Governments need money, so they have to make up these losses somehow. Many of them turn to consumption taxes because they are easy to collect and difficult to evade. Low-income countries raise ‘about two-thirds of their tax revenue through indirect taxes such as VAT, and just over a quarter through income taxes’.38 A recent International Labour Organization analysis found that 138 governments (ninety-three developing and forty-five developed countries) are planning to either increase and/or extend consumption taxes, primarily through VAT.39
This increase disproportionately affects women too. Not just because they are over-represented among the poor (the poorer you are the higher a proportion of your income goes on consumption), but also because they tend to bear the responsibility of buying food and household goods. And because women’s paid labour supply is more elastic (in no small part because of the gender pay gap), increasing VAT can have the effect of pushing women to spend more time in unpaid work in order to produce in the household what they might otherwise buy on the market.
This problem is exacerbated by an often gender-insensitive allocation of what products do and don’t have VAT added, driven by an overall lack of research based on sex-disaggregated data on the impact specific consumption tax rates and exemptions have.40 VAT is not generally added to products that are seen as ‘essential’, so in the UK, food is exempt because it’s considered essential, while iPhones are not because they are not. But one man’s frivolity is another woman’s essential, and around the world women have been campaigning to get male-dominated legislators to recognise that sanitary products are not luxury items. In some countries they’ve even succeeded.
It’s clear that tax systems around the world, presented as the objective trickle-down of market-driven forces have intensely gendered impacts. They have been created based on non-sex-disaggregated data, and male-default thinking. Together with our woman-blind approach to GDP and public spending, global tax systems are not simply failing to alleviate gendered poverty: they are driving it. And if the world cares about ending inequality, we need to adopt an evidence-based economic analysis as a matter of urgency.
CHAPTER 14
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
What the past two chapters have shown is that there are substantial gender data gaps in government thinking, and the result is that governments produce male-biased policy that is harming women. These data gaps are in part a result of failing to collect data, but they are also in part a result of the male dominance of governments around the world. And while we may not think of male-dominated government as a gender data gap problem, the evidence makes it clear that female perspective matters.
Several US studies from the 1980s to the 2000s have found that women are more likely to make women’s issues a priority and more likely to sponsor women’s issues bills.1 In the UK, a recent analysis of the impact female MPs have had in Westminster since 1945 found that women are more likely to speak about women’s issues, as well as family policy, education and care.2 An analysis3 of the impact of female representation across nineteen OECD countries4 between 1960 and 2005 also found that female politicians are more likely to address issues that affect women.
The OECD study also found that women’s words translated into action. As female political representation increased in Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, these countries experienced an increase in educational investment. Conversely, as the proportion of female legislators in Ireland, Italy and Norway decreased in the late 1990s, those countries experienced ‘a comparable drop in educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP’. As little as a single percentage point rise in female legislators was found to increase the ratio of educational expenditure. Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs.5 A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.6
In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does. On the other hand plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her. Shortly before the 2016 US presidential election, the Atlantic published the results of a focus group of undecided voters.7 The main takeaway was that Hillary Clinton was just too ambitious.
This is not a groundbreaking opinion. From Anne Applebaum (‘Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary, irrational, overwhelming ambition’8), to Hollywood mogul, democratic donor and ‘one-time Clinton ally’9 David Geffen (‘God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?’10), via Colin Powell (‘unbridled ambition’11), Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager (‘don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions’12), and, of course, good old Julian Assange (‘eaten alive by her ambitions’13), the one thing we all seem to be able to agree on (rare in this polarised age) is that Hillary Clinton’s ambition is unseemly. Indeed, so widespread is this trope it earned itself a piece in the Onion headlined, ‘Hillary Clinton is too Ambitious to be the First Female President’.14
Being the first woman to occupy the most powerful role in the world does take an extraordinary level of ambition. But you could also argue that it’s fairly ambitious for a failed
