the impact of budgetary policy over the last ten years and it was particularly stark during the austerity budgets where women lost more of their disposable income compared to men because of reforms to tax and benefit policy.
"The reason behind the gender differences in budgetary policy can be traced back to traditional divisions between work and caring roles," Dr Doorley explained. "To put it simply, men's income is more sensitive to taxation policy while women's income is more sensitive to benefit policy. The reason for this is that men tend to be in paid work more often than women. If they are working, they tend to work full time and they tend to earn more because there is still a gender wage gap in this country.
"Women on the other hand take time out of the labour market to have children. They are more susceptible to cuts to child benefit, one parent family carer's allowance etc," she said.
Is it possible to gender proof budgets? Dr Doorley said the allocation of spending is essentially a political decision so it will be a political decision in the future whether to try to spread resources equally so that no gender is adversely affected by budgets whether to target one gender above the other. "What we have done in this research is develop a tool that allows policy makers to actually analyse this before they implement budgetary reform, so they can look at alternative policy packages and see which hits their gender proof target the best," she said.
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