Getting serious about holistic recovery requires gender-responsive budgeting
In a year full of surprises, the delay of the national budget is but a blip on the screen. As pre-submissions to the budget close this week, Policy Whisperer Susan Maury (@SusanMaury) and Jeremy Levine (@_JeremyLevine), both of Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand, analyse how integrating a process of gender-responsive budgeting could enable Australia’s state and federal governments to identify and address some of the many social and economic hits that COVID-19 has unleashed. This analysis draws on their testimony to the Victorian Government’s Inquiry into Gender Responsive Budgeting. A copy of the tabled document and full transcript is available here.
One thing we have learned about this pandemic, particularly those of us living in Victoria, is that COVID-19 is unpredictable; cases can scale up stratospherically in a matter of days (the Roner Coaster is a great illustration of this). How is the economy set for recovery in such a volatile environment? While Treasurer Josh Frydenberg sounds optimistic, there is still a great deal of uncertainty. As pre-submissions for the Federal Budget come due, it’s a good time to think about how the economy could be better positioned for Australia’s needs going forward.
Ilan Noy, who specialises in the economic impacts of disasters, outlines three primary functions of government spending during the COVID-19 pandemic:
a. Meeting the basic needs of the population;
b. Preparing the economy to ‘snap back’ quickly once stay-at-home orders are relaxed; and
c. Creating positive social change, particularly in areas that have been under-developed in the past.
The Australian Federal government have announced several economic stimulus measures. Will they prove to have been effective at achieving the three criteria above? There have been critiques regarding each of these three measures of success. Employing gender responsive budgeting would provide a more nuanced, and ultimately effective, approach towards stimulus spending.
Gender responsive budgeting
One of the last face-to-face activities we undertook prior to COVID-19 sending us home to work was to give evidence to the Victorian Government on gender responsive budgeting practices. Our testimony highlighted that gender responsive budgeting moves beyond preparing a women’s budget (a proud Australian innovation) to ensure that a gender lens is cast over every aspect of the budget cycle. We submitted a sample of how to incorporate a gender lens across the budgeting life cycle (which we had adapted from a wonderful resource created by Oxfam Great Britain). Some of our key messages included:
Gender continues to be a primary predictor of disadvantage and divergent policy impacts.
Women’s lives are shaped differently to men when taken as a whole, and this includes their working lives but also how their time away from formal employment is spent.
An intersectional lens is critical because, while gender is a primary predictor of disadvantage, it is far from being the only predictor. When gender is overlaid with other identities, including ethnicity, First Nations status, recently-arrived communities, reduced mental or physical health, reduced educational attainment, and/or identifying as LGBTIQ+, lifecourse trajectories tend to be poorer.
The most important input into the budgeting process is data, data, data. This requires gender-disaggregated data and time use survey results (or similar).
Analysing the data and the policy impacts requires input and advice from economic and budget experts who employ a gender lens. Organisations such as Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand who work directly with disadvantaged individuals and communities and are also feminist policy experts; and a lived experience panel, who can provide insight into how policies ‘land’ for those at the receiving end.
A human rights framework should sit at the heart of all policy and planning activities.
Focussing on those at the margins is the best way to test the efficacy of a policy.
We had some interesting questions, which were captured in the full transcript, that required a bit of myth-busting.
Women are not at parity in senior leadership positions. Even if they were, the impact of female leadership to effect change is ultimately limited. There has been growing evidence that female leadership has many benefits across disciplines, including influencing government policy. However, because many of the issues that create unequal outcomes are structural, they are resistant to substantial change unless the structures themselves are reformed.
Social and cultural change is important. Despite having both feet firmly planted in the 21st Century, Australian women still experience bias. This includes in politics where their contributions and capabilities are often undermined in ways that men seldom experience.
Tax-and-transfer policies sit at the heart of much of the poverty women experience, particularly for single mothers. Making a distinction between paid (valued) and unpaid (a lifestyle choice?) work has meant that many women are vilified for their reliance on welfare payments to make ends meet. Single mothers are the clearest example of how these policies exacerbate poverty; all too often single mothers are also expected to negotiate directly with their former partner to receive child support payments, even in cases where abuse is ongoing.
Impactful change moves beyond goodwill. One clear lesson from the Black Lives Matter movement is that goodwill is not enough to fix structural inequality. Being aware of the issue or sensitised to it is only the first step; the next step must be to dig into the data and understand how the same policies impact on different groups in different ways.
How can gender responsive budgeting help our recovery from COVID-19?
