Public finance is feminist terrain

 Reflections from the UN Women Expert Group Meeting for the Seventy-First Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW71)

For much of the past decade, the dominant approach to advancing gender equality has been framed around integrating women more fully into existing economic institutions. We have asked how more women can participate in labour markets, access finance, shape climate policy, occupy positions of leadership and benefit from economic growth. Those questions remain essential. But they have often left comparatively little space to ask how those institutions themselves distribute resources, allocate risk and shape the boundaries of political possibility. 

Conversations about financing have followed a remarkably similar logic. They have largely begun with questions of scarcity. Where will governments find additional resources? How can countries mobilise more revenue? How do we close the financing gap? Important though they are, they also risk obscuring a more fundamental question: why do governments continue losing so much of the revenue they already generate?

In both cases, we begin by asking how to work within existing constraints rather than asking how those constraints came to exist. A feminist political economy perspective starts elsewhere. Rather than treating economic institutions and fiscal constraints as immutable, it asks how they are produced, whose interests they serve, who benefits from preserving them, and how these structural barriers can be transformed.

These reflections were prompted by participating in the recent UN Women Expert Group Meeting convened to inform the Secretary-General’s report for the Seventy-First Session of the Commission on the Status of Women and the broader global debates on what should succeed the 2030 Agenda. Over three days, researchers, policymakers, feminist advocates, civil society leaders and representatives of international organisations grappled with what the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) had achieved, where they had fallen short and what the next development agenda would need to confront. While much of the discussion centred on implementation, financing and accountability, it increasingly became clear that the frontlines of gender justice lie as much in political economy as in gender policy itself.

The SDGs emerged at a particular moment in history. There was cautious optimism that stronger multilateralism, expanding development finance and growing recognition of women’s rights could gradually translate global commitments into meaningful change.

A decade later, that landscape looks markedly different.

Many of the political and economic conditions that sustained progress on gender justice over the past decade are beginning to unravel. Governments are expected to finance climate adaptation, strengthen public services, invest in care systems and deliver just transitions while confronting rising debt burdens, tightening fiscal space and an international economic architecture that continues to permit wealth and corporate profits to escape taxation. The wider political landscape has shifted just as profoundly. The promise of an increasingly cooperative multilateral order is beginning to fray. International institutions are no longer simply arenas for cooperation; they have become sites of growing geopolitical contestation, where competing visions of development, sovereignty and global governance increasingly shape what is possible. At the same time, civic space continues to narrow as anti-rights movements become increasingly coordinated, better resourced and more transnational, intensifying backlash against gender justice. 

The challenge, then, is not one of ideas. It is no longer about finding the next policy innovation or institutional blueprint. It is about creating the political and economic conditions that allow decades of accumulated knowledge to be translated into practice.

If one lesson became clear over the course of the meeting, it is that public finance can no longer be treated as a peripheral concern within feminist politics. It has become one of its central terrains. For many years, tax occupied a surprisingly marginal place within feminist organising. There were understandable reasons for this. Tax systems appeared highly technical, dominated by legal language, accounting rules and international negotiations that felt far removed from everyday struggles over violence, care, labour or reproductive rights. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Every issue feminist movements care about ultimately depends on public finance. Care systems require budgets. Healthcare requires budgets. Education requires budgets. Climate adaptation requires budgets. Freedom from violence requires budgets. Gender-responsive social protection requires budgets. Without public resources, even the strongest commitments risk remaining aspirations rather than realities.

Countries currently lose an estimated US$492 billion every year to global tax abuse. More fundamentally, governments have far greater untapped revenue potential. Research by the Tax Justice Network finds that governments could raise up to US$2.6 trillion annually by introducing a modest tax of between 1.7 and 3.5 percent on the wealthiest 0.5 percent of households and by recovering corporate taxes lost when multinational corporations shift profits to tax havens. The United Nations estimates that achieving gender equality by 2030 requires an additional US$360 billion each year. The financing gap is substantial, but it is dwarfed by the public revenue that could be mobilised through fairer and more effective taxation. These figures challenge the idea that today’s financing gaps are inevitable. Rather, they are the product of political choices—embedded in tax rules, international agreements and the governance of cross-border wealth—and political choices can be renegotiated. The central challenge, then, is not simply mobilising additional resources, but confronting the economic rules that systematically place so much existing wealth beyond the effective reach of taxation.

