Gender Budgets: A Capability Approach

Feminist studies have developed several tools to assess the gender impact of public policy and of budgets in particular. In this paper we introduce an innovative approach to the gender auditing of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. First, we expand the scope of the assessment of the policy impact taking into account women’s multidimensional well‐being and the contribution of their unpaid work to other people’s well‐being. Second, we use a macro‐economic feminist perspective to make the capability approach operational in the policy space. Within this extended reproductive approach, gender budgets could become a tool for advancing a reflection on social and individual well‐being and for greater transparency on the gender division of labor, the distribution of resources and the share of individual and public responsibilities.