How WBG got started

These pages explains how the Women’s Budget Group got started and our work today

How WBG got started

The Women’s Budget Group (WBG) is a network of leading academic researchers, policy analysts and activists set up in 1989 to analyse UK government economic policy for its impact on women and to promote policies that will increase gender equality.

Our vision is of a gender equal society.

Our mission is to promote greater gender equality in policy making and raise awareness of feminist approaches to economics.

We do this by producing well respected, academically robust analysis of the gender impact of economic policy in order to influence policy discussions and promote gender equal policy outcomes. This involves drawing on the expertise of our membership network and staff team to:

Analyse economic policy for its impact on women and men
Develop social and economic policies towards a gender equal and sustainable economy
Promote our policy analysis and proposed alternatives to policy makers, the media and wider civil society
Promote and enable the use of gender budget analysis by government and other public bodies
Build the capacity of women’s organisations to influence debates on economic policy
Contribute to and learn from the international experience of gender budget analysis

How the Women’s Budget Group got started and our work today

Building an alliance

The UK Women’s Budget Group started as a small group of women who were frustrated that discussions about the impact of the budget every year did not include how the budget affected women and men differently.

From the start one of the strengths of the Women’s Budget Group was that it involved members from a range of different backgrounds, with different expertise, particularly academia, the women’s voluntary sector and trade unions. As well as bringing a range of expertise to the Women’s Budget Group, members use WBG analysis to influence their own networks and build awareness of feminist approaches to economics within academia, trade unions and the women’s movement. Some gender budgeting groups also involve policy makers. However, while WBG has allies among parliamentarians and civil servants, the group has always remained independent of government and political parties.

Potential membership of a gender budgeting group

Mapping out the stakeholders

As the group grew WBG started to identify potential allies among civil servants, journalists, and politicians and their advisors from different parties. These allies helped WBG communicate its findings to a wider audience and influence policy.

An early task for a group wanting to promote gender responsive budgeting is to map out different ‘stakeholders’, institutions, organisations, networks and individuals which might have an interest in your work. This could include those you want to involve in your group and those you want to influence.

It helps to think of where different stakeholders fit on a chart like this:

It is also worth thinking about opposition to your work and where this might come from. The potential allies and opponents that you think about will vary depending on context but might include:

Grassroots women’s organisations
Larger national women’s organisations
Other equality and social justice voluntary organisations
Trade unions, particularly those representing large numbers of women
Research institutes and think tanks
Political parties and individual politicians
Parliamentary committees working on relevant areas
Individual academics
Academic networks with an interest in gender and/or the economy
International Non-Government Organisations
Civil servants

There may be potential allies and opponents in each group.

When building alliances think about what you can offer potential allies.

Politicians, civil servants and other policy-makers may value expert evidence that they can use in policy making and/or to persuade their colleagues to act.
Academics may value an opportunity to use their research to influence policy and links with front-line organisations that could help with future research.
Women’s organisations may value evidence and analysis that they can use in their campaigning and advocacy work and an opportunity to feed their front-line experience into research.

“In the UK, academics have historically been relatively well paid, can research what they want and are used to working outside fixed working hours, which creates a pool of people who are willing to help. They have been able to contribute expertise for free. In some countries most people do not earn enough to do that; they expect to be paid on a consultancy basis by the UN or International NGOs meaning mobilising their expertise may be harder. On the other hand, organisations may be able to mobilise international funding that isn’t available to us.”

WBG member

Finding an initial focus

Civil society groups working on gender responsive budgeting generally start with a focus on a particular stage in the budget cycle, or a particular policy issue. One of the first tasks is to find out about the budget cycle. The chart below was developed by WBG in partnership with Oxfam and shows an example of a ‘typical’ budget cycle with possible actions at different stages.

Diagram showing GRB actions at different stages of the budget cycle

In practice the budget cycles in all countries will be different. Some countries may work on a three or five-year plan, which may be amended every year. Local or regional government will have different levels of power to raise taxes and decide spending priorities in different countries.

Mapping out the budget cycle will help you think through where you have the most opportunities for impact. Your activities will depend on the context in which you are working but could include:

Research and analysis into:

The likely or actual impact of the budget (or other economic policy decisions).
The likely or actual impact of policy in a specific area (for example spending on health).
Whether actual spending on services matches budget commitments.
The needs of women and men, girls and boys and the spending required to meet those needs.

Using the findings of research and analysis to:

Advocate for changes to policy/practice across government or within a specific department.
Highlight the need for national, regional or local government to carry out their own analysis.
Inform the work of women’s voluntary organisations.
Inform work of parliamentarians in holding government to account.

