As negotiations continue towards a UN Framework Convention on Tax, we must recognize that there is no tax justice without gender justice.
The establishment of a legally binding UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation is historic for Global South countries and the global tax justice movement, which have long called for fair and inclusive international tax rules. But to be truly transformative, the Convention must be grounded in a feminist perspective that accounts for the gendered differences in how tax shapes people’s economic realities. Feminist economists and movements have spent decades exposing these structural injustices and advancing alternatives now central to the tax justice movement: progressive and redistributive taxation, investment in care systems, and organizing economies around the realization of human rights rather than maximizing profit.
Feminist perspectives are therefore essential to ensuring the UN Tax Convention confronts the structural drivers of inequality and climate breakdown, rather than reinforcing the patriarchal, colonial, and neoliberal economic model that created them.
