Gender-Responsive Budgeting with Katherine Gifford
In preparation for our Cities So Equitable event on October 23, we sat down with Katherine Gifford, a Senior Policy Specialist at UN Women. We discussed the importance of gender-responsive budgeting, gender analysis, and statistics, as well as UN Women’s work with ministries of finance and civil society. If you are interested in learning more about gender mainstreaming and gender-responsive budgeting, you can check out UN Women’s materials here and here.
About Katherine Gifford
Katherine Gifford is a Senior Policy Specialist, Governance and National Planning at UN Women. She has worked with UN Women since 2011, specializing in gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). Gifford also previously worked with the UN Population Fund on maternal mortality and morbidity. She received an MPH from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in 2007 and volunteered with the Peace Corps in Mali to deliver HIV and health education counseling and training.
To jump right in, for someone who is not very familiar with gender mainstreaming or gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), how would you describe the practices and aims of GRB?
Well, GRB is a classic gender mainstreaming approach. And the reason being is that it’s about gender analysis — “what does that mean?” — it’s about doing analysis; asking questions to unpack whether or not policies, laws, and budgets are designed in ways that actually respond to the needs of all women and men, boys and girls.
This work can feel very technical, and I think it can be kind of overwhelming. But it is about interrogating, asking questions, doing these analyses that are just trying to get at the ways in which decisions are made. Are the issues and challenges that women and men, boys and girls, and all people face being considered in policy interventions? This analysis enables better decisions about where we put our money.
I think the simplest way of looking at it is that everyone has a budget — every country, every government, every person. We all have a set amount of money that we can spend on what we need. And so, when governments are making those decisions, there are so many competing priorities. So, GRB’s endeavor is to make sure that gender equality objectives and gender inequalities are taken into account when choosing where money flows so as to remediate and reverse structural inequalities.
Would you say that the connection between budget and policy is making sure that the remediation steps that target those structural inequalities are properly funded? Or how would you define the connection between budget and policy?
We always talk about it as “bridging the gap,” the idea of that link. So, I think — and there’s a lot of discussion, and you hear it often — that there are a lot of good policies. And policies aren’t perfect, there’s always room for improvement. But generally speaking in most countries now, there’s generally some good policies on gender equality. But then we think about whether or not budgets are targeted to them. Policies don’t get implemented if there isn’t money — that’s just the reality. So, it does come down to how do we bridge that gap; how do we move from having good policy measures, good laws, and making those implementable? Financial resources aren’t going to do it all, but they are critically important. Without them, it’s really, really tough to make much progress.
I always think about if you’re at a local level, if you’re in a community — if you don’t put money into delivering health services in a way that actually meets the needs of a population that you’re trying to serve, then those health services aren’t going to be available, accessible or effective. People aren’t going to get what they need. So, it’s that link that we always think about when we work on GRB. It is technical, there’s no avoiding that. Also, it is very political, because the decisions that are made about what gets funded are political.
We talk about financing a lot as a “critical enabler.” The resources have to be there to see that shift from policies on paper to actual change and implementation.
And if someone was unfamiliar with the work of UN Women, especially in regards to GRB, how would you briefly frame that history?
The work on GRB predates UN Women, because UN Women has only been around for a little over 10 years now. It started with UNIFEM, then UN Women. UNIFEM initiated work on GRB around 2001, but the practice emerged even earlier — there were feminist economists and civil society organizations working on GRB in the ’80s into the ‘90s.
UNIEM’s early work [on GRB] started in a few countries — primarily focused on awareness-raising. Then it shifted into much more intensive technical work. So, a lot more around developing tools, developing guidance, producing knowledge — intensified country-level implementation and support of country-level work with ministries of finance, with sectoral ministries, with local governments. There have been programmes that focused on national and local-level gender-responsive budgeting. A major development was: increasing engagement with ministries of finance and bringing gender and finance ministries together. A unique feature of the work supported by UN Women is our engagement with and close collaborative work with civil society. So, we bring that holistic approach.
More recently, a strong focus was on bringing GRB into the Sustainable Development Goals, where UN Women spearheaded the introduction of SDG indicator 5.c.1. Through this indicator, we did methodological work to build a global repository of data and information with the aim of supporting countries to strengthen this work over time.
Also, we’ve done a lot of work to bring [GRB] into global norms and strengthen its integration into laws and policies in countries. We have also increased collaborations with different partners, including international financial institutions, with the work supported by UN Women providing a very strong grounding for other partners’ efforts.. And increasingly, countries are integrating it into their planning and budgeting decisions and systems. There’s much more to do, and we’re not done. [laughs] So that’s not a brief history, but hopefully a relatively brief history for 20+ years of work.
To my understanding, there are two sides to GRB: the spending side and the taxation and revenue side. I know you’ve spoken at a few panels in the past about how UN Women has increasingly focused on taxation, and I was curious as to what UN Women’s work on that has been like in recent years.
I certainly have referenced that. I would say that we continue at UN Women to focus on the expenditure side. We are working to strengthen and build the revenue side of this work. There has been a strong call for some time — to bring analytical GRB work, including practical guidance, to revenue-raising, resource mobilization. How do countries do it, and is gender equality something that is actually considered especially in tax law, tax policy, tax systems?
