SWBG blog

Gender budgeting looks at how budget proposals affect women and men, and how choices can either reduce or reinforce inequality.

Gender budgeting is a good budgeting practice that focuses on results. It connects how money is raised and spent with the outcomes we want to achieve.

A principal aim of it is to integrate gender analysis into economic policy, government spending and revenue proposals. It’s about examining how budgetary allocations affect the economic and social opportunities of women and men, and restructuring revenue and spending decisions to eliminate gender-based inequities. It is not about setting separate budgets for women or focusing resources on so-called “women’s issues”. 

Money that’s raised in the form of taxes, fees and charges is used to fund public services, such as hospitals, schools and transport systems.

This impact comes from different life experiences, gendered norms and expectations. This affects the jobs that women and men do, how paid and unpaid work is valued, and the assumptions made about parenting and care. Therefore, how funds are raised and allocated has different impacts. 

Women and men continue to experience inequalities in pay, in employment and promotion opportunities, and in the harassment and abuse they experience at work.

Analysis by the Scottish Trade Union Centre has found that the gender pay gap has recently risen by 20 percent. This highlights that progress is not always linear and women have experienced setbacks, especially through recent years of austerity, the Covid-19 pandemic and high inflation rates. 

Women are likely to be poorer, have lower levels of savings and wealth, and are less able to increase paid work than men due to caring responsibilities. Overall, women are more likely to be in lower-paid or insecure work, are twice as reliant on the social security system, and have lower and less access to pensions. 

Women often rely more on local government services like public transport, childcare or social security. This is because they do more unpaid childcare and care work. Decisions about local public services such as care, transport and healthcare will therefore have a disproportionate impact on women. Alongside this, women from specific groups are affected by these decisions even more. This includes disabled women, lone parents, carers, women from ethnic minority groups, and women on low incomes. 

The Scottish Women’s Budget Group’s Gender Budgeting Toolkit provides a comprehensive framework to support the integration of gender budgeting into local decision-making. It offers practical guidance for everyone involved in budget development, scrutiny and approval, including elected members and local authority officers.

The toolkit sets out a structured process for assessing how budget decisions affect different groups and for embedding equality considerations throughout the budgeting process. Below, we summarise the foundations of gender budgeting to provide an overview of the approach. We encourage all decision-makers to consult it in detail when developing, reviewing or scrutinising budgets.