At its core, taxation is about the distribution of power as much as the distribution of revenue. A feminist approach to taxation therefore asks not only how much revenue governments raise, but who pays, who benefits and who bears the costs when governments cannot finance public goods. It therefore requires tax systems that are both progressive and gender responsive: systems that ensure those with the greatest ability to pay contribute their fair share while recognising how tax policy affects women and men differently. That means paying attention not only to tax rates, but to the design of the tax system itself: what is taxed, what is exempt, whether income from wealth is treated more favourably than income from work, and whose economic activity is made visible to the tax system in the first place. In many countries, returns to accumulated wealth continue to receive more favourable tax treatment than wages and salaries, while multinational corporations can still shift profits across borders with relative ease. When wealth and multinational corporations remain undertaxed, governments are frequently left borrowing more, cutting public spending or relying more heavily on regressive consumption taxes. Women often pay for those choices twice: first through tax systems that place proportionately greater burdens on lower-income households, and again when fiscal retrenchment shifts the costs of social reproduction onto unpaid care work. Fiscal policy therefore structures gender inequality long before governments decide how public money is spent.

Taxation occupies a distinctive place within struggles for gender justice because it is one of the few financing instruments that can provide public revenue at the scale, predictability and permanence required to sustain transformative public investment. Unlike debt, it does not defer today’s costs to future generations. Unlike aid, it is not contingent on external priorities, shifting geopolitical interests or donor cycles. And unlike private finance, it is democratically accountable to the societies from which it is raised. At its best, taxation can finance care systems, public services and social protection while also functioning as a reparative instrument capable of addressing historical and colonial injustices.

Yet realising that potential depends on how the international economy is organised.

Governments are repeatedly encouraged to mobilise domestic resources while the international tax system continues to create incentives for harmful tax competition that erode those very resources. Preferential corporate tax regimes and generous tax incentives encourage countries to compete for investment by narrowing their own tax bases, weakening the fiscal capacity they are simultaneously expected to strengthen. What is often presented as a technical debate about competitiveness, investment incentives or business-friendly tax policy is, in reality, a political question about whose interests the international tax architecture serves—and who bears the costs when public revenues prove inadequate. Those costs are not distributed evenly. They are shifted onto women through both paid and unpaid labour, allowing economic systems under increasing strain to sustain themselves without confronting the structural inequalities on which they depend.

Once public finance is understood as a central site of political struggle, the geography of feminist organising also begins to shift. The frontlines of gender justice are no longer found only in ministries responsible for women’s affairs. They are equally found in ministries of finance, tax administrations, budget processes, debt negotiations, climate finance discussions and international tax negotiations, including ongoing negotiations towards a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation. It is precisely these institutions that determine how wealth is accumulated, public resources are governed and gendered inequalities are reproduced. Yet public finance has yet to assume the central place within feminist strategy that its significance demands, leaving the feminist project too often responding to the consequences of—and adapting to—economic systems that were never designed to value women’s lives, labour or wellbeing.

That, in turn, brings us back to the question that ran through the meeting: what exactly are we mainstreaming gender into? If our economies continue to concentrate wealth, externalise care and reward extraction over redistribution, then inclusion risks becoming an endpoint rather than the beginning of reimagining—and ultimately transforming—the economic rules that organise our societies.

The post-2030 agenda will not be judged only by the ambitions it sets, but by whether it reckons with the political economy that determines whether those ambitions can ever be realised. Perhaps that is the defining question the next development agenda must answer.