Incorporate Gender-Transformative Provisions into the UN Tax Convention

This guest blog for the Global Alliance for Tax Justice is the second in a series exploring the five demands of the 2025 Global Days of Action on Tax Justice for Women’s Rights.

This year, for the first time in history, all UN member states will come together to negotiate a legally binding tax instrument. The UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation represents a historic opportunity to fundamentally change how global tax rules are decided and offers an opportunity to establish tax policy that works for all, including for women. 

Getting to this point in the process is an enormous win already in terms of international tax governance, but it is not time to sit back just yet. Our work has only just begun to ensure that the UN tax negotiations result in a better tax policy that aligns with UN human rights conventions and previous human rights commitments that States have made, including commitments to furthering women’s rights.

Last year while negotiating the terms of reference for the framework convention, several organisations called for gender provisions to be included in the terms of reference. International human rights law was included in different iterations of the draft terms of reference. However at one point, the concept was removed entirely before international human rights law was once again re-incorporated into the text. This version was subsequently approved by the General Assembly in December 2024. As advocates of women’s and girls’ rights we must remain vigilant. As the negotiations begin on the text of the Framework Convention and two early protocols, we need to continue to safeguard and champion the rights of women and girls to ensure they are not forgotten voices in the reforms being developed.

Tax is our social superpower. Tax policy has enormous potential as a transformative instrument for the development and well-being of the population at large and women in particular, but instead the way that tax policy is currently designed and implemented contributes to the persistence of inequalities, including of gender inequality. 

Current estimates by the Tax Justice Network show that countries are losing US$492 billion in tax revenue a year to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals using tax havens to underpay tax. 

When states lack adequate resources to pay for public goods and services, women are disproportionately affected. As states eliminate and underfund social services, the impact of this loss is felt most acutely among low-income populations, among whom women are overrepresented. Additionally, institutions and programmes to promote gender equality and support women’s advancement also lose funding and thus are unable to carry out vital work. Inevitably, women fill in the gaps in caregiving, education, and other family support and care work left behind by dwindling and disappearing social programmes, typically without remuneration. 

Due to a lack of revenue, States will also often increase their reliance on regressive forms of taxation, such as consumption or value-added taxes (VAT) on basic goods and services. These taxes may be easy to administer, but they disproportionately burden women, meaning that women become responsible for a disproportionate amount of the tax burden while receiving fewer benefits from tax-funded services, losing social protections and support, and taking on an increased workload without pay.

The UN Tax Convention represents a window of opportunity to break this cycle by delivering on progressive taxation to ensure that the tax burden is fairly distributed, combating illicit financial flows, and introducing transparency and accountability measures that ensure corporations and wealthy individuals pay what they owe in tax. The convention not only offers a promising moment to reform our broken international tax system, but also presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to set better normative standards for future social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Without clear and targeted gender-responsive considerations, though, gender blind tax policies will fail to address structural inequalities in the organisation of care work and undermine progress toward gender justice by replicating harmful cycles. We demand that the UN Tax Convention is aligned with established UN human rights conventions and includes gender equality considerations in all relevant provisions.