Why Tax is a Feminist Issue

March 9, 2016

Tax pays for public services that meet women’s rights

Why tax is a feminist issue? All over the world women are more vulnerable to poverty than men and this is especially true in developing countries, but this year the women of Heliopolis in Sao Paulo, Brazil were celebrating. Their streets have more lights, helping all residents, especially women, to return to their homes safely at night. Their victory was secured following intense campaigning for safe cities for women, especially through their highly visible night-time flashlight march demanding public lighting.

Jaqueline, studying at college, explained: “If I attend college in two years I can get do what I like, which is working with children. I’m only afraid of the way I have to walk to college, because it is very dark. The fear has never stopped me going to class because I have a major goal. But I go all my way praying, asking God to protect me, because I am afraid of being robbed and raped.”

Across the world, up to 70% of all women will experience violence in their lifetime. Poor women in developing countries are the most likely to be exposed to sexual violence on the streets. Women-friendly public services, like policing, public toilets and street-lighting can help keep women safer.

But where will the money come from?

Whether you want to: stop violence against women and girls; make cities safe for women; ensure more girls get a quality public education; or support women’s economic equality and reduce their unpaid care work – it needs adequate funds.

But where will the money come from? Too often governments point to empty budgets. But simple reforms in tax policy could provide many more public resources.

Unfair tax systems making it worse for women, ensuring tax is a feminist issue

Right now global and national economies and tax systems are not working for women and it is making the world more unequal.

Right now many big companies not paying their fair share of tax. The IMF estimates that developing countries lose an astonishing $200 billion US dollars to tax dodging every year. Imagine how transformative this money could be in the lives of women and girls if spent wisely on public services! This money is enough to:

Provide a primary school education for every child – including the 57 million children who currently don’t go to school
AND provide the agricultural investment needed to achieve a world free from hunger,
AND meet international goals to reduce ill health more than twice over (USD 58.9 billion), protecting vulnerable people from infectious diseases and ensuring women and children have access to healthcare.

What we want

We want women and girls to be able to hold governments accountable for tax to be fairly raised, to demand multinational companies pay their fair share of tax, & that it is fairly spent on gender-responsive public services.

Join us during this 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, to demand that multinational companies pay their fair share of tax for women’s rights! Sign up for email updates here or email olivia.lally@actionaid.org if you would like to join a training on tax and women’s rights and to learn more about why tax is a feminist issue.

Blog adapted from original by Bridget Burrows, available here to download

Funding

ActionAid Ireland’s Tax Power campaign is funded by the European Union through Development Education and Awareness Raising funding, April 2015 to April 2017.

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.