Seminar 2 - Roundtable: Gender equality aspects amid a pandemic. Discussions on tax measures and fiscal policy

The impact of COVID-19 is at the moment undeniably extensive as the world faces the most severe recession in nearly a century. Economic emergency programs, the design and implementation of COVID-19 tax policies and subsequent state aid actions have been launched in many countries to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. Unlike previous economic recessions or financial crises, feminized sectors of the labor market, such as healthcare, education, care, retail, and client-facing services, which all are characterized by low-paid and multiple part-time jobs, seems to be hit the hardest by the pandemic. These sectors have, supported by emerging data, experienced higher job losses than traditionally male-dominated sectors and appears to be inadequately covered, by most financial state aid schemes at the moment. 

Women have, in comparison to men, also reduced their hours of work to care for, and home school, children. Aggregating already existing problems associated to both the loss of paid work hours and to the gender-segregated allocation of unpaid hours for household work and caring. The sudden closure of childcare programs and schools in many countries has had a crucial impact for women whose labour force participation depends on these institutions.[1] The possibility of several waves of the virus that could trigger additional childcare closures make it extremely likely that married women (in general when considering the current norm of heterosexual couples) in particular may be slower to re-enter the work force in the hope of protecting the (single-breadwinner) family income. 

This seminar will discuss existing gender gaps within various domestic tax systems and national tax policies. Even before the pandemic, domestic tax systems inherently worked against economic gender equality, despite impressive growth performances in many economies. Although most tax systems being utilizing a gender equal wording in its legislative texts, tax systems and fiscal policy decisions affect men and women differently when the legislative tax acts are factually applied. Therefore, many aspects of taxation have had an indirect but substantial effect on gender-related socioeconomic inequalities. These gender differences subsequently persist in not only employment rates but also general patterns and gender gaps in unpaid care work. As a result, employment rates, income, old age security, poverty and wealth are all closely linked to the allocative and distributional outcome of tax regulations. 

Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Caroline Heber (Post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance)

Caroline Heber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Munich. Prior to this, she worked as a Research Fellow at the Ross Parsons Centre, University of Sydney and at the Department of Fiscal Law, University of Graz. In the fall semester of the academic year 2017-2018 Caroline was appointed as a Global Emile Noël Fellow at NYU School of Law. In 2020, she completed her post-doctoral thesis on the enhanced cooperation and European tax law at WU Vienna. Her area of expertise lies in the field of tax law, European Union law and European integration theory. 

Åsa Gunnarsson (Professor in Tax Law at Umeå University)

Åsa Gunnarsson serve as professor of tax law and jurisprudence at Umeå University. She started her career in tax administration but shifted to academia and a theoretical approach on tax issues. Her thesis on tax equity, published in 1995, became a part of the Nordic tax law doctrine. A visiting fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand, gave the entrance to international collaborations. She has initiated and participated in many networks that applies critical perspectives on the relationship between law and society. She is a founder of the generously granted network, Feminist Studies on Taxation and Budgeting (FemTax). The activities and publications initiated by FemTax have been a part of the evolving interest on the structural impact that tax laws have on gender equality. During 2015-2019 Åsa Gunnarsson coordinated a Horizon2020 project, titled Revisioning the ‘Fiscal EU’: Fair, Sustainable, and Coordinated Tax and Social Policies (FairTax). The project had an impressive dissemination output and a high impact among European stakeholders. Åsa Gunnarsson has written extensively on tax policy and the law, tax fairness, the tax/benefit interface, gender equality and taxation, social citizenship, and gender equality law. She has published in the academic format of scholarly articles and books, as well as columns, essays and reports. She is frequently invited to present papers, give lectures and participate in conferences outside Sweden. Her present research projects have quite diverging topics; a book on jurisprudence and legal dogmatics is in progress, as well as couple of articles on the relation between human rights, taxation, and gender equality from a global perspective. Her contribution to the CBS Tax Colloquium 2021will be based in an article in Tax Notes International, co-written with Yvette Lind.

Twitter: @gunnarsson_asa

Miranda Stewart (Professor in Tax Law at Melbourne Law School)

Miranda Stewart is Professor of Tax Law at Melbourne University Law School and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, where she works with the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute (TTPI). Miranda was the inaugural Director of TTPI from 2014 to 2017. Miranda researches, teaches and consults on a wide range of tax law, policy and budget topics in Australia and globally. Recent publications include the edited book Tax, Social Policy and Gender (2017, ANU Press). Miranda is a co-editor of Austaxpolicy.com blog and a frequent public commentator on tax and budgeting. Miranda was named as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence in 2018.

Webpage

Twitter @AusTaxProf 

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