Challenging Gender Inequality in Tax Policy Making

This volume takes a critical look at the gender of tax policy around the world. Contributors based in eight different countries examine the profound effects that gender norms and practices have had in shaping tax law and policy, and how taxation in turn impacts upon the possibilities for equality along gender, race, class, sexuality and other lines. Chapters explore how the gendered fiscal state might be theorised; how structural choices about rates and bases in tax policy design contribute to gender inequality; how tax policy affects family configurations and perceptions of what constitutes family; how fiscal systems impact on savings and wealth accumulation by women and men; and the role of different policy-making processes and institutions in occluding and sometimes challenging these patterns. Most significantly, perhaps, the book explores these questions in an international frame, traversing countries and continents. The conclusion: fiscal policy has deep rooted, long standing gender implications that affect virtually every aspect of our social, political, and economic lives whether we live in Canada, Australia or Kenya.

Kim Brooks is the Dean at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

Rosemary Hunter FacSS is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Founding Head of Law at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. She is a feminist socio-legal scholar with particular interests in family law and family justice processes, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She has published widely on these topics in both Australia (where she began her academic career) and the UK. With Anne Barlow, she was a member of the ESRC-funded Mapping Paths to Family Justice project, which resulted in their prize-winning book, Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times (Barlow, Hunter, Smithson and Ewing, 2017). Rosemary has been the Academic Member of the Family Justice Council since 2016 and leads the Council's Domestic Abuse Working Group. She is also a member of the Private Law Working Group and the Ministry of Justice's Expert Panel on Harm in the Family Courts. She is a former Chair of the SLSA and a former Council member of JUSTICE.

Åsa Gunnarsson is a Professor at the Department of Law of Umeå University, Sweden.

David Nelken is Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law and past Vice-Dean for Research at King's College London, UK. Widely published in sociology of law and in criminology, he has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the International Sociological Association, and the (USA) Law and Society Association. He has twice been a Trustee of the LSA and Vice-President of the RSCL.

Lisa Philipps is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto, Canada.