We have a piece of work that we did with a leading scholar, Kathleen Lahey, in 2018 on gender-responsive taxation in the context of her broader work. It provides a set of policy options for developing countries to think about as they work to bring gender analysis more strongly into their revenue-raising and, in particular, taxation policies and practices. That said, it continues to be an area where there’s more to be done. Certainly we, at UN Women, want to continue to expand this work.
There is work that has happened over the last few years at country-level as well, including different analyses that involve micro-simulations to identify policy alternatives and their potential gender impacts. Work on gender and tax has been done in Vietnam and Timor-Leste, and that is continuing, I think, to hopefully build the analytical base as well as expand knowledge so other countries can learn from these experiences.
It’s something that we see as even more important, in the context of COVID and COVID recovery. So many countries are facing staggering financial constraints that are proving to be difficult to conquer and avoid the introduction of austerity measures. In the COVID response and recovery period, there’s been this huge influx of money and spending, especially from wealthier countries. However, the majority of countries globally are struggling to deliver what’s needed with the available resources.
Austerity is often a reaction after a big spending period. From a feminist perspective and from a gender equality perspective, austerity really is detrimental to women, in particular, and poor people more broadly, because it means cutting back investments for critically important public resources. So, for example, reducing spending on health and education in the name of reducing deficits, but, in reality, it has hugely negative impacts. Because then people don’t have services on which they rely, and those public services that are available are often more limited and of poorer quality.
[laughs] Anyway, I think I’ve gone off track a bit. On revenue raising in the COVID period, there was a lot of emphasis even before COVID on the necessity for governments to be raising the resources to invest in their sustainable development. When it comes to tax, what we’re trying to do is to increase the focus on taxation as part of GRB. That we’re looking at the whole budget, which is both revenue and spending.
On the topic of COVID, is there anything you want to mention about the expenditure side of things or anything else you wish to discuss there?
Sure. So my colleague, Zora Khan, and I recently wrote a policy brief on GRB in the context of COVID. We laid out the ways in which countries can apply the tools of GRB to COVID response and recovery measures. And I think the important thing — I just want to highlight in terms of COVID — is the essential need that when resources are being allocated and spent as part of response and recovery plans, that those, are being targeted to women and men, and in particular, that women’s needs are considered and responded to. We have the data to show that women have faced higher and more detrimental impacts from COVID-19 across all areas of life — whether we’re talking about job loss, reduction in employment, leaving the workforce, informality in work, unpaid care, increases in violence. So really making that link between all of the challenges, many of which already existed, but have been exacerbated by the crisis. And making sure that when decisions are made about prioritization, about investment, about where funds are flowing — in all countries — making sure that those resources are going to respond to, in particular, women’s needs and to address gender inequalities that are long-standing.
You mentioned previously about working with ministries in finance and UN Women uniquely collaborating with civil society. Would you mind speaking a bit about UN Women’s focus on working with civil society and a diverse pool of stakeholders in your work on GRB?
Sure. Often and in many countries, the work on GRB originated from civil society and feminist economists. However, that’s not true in every country. In some countries, it has been initiated by governments, so there are various ways that GRB has developed. But what UN Women focuses on in our work on GRB — and in all of our work, really — is how do we look at the whole of government, and then the inside-outside government dynamics, and how do we facilitate and create opportunities and forums and venues for different partners to come together? And partners who might not collaborate regularly.
I remember I was in a meeting a few years ago that brought together 20 countries with people from the gender ministry and finance ministry. It was a deliberate decision to have these different ministries together in the room. And I remember one woman from the gender ministry saying, “This is the first time I’ve ever been in a room with someone from the ministry of finance.” And her country had been doing work on GRB for a few years. She went on to say, “You know, we just so often don’t even speak the same language, so we don’t even know how to begin.” So a lot of the work UN Women has supported focuses on opening dialogue opportunities, facilitating stakeholder groups, creating groups with different ministries.
Then with civil society, a lot of work has focused on creating space so that civil society can engage actively in decision-making around the budget. And also to build and strengthen capacities to do analytical work. I led a GRB workshop with civil society organizations, and they had been doing analysis for a while. But they were coming up against all of these barriers and wondering if they had the skills to do the work. We, as UN Women, were bringing information, capacity development opportunities and tools to support their efforts. They already had skills, and they were doing the work. But they were saying, “We need more. We need more skills, more knowledge, more capacity so that we can do this even better and push the work even further.”
It is critically important that all stakeholders are engaged. In some countries there’s more space for civil society, some countries less. And in this work, there are some countries where there’s very strong civil society engagement, and in other countries, there is room to strengthen this engagement.
And just one addition, we also work with parliaments on GRB. Parliaments, of course, play this important role for budget interrogation, budget oversight. So, they are critical interlocutors around the budget decision making. And often it’s parliamentarians who might be in a position to say, “Has there been a gender analysis of the budget?” We support their capacities in this area and work to strengthen analytical skills and even awareness to ask the questions and look at the budget through a gender lens.
