Ladies Get In Free? Not Even Close
Putting pressure on politicians to count women in
BY Ellen Russell
Illustration by Rob Elliott/Swizzle
Complicity with discrimination against women is political suicide these days. Politicians would rather walk into a propeller than refer to women as “girls” on camera. Their glossy brochures always picture the requisite number of women. And politicians are careful to say that their policies are intended to help all Canadians, which certainly includes women, right?
Wrong.
Although politicians love signing high-profile international agreements declaring their commitment to advancing women’s equality, their policies are often inimical to real equality for women. And—most insidiously—these policies often escape culpability for reinforcing gender inequalities because they have the superficial appearance of being gender-neutral.
How does a seemingly gender-neutral policy perpetuate discrimination against women? Public policy doesn’t occur in a vacuum—it is enacted in a social context fraught with inequalities, including women’s inequality. As of 2000, the average wage for a full-time full-year female worker was $34,892 versus $49,224 for male workers; half of all women with paid employment earned less than $20,000.
Policies that don’t take these facts into account can end up reinforcing the economic problems facing women. Armine Yalnizyan has documented the many ways in which the gender blindness of federal policies exacerbates women’s existing inequalities in her recent reports for the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, which can be found at www.fafia-afai.org.
Here’s an obvious example. Say the government introduces a policy intended to help people save for retirement. Sounds gender-neutral—after all, both women and men are concerned about saving for retirement. This may even sound favourable to women, since it’s not hard to argue that women require more help than men when it comes to boosting their retirement savings.
Now, suppose this policy turns out to be the very policy announced by the federal government in its last budget. This policy increased the limits on Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) contributions. Currently, you can put a maximum of $16,500 in a tax-sheltered RRSP. This new policy would allow you to put $18,000 in your RRSP in 2006, and by 2010, this ceiling would increase to $22,000.
You have to make a lot of money to be able to afford to save $18,000 in a year. It turns out that you would have to make more than $100,000 to benefit from increases in the RRSP ceiling.
Who makes more than $100,000? Nearly 23 million Canadians filed taxes in 2002, but fewer than 700,000 people (or 3 percent of tax filers) reported incomes of over $100,000. And of this small group of high-earners, only 20 percent were women. So this policy helps only a tiny group of women—those who are already affluent.
But that is not all. Giving the affluent a tax break on their RRSPs and registered pension plans will cost the government $180 million per year in forgone tax revenue when it is fully implemented. This is money we won’t have to spend on other things—like the public programs that do make a difference in women’s lives. And when public programs are not forthcoming—or are cut (as was the case in the deficit-fighting 1990s)—all sorts of pernicious effects on gender begin to ripple outward.
Women will be disproportionately affected when health care, social services and many other public programs are cut altogether (or starved to the point of inefficacy), in part because they assume more responsibility caring for children, aging and sick family members than men do. To pick up the slack left by dwindling public programs, women may be obligated to reduce their hours of paid work, or interrupt their employment altogether. Thus, spending cuts create new obstacles to maintaining and improving women’s paid employment, which in turn reinforces women’s income inequality.
And here is the icing on the cake: Just last February, Minister of Finance Ralph Goodale promised the House of Commons, “I will do my very best to respect the principles of gender equity in the preparation of this budget and indeed every budget going forward.” Then, a few weeks later, he introduced a budget that contained the RRSP provisions discussed above—as well as many other policies that overlooked the needs of women.
To judge whether the lofty rhetoric of politicians is backed up by policies that actually help women, Canadians need the tools supplied by gender budget analysis. Gender-responsive budget analysis is a method that examines the distributional consequences of both the taxation and spending activities of government. While this methodology focuses on distributional effects in terms of gender, it also reveals class inequalities as well as other forms of discrimination. You can learn more about gender budget analysis in a paper published by Isabella Bakker in conjunction with a group of analysts at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives at www.policyalternatives.ca (the fine organization that provides me with a paycheque).
Thanks to the insistence of women’s groups worldwide, 60 countries are engaged in some form of gender budgeting. Canada must engage in rigorous annual gender budget analysis, and report on the results to Canadians. Let’s put some pressure on Canadian politicians to demonstrate what they are really doing to promote women’s equality.
