(Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment)

 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is preparing its first strategy to mainstream gender, aiming to integrate gender into its surveillance, lending, and capacity development. In contribution to the online public consultation opened by the IMF, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice joined other civil society organisations to welcome the Fund’s commitment to tackling gender inequality through its new gender strategy and share concerns regarding the process and content of such strategy.

 

“Despite the efforts around this strategy, it seems that gender has been de-prioritized by the Fund (e.g. in its recent Work Program and the Comprehensive Surveillance Review, where gender was simply pushed down the agenda to just “another form of inequality of opportunity”) – exactly at a time when it has been widely acknowledged (including by the IMF) that women have suffered the most from the pandemic and will continue to carry the burden of its economic and social aftermath, making it critical to mainstream a gender lens in wider economic – including fiscal and monetary – policy decisions”, says the statement of the CSOs. “At its core, the gender strategy should subscribe to a do no harm approach, moving beyond the IMF’s orthodox macroeconomic paradigm and critically assessing how the Fund’s standard fiscal, monetary, structural, and labour market policy framework has substantive implications for gender inequality.”

 

Read the civil society organisations’ joint statement.

 

Tax and Gender

 

Since its creation, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice has been working to advance gender equality through fiscal policies. In 2015, GATJ created the Tax and Gender Working Group as a space for its members and committed partners to engage directly in campaigns and policy work on tax and gender, as well as to strengthen the global integration of tax justice and gender justice work.