Is the tax system stacked against women?

Tax policy can contribute to gender equality or make things worse. Sometimes, tax code provisions are legally linked to gender, and often, tax systems indirectly disadvantage women because of existing inequalities in society. These include the fact that women are generally paid less, do more unpaid work, have different costs and own less property.

A distinction is made between explicit bias, where the tax code provisions are legally linked to gender, and implicit bias, where the outcome of tax policy has different implications for men and women because of existing inequalities. Very few countries (7 out of the 43 respondent countries) reported instances of explicit bias in their current tax systems (Argentina, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, South Africa, Spain and Switzerland). Implicit bias is less obvious, and few countries have guidance on how to test for it in their tax policy design (only 5 out of 43 countries: Austria, New Zealand, San Marino, Spain and Sweden).

Half of the countries surveyed have already implemented tax reforms to improve gender equality, suggesting that gender is an important consideration in tax policy design for most countries. However, even though tax administration processes can have different outcomes for men and women, only four countries indicated that they have made any adjustments to them to respond to the needs of a specific gender (Argentina, France, Indonesia and Israel).

See also: Tax Policy and Gender Equality: A Stocktake of Country Approches