by Marilyn Marks Rubin and John R. Bartle
Image of a stack of money.
In early 2024, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) held its first “Global Dialogue on Public Finance and Taxes for Gender Equality,” a conference to discuss how biases in government fiscal policies, especially taxes, impact gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Tax biases can be explicit, with specific regulations or provisions that treat men and women differently, or implicit, with provisions in the tax code having different gender impacts due to underlying and systemic social norms and economic roles. Looking at the U.S., nowhere in the federal tax code nor in state and local tax codes does it explicitly state that women and men should be treated differently. However, while the tax law language may be “gender blind,” taxes can have differential impacts on men and women due to their different social and economic characteristics, such as providing non-paid labor. For example, two-thirds of non-paid care in the U.S. is provided by women. When calculating their personal income tax liability, caregivers may not be able to deduct all expenses related to this care, thus increasing the amount of their income that is subject to the tax.
Implicit tax biases can occur across all forms of taxation, including taxes on income (e.g., personal income taxes), consumption (e.g., sales taxes), and wealth (e.g., property taxes). The ubiquity of biases in taxation brings us to the current topic on how state and local actors are navigating the gendered impacts of recent federal policy changes. By reducing federal funding and offloading federal obligations for providing health care and other services to state and local governments, the question arises as to how subnational governments are going to pay for their increased responsibilities.
All but one state government (Vermont) and just about all local governments have a constitutional/charter or statutory balanced budget requirement, meaning that they cannot spend more money than what they take in through their own source revenues including user fees and taxes. Moreover, most borrowing is restricted to capital expenditures for infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges and not for operating expenses such as those related to health care and social services. So, subnational governments are left with two options: not providing the services or raising taxes and/or user charges to pay for them. The first option, not providing the services, would negatively impact the lives of many citizens (who are also voters) and seems to be (or should be) out of the question. So that leaves increasing taxes and/or user charges as the only option. We focus our remarks on taxes.
Tax systems of state and local governments are quite different from that of the federal government. While some taxes in the federal tax system are regressive, such as payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, even with the multitude of loopholes available to higher income taxpayers, the total federal tax system is somewhat progressive. This means that the burden is higher on higher-income earners than on lower-income earners. State and local tax systems are mostly regressive, meaning that they take a greater percentage of income from lower-income earners – predominantly women – than from higher-income earners. Women account for close to 70% of workers in the lowest-wage occupations that generally pay less than $10 per hour (National Women’s Law Center 2017).
Among the states, 27 impose progressive income taxes in which the tax rate increases as incomes rise; 14 impose flat rate taxes in which the same rate is applied to all incomes, thus taking a greater percentage of income from lower income workers (Tax Foundation 2025). In addition, almost 1/3 of tax revenues for the 50 states come from sales taxes (Tax Foundation 2025) that are regressive, disproportionately impacting lower-income households. In 2023, close to one-third of families in the U.S. with children living in poverty were headed by single women (National Women’s Law Center 2023).
Property taxes are the primary revenue source for local governments, accounting for close to half of own-source tax collections in fiscal year 2022 (Tax Policy Center 2024). Property taxes are sometimes seen as being progressive due to the concentration of homeowners in higher income brackets. However, effective property tax rates are higher for lower-income people, a greater proportion of whom are women.
In summary, state and local governments will either not fill the gap in services for their residents left by decreased federal funding, or will pay for the services by increasing taxes and/or user charges. These charges, like most state and local taxes, are regressive, taking a larger percentage of income from lower-income earners – primarily women – than from higher-income earners. The differential gender impact of recent federal policy changes needs to become part of the discussion of the impact of these changes on state and local government fiscal policies.
Unfortunately, as a result of federal policy changes, the data that would underlie this discussion are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. According to the Federation of American Scientists, many federal agencies are reducing data collection efforts due to “targeted, surgical removal of data sets, or elements of data sets, that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities.” This, too, has to become part of the discussion.
About the author:
John R. Bartle is a Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and Dean Emeritus of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is President of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). He was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2010 and currently serves as Treasurer. He received two major awards from ASPA sections: the Aaron Wildavsky Award for lifetime achievement in budgeting and financial management, and the Truitt-Felbinger Award for significant contributions to the field of transportation policy and administration. He has co-authored or edited four books: Innovative Infrastructure Finance: A Guide for State and Local Governments, Management Policies in Local Government Finance, Sustainable Development for Public Administration, and Evolving Theories of Public Budgeting. He has published over 70 articles and book chapters in both academic and practitioner outlets. He has worked with the Nebraska Legislature to provide policy advice for fifteen years. He worked in city and state government in Minnesota, and for state and national nonprofit research organizations on tax policy issues. His bachelor’s degree is from Swarthmore College, his MPA from the University of Texas, his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the State University of New York.
About the author:
Marilyn Marks Rubin is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Rutgers-Newark School of Public Affairs and Administration and Professor Emerita at John Jay College of the City University of New York where she was Director of the MPA program for more than 25 years. Her primary areas of research are state and local public finance and gender budgeting. She has authored/edited several books and articles in a number of academic journals and is a Fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). Dr. Rubin holds a PhD from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service of New York University.