ABSTRACT
The issue of taxes has always been a highly politicized one in the UK, and never more so than in 2009 as the UK government weighed how best to rebalance its budget after rescuing its banking sector while its economy suffered its most severe financial crisis since the 1930s. Debates about taxes, however, tended to focus mainly on the overall level of taxation and government expenditure and on distributional effects among households. With the exception of the work of the Women’s Budget Group, a think tank that regularly comments on the gender implications of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s annual budgets, little attention has been paid to the gender aspects of the taxation system. In particular, there has been little debate about what effects any proposals for tax rises to pay for a 2008 stimulus package, or for bailing out the banking sector, are likely to have on both men and women.