I believe another concept you have previously mentioned is that one of the goals for GRB is for it to become embedded in practice so that it can be institutionalized and then, hopefully, expand. In other words, thinking of GRB as a movement. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by GRB being institutionalized or GRB as a movement?
We’re always aiming for the whole of the government to adopt and integrate GRB. So that means going from one or two ministries doing it to it being a part of day-in-day-out practice by planners, budget officers, etcetera. There is sometimes a misperception that when we talk about gender equality, we’re either just talking about money that funds the gender ministry or money for programs that are very clearly targeted for women — super important, but that’s not the whole picture.
We focus on and increasingly emphasize the importance of going beyond what we consider the “social sectors” — hugely important, and not in any way diminish the importance of these — but also to look at infrastructure, energy, [and other sectors] where huge amounts of resources and investment are. And how to ensure that these include and address gender inequalities.
An example we often use is infrastructure. How does it affect women and men differently? You have a bridge, okay, it’s the same for everyone, right? But if you think about it, where you build a bridge does have different implications for different people. So, if it’s in a certain location that’s hard to access, if there isn’t consideration, if it goes through an existing market, all sorts of different factors. And that’s an example of how gender analysis can surface issues that might otherwise just be invisible. It might not have even occurred to those making decisions, because it wasn’t on their radar.
Gender budgeting is about looking at the gender-responsiveness of budgets across the board. So, not just resources that are targeted specifically to women and girls — again, hugely important — but also what about the resources that might not be directly targeted to programs that affect women and girls, but might have very strong gender implications? For example, how do you invest in digital technology? Think about where we are now and how dependent we are on digital technology to have any connection to work, to life the past many months. For women who don’t have access, an investment in digital technology and technological development that doesn’t consider gender equality potentially leaves them out and fails to tackle the digital gender divide. So those are examples of what we’re talking about with GRB.
As far as becoming a global movement, we’re increasingly seeing recognition of the importance of GRB. We’re seeing that at national levels, we’re seeing it regionally, we’re seeing it globally. Different partners that a few years ago weren’t even talking about gender in budgeting are now doing this work. So that’s progress and momentum. But more is needed. There’s a need for more focus, more investment, more political commitment, more engagement. UN Women continues to emphasize and endeavor to be a driving force behind that movement.
So, speaking to the kind of analysis which makes visible things that may otherwise be invisible — the disproportionate impact decisions could have on women, children, or other communities. I feel that this idea ties into data and the need for transparent data to build financing decisions. For someone who might not be familiar with statistics or other kinds of analytics, would you mind speaking to the sort of data needed for GRB?
Data underpins decision-making — or, it should. And we need to know what isn’t working to be able to respond, and we need to know where gaps are in order to be able to address them. So, when we talk about sex-disaggregated data — and about gender statistics, because we don’t just want to have the binary of men-women, boys-girls that is oftentimes the way that data can be categorized — what do we mean. It’s really about asking questions in ways that you get information that captures the lived realities of different people. So it’s not just saying, “Are you employed?” But understanding who is employed how. So, are women and men employed differently? Are they employed in different sectors? Are they employed at different levels of power and responsibility? And then thinking about it from the perspective of, for example, healthcare. Is this person getting the kind of care they need, and what is that care? So thinking about those types of data.
Also, it’s about digging beyond the household. Oftentimes, data can be collected from the household level. But households are made of people, and those people have different experiences within a household. So, a man living in a household and a woman living in a household may have different experiences, different access to resources, and different decision-making power. So it’s trying to get at and understand those differences, those nuances in order to make decisions based on how people are experiencing the world, the challenges they face, the barriers they face. And if we don’t know those, it’s pretty tough to respond to them.
When we think about how to make a budget gender-responsive, if you don’t know where gaps are, it’s very challenging to then target resources effectively. If we don’t know, for example, that girls are attending school after 10th grade 20 percent less than young men, it’s unlikely resources will go to programs or interventions that might, in fact, help to address the issue. UN Women also has an entire team of people who work specifically on strengthening — at a national level as well as globally — recognition, understanding, technical skills to collect and then analyze sex-disaggregated data and gender statistics.
I know our time is winding down, but are there any last bits you’d like to add about GRB or UN Women more broadly? Maybe things you wish people would know?
About GRB, I would say that it is an incredibly important strategic approach, one that provides a set of tools that governments can use across sectors. It is something that can facilitate more effective budget decisions, but [GRB] can’t do it alone. It is part of a much larger whole that is needed to advance gender equality and gender-responsive action. But it is certainly something we see as an essential piece of moving our collective agenda forward, because if we don’t have the resources, it’s very difficult to deliver on the policies and laws.
On UN Women, I suppose I always wish for and hope that people will be committed to and as passionate as I am — and all the wonderful people with whom I work — about the mandate of UN Women and recognizing gender equality as central to all of our lives and that we are better when everyone does better. So, that we all have more opportunity is only a good thing. If we all have equal rights, equal access, equal space, safety, and security, that benefits all of society. I think that the UN Women’s mandate is essential — has been and will continue to be.
Interview and transcript by Young Professional Intern, UN Women USA LA
