By
Tom Odhiambo
Title: Framing Feminist Taxation; Publisher: Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ); Authors: GATJ; Publication Date: June 2021; Pages: 53.
Electronic Access: Free Download, Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file.
When one speaks the word ‘feminist’ it often conjures images of a woman or women who are ready to fight ‘patriarchy’, in a manner of speaking. In fact, in many parts of Africa the word is taken to mean women who are ready for a confrontation with men and other women in any subject that touches on women’s rights or lives.
To claim to be a feminist suggests a battle, a war, a cause to fight for. In many cases, African feminists – women or men – tend to speak eloquently and act stoically about the rights of women in the society in which they live. Thanks to the global rights movement, there are feminist activists nearly in all parts of Africa.
Yet, the language and pursuit of human rights tends to throw fog on the finer details of everyday human struggles. The discourse and practice of human rights, for instance, is often not translated into the minutiae of economic, political, cultural, social, religious, or spiritual rights for women in specific communities.
Even where human rights defenders isolate the task at hand as particular rights to do with women, say the right to go to school for the girl child or the right to access maternal health care – the concerned individuals and institutions gloss over or do not link the lack of these rights to institutionalized economic marginalization.
Yet, struggles for human rights need to see the bigger picture in which a range of practices and institutions interconnect to cause one deficiency or another. For instance, how does tax affect women’s livelihoods, lives, and socio-economic, political, cultural, personal or even gender rights.
Reading Framing Feminist Taxation (2021) a tax guide based on experiences from Uganda, one realizes the urgency of looking at and understanding how tax and taxation affect women from a multi-sectoral perspective if not perspectives.
This guide is divided into four parts: Introduction to International Financial and Tax Architecture; Feminist Perspectives and Principles; Feminist Economics: Reimagining the Economic and Tax Systems; From Plans to Actions – An Advocacy Guide for a Feminist Taxation Framework to Fulfill Women’s Rights.
In the first section, the authors outline the need for knowledge on who or what institutions run the global financial system and how these individuals and organizations determine global or local economies plus their tax regimes.
It is important that fighters for and defenders of women’s rights should know how the IMF or African Development Bank or the African Union, a few of the organizations mentioned in this section, make decisions that impact local industries, commerce, taxes and lives of all and sundry.
Considering that taxes and taxation affect savings, investments, and livelihoods, how do the policies and actions by such organizations affect women’s lives in the short and long runs?
The second section reprises the old question of power equation in society. What is power and how does it manifest itself? How does such power affect economic production, collection of public revenue, distribution of such revenue or the tax burden for women and men; for the poor and the rich; for the abled and the disabled.
Framing Feminist Taxation notes that power appears in at least three forms:
- Visible power – that which one sees and feels in public such as held by politicians or bureaucrats, or as held by heads of households or clan heads, even heads of criminal gangs, a majority of them tend to be men,
- Hidden power – this about the agenda setters or influencers or members of a caste or economic group,
- Invisible power – which is the capacity of individuals or institutions or any other force to shape people’s views, beliefs, needs, biases etc, such as is done by social media these days or even religious or political leaders through rituals and doctrines.
The third section reminds readers of the seeming deliberate inattention to women’s economic productivity by orthodox economics.
Although it is not a new claim, Framing Feminist Taxation reinforces the argument that traditional methods of measuring economic production in a country, Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product (GDP and GNP) do not consider the amount of time, resources and the productivity of women who work every day in the houses or homes they live in.
Raising children, cooking, cleaning the house, maintain the home etc are hardly factored into the measures of economic production and growth. Most of these are duties are performed by women.
Section Four is an outline on what can and should be done to make women suffer less from taxes and taxation. Here, the authors of Framing Feminist Taxation root for action rather than more policy formulation. They argue that from a feminist taxation perspective, there is need for more campaigns for tax justice for women’s rights.
They note that individuals and groups need to identify a problem and thoroughly analyze it; think through the advocacy approaches, such as engagement with the media, directly demand action from policymakers and holders of power, mobilizing the public to leverage pressure, and use of digital communication and online media; engage with other women’s organizations to learn from their experiences and also seek support; target specific organizations – public and private, local or international – in the advocacy campaigns, among others.
One of the key lessons Framing Feminist Taxation offers is the need to rethink the traditional approaches to tax and taxation where women are concerned. For instance, why would, for instance, any African government zero rate, computers, or solar equipment but tax paraffin, which is used by a majority of poor households for lighting and cooking?
Why do governments continue to tax women more than men when they tax a married couple as a single unit? In such cases, the woman’s income is treated as a ‘second’ earner, thus suffering a higher tax burden, when they are also likely to be earning far less than the husband.
A feminist approach to taxing the couple would prefer them to be taxed separately – yet the intersection of culture, economics and social practice predisposes the woman to almost a career and lifelong disadvantage. Why? Simply because she is married but also working.
But to change the way the world sees women, taxes and taxation will also mean to literally change the way societies educate the young.
A feminist approach to tax and taxation needs to adopt a multidisciplinary and holistic approach that seeks not just to empower women and advocacy groups to be alert to the networks and processes that overtax women and underspend on their needs.
Such an approach will have to be ever vigilant for the insidious nature of economic exclusion, disadvantage and alienation through socialization, acculturation, education, and other practices of everyday life.
The writer teaches at the University of Nairobi. Tom.odhiambo@uonbi.ac.ke