Capacity building:

Providing expert advice and training to civil servants or elected officials wishing to carry out gender responsive budgeting.
Working with back bench politicians to build their capacity to hold local or national government to account.
Building the capacity of women and smaller civil-society organisations to engage with the budget process and hold government to account.

The initial focus of the UK Women’s Budget Group was the annual budget speech to parliament made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is a high-profile occasion that attracts a great deal of media and political attention. The initial aim of the WBG was to ensure that public debate about the impact of the budget on different groups included discussion of the budget’s gender impact. To further such debate, members of the group would meet to discuss the likely impact of the budget on women and produce a written analysis.

At this point the group was an entirely unfunded network, relying on the voluntary expertise of members. In the early 2000s, WBG secured funding to pay a part-time co-ordinator, but most of its work was carried out by members. Since 2016, WBG has succeeded in raising additional funding to employ a director and other staff members, but still relies on the pro-bono (unpaid) expertise of its members for much of its work.

WBG work today

The budget remains a key focus of activity for the WBG every year. In advance of the budget WBG produces briefings on a range of policy areas, including health, social care, childcare, education, housing, violence against women and girls, employment and public sector pay. We produce an analysis of the budget every year. We also produce briefings for parliamentarians during debates on the budget in parliament.

Today WBG works throughout the year. Our work includes:

Carrying out research

We do this in a number of ways:

Analysing existing research to highlight its gender implications. We don’t always have the resources to carry out primary research in every area, so we use analysis by reputable research organisations to provide evidence for our own briefings. For example, recent briefings on health and education spending have quoted findings by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that spending on schools and health has fallen in real terms, to show the implications of this for women and girls.

We also use data collected and published by government. For example, we use data on employment and pay from the labour force and earnings surveys (major national surveys published by the Office for National Statistics) to analyse the gender employment gap and gender pay gap.

Distributional analysis. We use the microsimulation model developed by a British economic consultancy company called Landman Economics. They analyse the cumulative impact of changes to tax, benefits and public services by gender, race and income (for more information see Case study 4: Cumulative Impact Analysis).

Qualitative analysis. We have drawn on research by our members and worked with our academic networks and civil society partners to carry out our own research into the impact of economic policies on the lives of women and girls, through interviews and focus groups with individual women (for more information see Case study 3: Public Services and Case study 10: Working with Other Civil Society Groups).

Communicating our analysis to policy-makers and the public

As well as briefing parliamentarians and the media on our analysis of the budget each year we also:

Respond to consultations. We submit evidence to consultations carried out by government, political parties, national and international bodies. For example, we have provided evidence on the impact of austerity policies on women to the UN Independent Expert on Foreign Debt and Human Rights.

We have also contributed sections to the UK Shadow Report to the CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women) Committee. Shadow reports are a way for civil society groups to highlight issues for the committee to consider when it examines a government’s record against the obligations of CEDAW.

Give evidence to parliamentary committees. We submit written evidence and have been asked to give evidence in person to various parliamentary committees. For example, we gave evidence to the Social Security Select Committee when it was scrutinizing a Bill to introduce Universal Credit, a new system of means tested cash transfers (sometimes called benefits or welfare payments). More recently we have given evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee, which was holding an inquiry into the UK government’s strategy to meet UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 on women’s equality.

Propose alternative policy approaches. Alongside analysing the likely or actual impact of government policies, WBG has proposed alternative economic approaches. In response to the austerity policies introduced by the Coalition and Conservative governments since 2010, we have developed Plan F, a feminist economic strategy for a caring and sustainable economy based on mutual support and respect for rights. At the 2015 election we used Plan F as the basis for our analysis of all the party manifestos.

Promote gender budgeting in government. We work to encourage government to adopt gender responsive budgeting policies, both through carrying out our own analysis and through providing advice on how gender budgeting can work in practice.

Build the capacity of civil society organisations. We have run training workshops and produced toolkits to enable women’s organisations and individual women to scrutinize economic policy and advocate at a local and national level.

Next sections in this series

What gender budget analysis can show

These pages give examples of WBG analysis in different policy areas and highlight some of the main gender issues to consider in each area.

Communicating the analysis

These pages give examples of ways in which WBG has done this.

Lessons learned

These pages share several important factors that lead to changes in government policy or law.

Key challenges and questions

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions – what you do will depend on the context you are in.

Resources

Useful resources for carrying out GRB