Bases

Apparently neutral decisions with an impact on resources do not impact on all people equally.

An example: cuts in child day care (shorter day care times, higher charges) affect in particular single mothers when they can only make up for these cuts by doing unpaid child day care work themselves, thus running the risk of being shut out of the employment market. Single fathers are on average less affected by such cuts as they earn more on average and the cultural barriers in the employment market are lower for them.

Another example shows that decisions with direct consequences for the public budget have important consequences for disposal over resources for women and for men; the extension of shop opening hours has had a considerable impact on the income, time budget and organisation of household work of people employed in retailing, on household organisation for customers, both male and female, and on turnover and profit trends for the companies. For many of the predominantly female employees, this decision has brought disadvantages in terms of finances and time (family-unfriendly hours of work and more low-paid jobs). At the same time, they have brought more flexibility for customers and therefore advantages in the organisation of household work, which still tends predominantly to be done by women. A gender-related impact assessment before this decision would have been able to make these consequences clearer. An informed public discussion could have taken place on the basis of such an impact assessment. These aspects would then have been able to carry more weight in the face of the general social policy arguments in favor of deregulation and may have played a more prominent role in the decision-making process.

Examples like these show that women and men are not homogeneous groups. Men as well as women are different because of different life situations, age, origin, physical and mental disposition, education, etc., and are affected to different extents by decisions with an impact in relation to resources. The consequences of such decisions can in a gender-related way lead to very different burdens. The distribution of resources in a society is a decisive factor for the participation of individuals in social decision-making processes and for the esteem in which they are held in the structure of society. The public budget is a central expression of the value decisions and priorities of government policy.


Gender-related effects of decisions with an impact for resources on the private division of labor should be taken into account

Consideration of families as economic units tends to cover up their internal division of labor, which is often gender-differentiated. So the impact of decisions with an impact on resources should not be looked at solely with reference to private households as economic and consumer units. Only by taking each individual (children, women and men) into account can gender-differentiated impacts be perceived.


Unpaid work is an important part of the economic performance of a society

The conventional idea of the economy takes no account of unpaid work in the household such as child care, running the household and nursing care for those in need of it, nor of honorary work as part of civil society. It is only the output of the unpaid sector and the monetary economic sector together that gives the overall economic performance of a society.
Unpaid work is a performance in money’s worth for the community. This becomes especially visible in the case of work that was previously done as a public service, but is also true of every other kind of community work as well as ‘traditional’ household and family work. To this extent, unpaid work can be seen as an invisible donation to the community. This performance is brought, but has hitherto been absent from economic calculations.


Unpaid work and private division of labor can only be appropriately represented by taking the factor of time into consideration.

Consideration of the factor of time in economic calculations should be demanded in this context. This would, among other things, take the fact into account that periods spent bringing up children are not available for gainful employment. The point is to counter the exclusion from gainful employment and decision-making processes that is associated with gender roles.
Introducing the factor of time into economic calculations moreover permits a far more realistic impact assessment of cuts which have to be compensated for by unpaid work. If more and more tasks are carried out privately, then less time is available for individual private household tasks. It is unavoidable that the quality of the services provided (e.g. child rearing) will suffer in many respects. Consequential costs can be expected due to inadequate provision. Short-term cuts can thus cause higher costs in the long term.