Gender, economics, tax progressivity, and care in the age of climate change: Caren Grown’s vision for inclusive policy

Junjie Ren (JR): Caren, your career has spanned various roles and organizations across many decades, from academia to international development agencies. Can you share some moments in your career that significantly shaped your approach to gender issues and development?

Caren Grown (CG): In 1980, I was an intern at the U.N. Secretariat for the mid-decade conference of the U.N. Decade for Women. Being among governments, academics, and civil society organizations focused on gender equality exposed me to the world of global policymaking. Economists Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen came to the Secretariat to present two papers on accumulation, reproduction, and women’s role in the development process, which critiqued standard economic development theory and policy. Their approach opened my eyes—a light bulb went off in my head about how gender norms, inequalities, and power relations were systematically embedded in the processes and organization of economic life.

I decided then and there to abandon my plans to study public policy in favor of economics, which I thought could help me better understand how the world works. I became a student at the New School for Social Research, where Gita Sen was teaching. The economics department at the New School taught different schools of thought—neoclassical, institutionalist, Keynesian, and Marxian economics—all useful in different approaches to the economy. It also had a Class and Gender concentration, which was a precursor to the field of feminist economics.

While at the New School, Gita invited me to be a research assistant with an initiative called DAWN—Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, a network of 24 women from the Global South. Working with these women intensively over four years was an amazing intellectual journey. We wrote a book called “Development crises and alternative visions: Third world women’s perspectives,” which is still taught in some gender and development courses today. Following that journey, I have been fortunate to develop collaborations with scholars around the world on a range of micro and macroeconomic issues using my gender lens.

JR: One of your long-standing lines of work has been on the gender dimensions in taxes. What are the significant challenges developing countries have faced and still face today?

CG: A key challenge for many countries remains generating sufficient domestic resources to finance public expenditure on things like education, health, and infrastructure (both physical and social)—the public goods and services on which people depend—without placing an undue burden on the poor. Fiscal policies must be progressive and equitable, tackling a broad range of distributional issues through both taxation and expenditure.

JR: You recently co-authored a policy brief that critiques how the research literature has addressed gender issues in taxation, and you propose a new approach. Can you say more about that?

CG: That policy brief, co-authored with Giulia Mascagni of the International Centre on Tax and Development, is actually a self-critique, if you will. The prevailing approach, developed in the 1990s and which I used in my early work, identified what are called explicit and implicit gender bias in tax systems. Explicit forms of gender bias refer to specific regulations or provisions in tax law that treat men and women differently, while implicit forms of gender bias relate to provisions that have different impacts on men and women because of underlying and systemic gendered social norms and economic roles.

But we argue the bias framework is no longer fit for purpose. Tax systems have evolved, and most systems no longer have explicit biases. More importantly, this framework has backed us into a corner of tackling a small subset of issues rather than engaging in important conversations about broader issues like the overall progressivity of the tax system, whether countries should impose wealth taxes, and how tax compliance can be strengthened, among other issues. Our brief argues for a broader feminist fiscal policy agenda that embeds gender and tax issues within the larger context of fiscal policy. This includes ensuring progressive tax policies, linking taxation with government expenditure, and planning for long-term fiscal sustainability.

JR: You’ve touched upon this a couple of times. … How important is it for governments to link revenue generation with expenditure, especially for policies to help achieve gender equality?

CG: I think it’s very important to consider both revenue and expenditure together. The bias framework focused only on the tax side, delinked from expenditure, and implicitly led policymakers to think that solutions to gender inequality could be found in the tax system, whereas solutions might lie on the expenditure side or outside of fiscal policy. For example, while tax credits for child and dependent care may be beneficial to the tax-paying population, direct subsidies or support for child care might be more effective because they can cover a far larger group of people, especially poor women who may fall outside the tax net.

A broader feminist fiscal policy approach to gender equality—in which tax policy is one among several tools—would consider various policy measures in light of their effectiveness in achieving specific objectives, such as increasing female labor force participation or supporting elder care. Tax may have a role to play but it would be complemented by other tools.

JR: You wrote about the “Tampon tax” in your brief to illustrate your points. Could you explain that?

CG: The issue of menstrual hygiene is a good example. There’s been a movement to zero-rate menstrual hygiene products in sales and value-added taxes on the grounds of gender equity. But this may not achieve the policy objective of improving menstrual health and hygiene, especially for low-income women. Lowering rates on tampons or pads may not improve the affordability of these products if retailers pocket the savings. In many low-income countries, menstrual hygiene products are imported, have higher prices, and are disproportionately consumed by wealthy women who can afford them and who benefit from the zero or reduced rates. Most importantly, zero and reduced rating results in revenue losses to governments who could use the money to distribute them through schools or community organizations in low-income communities.