COVID-19 has magnified inequalities; gender-responsive budgeting will identify areas in need of policy attention. Photo by Filip Bunkens on Unsplash
In our testimony we mentioned data multiple times, and that’s because it all goes back to the data: Examine the data, see where the ‘pain points’ are, and fashion the policy response accordingly. While recognising that data collection and data exclusion on women and marginalised communities can be extremely problematic, it is critically important that it is ethically collected and responsibly used to improve policy responses. Problems that remain invisible are also likely to remain unsolved.
While acknowledging that there are gaps in data, the following section provides a high-level example of what a gender-responsive budgeting response would illuminate and how government policies could be fashioned to better respond.
Remaining safe at home: Women’s safety is reduced with stay-at-home orders, with incidences of domestic and family violence increasing while outside supports and services have become trickier to access. Domestic and family violence practitioners have proposed several practical solutions, including ensuring services have high visibility and are easily accessible, and improving referral pathways. A longer-term strategy would examine the unequal power dynamics that perpetuate violence against women and focus more on holding perpetrators accountable while ensuring women have greater financial security, including providing a supportive safety net for women and children leaving violence.
Mental health: Women have experienced greater mental health impacts during COVID-19. This is in part due to women’s poorer mental health generally (a result of gender-driven divergent experiences) and in part due to the differential impacts of the stay-at-home orders. Despite this, the government’s announcement of additional mental health funding to respond to the needs created by the pandemic is either gender-neutral or, where gender is mentioned, is aimed at addressing men’s mental health.
Employment impacts: Women’s productivity while working from home is taking a greater hit due to the gendered division of care work and household tasks (which hasn’t shifted much during the pandemic). Women are also reporting more active workplace discrimination. They are more likely to hold part-time, casual or precarious positions because their unpaid responsibilities require flexibility, which means women are more likely to miss out on JobKeeper – and young women in particular. The data tells us that women have had higher job losses compared to men, and they have also left the workforce in greater numbers. Research conducted by ANU indicates that women who fell out of work in February are much less likely to be seeking new employment, and this is attributed to their unpaid responsibilities ramping up, combined with the historic low number of jobs currently available. The McKell Institute reports that Victoria has hit the highest number of unemployed women in its history, and that some Federal policy responses are actually making economic recovery harder for many women. It’s a bleak outlook for women, which is confirmed by New Zealand’s experiences; prior to their second lock-down, 90% of all job losses were held by women.
Gender-segregated industries and stimulus packages: Governments are very concerned about the health of the economy, and they have introduced several good stimulus measures in response. However, to-date, with the exception of $250 million package for arts and culture investment, the largest incentive packages have been in industries which are both heavily dominated by males and little impacted by the pandemic measures. This includes funding for large infrastructure projects, heavily increased military expenditures, and incentives for the construction industry. Meanwhile, female-dominated industries, including childcare (97% female workforce) and the university system (66% female workforce) appear to be deliberately locked out of government support packages. Many of these impacts are hitting young women hardest, with some forecasting a “generational financial catastrophe.”
Getting serious about social and economic recovery
These are just a few examples where a gender lens would assist government’s with making better, evidence-based decisions about supporting both social and economic recovery. Gender Equity Victoria, along with over 100 co-signing agencies, provides a 10-point summary of ways that women are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and viable policy responses. Of course, the government employs a range of heuristics, or decision-making shortcuts used to frame problems and solutions. These may include partisan-backed understanding of how the economy ought to be organised and what women’s role within it ought to be, or whether worker protections are detrimental to economic growth, or favouring special interest groups. It is recommended instead that rigorous data analysis on who is being negatively impacted by our current environment, and in what ways, will result in more viable long-term solutions for Australia going forward. Gender-responsive budgeting is one important way that this is achieved.
This is not a plan that is too fantastical to be implemented. In addition to Victoria’s gender-responsive budgeting explorations, which started prior to a COVID-19 world, many are watching the U.S. state of Hawaii with interest, which is the first to implement a feminist economic recovery plan from the pandemic. There is also a proposal to use a similar framework for Canada’s recovery process. And many in Australia are calling for a gender-responsive approach from the federal level, including the Equality Rights Alliance Australia. Such proposals are supported by the World Economic Forum.
While it has become clear that ‘women’s work’ often equates with ‘essential services,’ and calls for stimulus measures that acknowledge this are right on target, incorporating a gender lens into the budget process itself expands the response from a purely economic one to also address social issues, such as mental health, the impacts of discrimination and domestic violence. Understanding where policy is failing people will provide governments the information necessary to achieve the three goals of meeting the population’s basic needs, priming the economic for fast recovery, and creating positive social change where the Coronavirus has expanded the failings that are built into the current settings.
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
Posted by @SusanMaury