Gender Budgeting in OECD Countries 2023

1. Introduction

The budget is the central policy document of government, presenting how annual and multi-annual objectives will be prioritised and achieved and how resources are raised and allocated for the delivery of public services. Given its role in authorising the funding of new and existing government programmes, the budget has significant implications for society and the economy. Thus, countries are increasingly identifying the budget process as a powerful method to affect change, particularly in the area of gender equality.

Gender budgeting is the application of gender mainstreaming in the budgetary process.1 It involves using the practices and procedures of the budget cycle in a systematic way to promote gender equality. A characterisation of gender budgeting is provided in Box ‎1.1.

Box ‎1.1. What is gender budgeting?

As part of a broader government effort to progress on gender equality goals, gender budgeting is a public financial management tool that can be used to integrate gender considerations into budget decision making. It can be used to identify budget measures that will be effective at closing gender gaps and advancing gender equality objectives.

Gender budgeting is one of a suite of gender mainstreaming techniques2 that assists governments in distinguishing the expected gender equality outcomes of policy choices in a systematic and co-ordinated manner. In particular, gender mainstreaming recognises the need to remove inherent gender biases from key government processes and tools as well as strategize these to meaningfully advance gender equality. In this context, gender budgeting prompts more informed decision making through the assessment of existing budget measures or new budget proposals and their impact on gender equality. It brings analytical work to the fore that helps promote improvements to budgetary policy and optimise revenue-raising and resource allocation to fulfil high-level gender goals.

A whole-of-government approach to gender mainstreaming encompasses legal, regulatory, policy and budget decisions. When implemented alongside other gender mainstreaming tools, gender budgeting can provide information about how gender inequalities have become embedded in public policies and the allocation of resources and ensure that budget decision making helps deliver transformational change that will bring social and economic gains.

This paper presents a summary of the insights drawn from the 2022 OECD Survey on Gender Budgeting across the five building blocks of the 2023 OECD Framework for Gender Budgeting (Gatt Rapa and Nicol, 2023, forthcoming[1]): 1) institutional and strategic arrangements; 2) methods and tools; 3) enabling environment; 4) accountability and transparency; and 5) impact. The survey findings outlined in Section 2 show an overall increase in the use of gender budgeting, as well as a broadening of the foundations, supports, measures, scrutiny and oversight mechanisms that encompass OECD country approaches to gender budgeting. The degree to which gender budgeting has been implemented across OECD member countries is displayed in Section 3 through the presentation of the 2022 OECD Gender Budgeting Index. The 2022 OECD Gender Budgeting Survey and Index methodology is provided in Annex A.

Notes

← 1.  Gender mainstreaming is defined as the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and all stages, by the actors normally involved in policymaking.

← 2.  Others include gender-responsive procurement and assessing the gender impacts of regulations.