JR: What are some challenges to implementing a progressive tax agenda in the United States?

CG: Our colleagues in the Hamilton Center have done some great work on this issue in the U.S. There is, I think, a very strong case for additional progressivity in the system, but we have a very strong political lobby that very much wants to keep taxes low on capital income and very much opposes wealth and inheritance taxes. Those political lobbies are one of the major constraints.

We also have an underfunded and understaffed Internal Revenue Service that struggles particularly with auditing and collections from higher-income individuals. There have been some very interesting studies that showed higher rates of audit support for rich people, who are more likely to have the resources to pay for tax preparers.

Many reform proposals include closing loopholes and reducing tax expenditures to improve progressivity. From a gender lens, these reforms are vital as they support public services that women tend to rely on more heavily, such as child care.

JR: Another line of your research is on climate change. How does climate change affect men and women differently, especially when it comes to care work?

CG: Different climate hazards or events may impact men and women differently because of their different economic and social roles and responsibilities. In most countries around the world, women are largely the paid and unpaid caregivers—for children, the elderly, and other dependents. Climate change events, such as heat waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and more severe and frequent storms, increase the needs for care and make the work of caregiving even more challenging than it might already be.

For instance, if schools close because of dangerously high heat, who leaves work to take care of the children? This was obvious during COVID but is happening with perhaps less visibility during climate change. We have to broaden our notions of climate change adaptation and resilience to include systems of caregiving, as well as retrofitting physical infrastructure, importantly prioritizing care infrastructure—child care centers and long-term care facilities for the elderly, since they house those most vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

JR: What specific policies or frameworks are most urgent in addressing this intersection of climate change and care work?

CG: I think climate adaptation finance is really important and must include care as a sector, but we can’t pit the needs of climate adaptation against the needs of care. They really are absolutely synergistic. We need to think about integrating care considerations into domestic resource mobilization and international development finance, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. We need to think about embedding care services and infrastructure in urban planning, transportation, and disaster risk preparedness and response, and make sure that services support caregivers, especially during climate emergencies.

JR: Can you discuss your recent work through the 17 Rooms initiative on local adaptation projects like the City Learning Labs?

CG: This is one spinoff of my work to intersect care and climate change. Our 17 Rooms conversation focused on how to help cities tackle the care and climate crises simultaneously. We wanted to do more than just talk. We wanted to surface solutions to these twin crises.

Most cities have climate adaptation plans, but the care sector is often not included in those plans. Cities might set up cooling centers for extreme heat or use cooling paint for certain commercial buildings or housing in certain residential areas, but these measures often do not reach lower-income areas where they are needed most to help build resilience to climate change. Through 17 Rooms, we became connected with the City Hub and Network for Gender Equality—CHANGE, which is a network of 14 cities committed to reducing gender-based violence, setting up inclusive care services, and improving sex-disaggregated data collection on city services and the city environment.

CHANGE agreed to host the City Learning Lab project to help cities connect their work on care to climate change adaptation. Together, we intend to co-create and pilot a toolkit for how city government and other stakeholders can implement activities that have both climate change and care co-benefits. This includes identifying key stakeholders from relevant city agencies to work together as a team, identifying potential research partners with expertise in urban planning from a local university or think thank who can help to map care services and infrastructure within each city, engaging city climate adaption teams to discuss how to incorporate care services and infrastructure into climate adaptation plans, and identifying existing data and data gaps that will be useful for future planning. Our initial planning meetings have been terrifically energizing!

JR: It appears to me that in your writing and research, there is a distinction between shifting politics and shifting policy. Do you think that is a valid observation? How would you delineate policy from politics?

CG: Really good and interesting question. Gender equality is fundamentally political. It’s a political football in many countries, particularly in the realm of reproductive health and rights. Governments often seek to control women’s fertility, access to contraception, and abortion rights. This control extends to the type of health care provided and the comprehensiveness of maternal and child health systems.

Politics also surrounds what is an appropriate set of roles for women compared to men. We are still stuck in whether women should be at home as mothers. Some countries are draconian in terms of constraining women from participating in public life, work, or even accessing various services and leisure in public spaces.

Policy, on the other hand, is about how to ensure that institutions, markets, and spaces enable women and men to fulfill their greatest potential. It is about removing constraints that prevent them from taking advantage of opportunities, such as employment and political leadership. Policies are important in recognizing and reducing, if not eliminating, the barriers to women’s full participation in economic and public life, allowing them to be leaders, (and) be vibrant actors in their families and communities.