The Journey to Gender-Responsive Budgeting: Lessons Learned from Higher Education

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Agenda includes gender equality as one of its 17 goals and emphasizes the importance of supporting women’s empowerment to meet the SDGs. Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) can help achieve gender equality in organizations, but there continue to be limitations on exploiting its full potential. Further research is needed, especially in the public sector and at higher education institutions. This paper investigates the development of the GRB process and the related reporting practices, as well as the potential to fully integrate it into the university’s strategic policies at the University of Ferrara. The paper is based on a qualitative content analysis of annual GRB reports from 2011 to 2018. The results show that, during this period, GRB at the university changed from playing an accountability role to having a performance measurement role. Although GRB has become more relevant inside the organization, the extent of the integration with the university strategy and the budgeting cycle remains limited, which hampers the strategic relevance of GRB.

The gender budget as a tool for gender equality?

“…The results of this research complement previous empirical evidence pointing to the need for a sound integration of planning, budgeting and performance cycles in order to implement successfully gender budgeting, and stimulate further investigation of the conditions under which gender budgeting can be implemented (Rubin and Bartle, 2005;Steccolini, 2019), specifically in the case of universities (Oppi et al, 2021).…”

“…The limited availability of data and technical expertise, the lack of political commitment and supportive political environments, the difficulties in involving civil society and stakeholders, and the balance between standardization and flexibility are cited as factors limiting the use of gender budgeting (Rubin and Bartle, 2005;Steccolini, 2019). The integration with both strategy and budget cycle is a further crucial element to carrying out successful gender budgeting (Oppi, Cavicchi, and Vagnoni, 2021). These reflections point to the need of advancing the academic debate on gender budgeting by going beyond a normative discussion on the potential benefits of this practice and investigating how it can be designed and implemented to create a successful reality.…”

“…By addressing these research questions, this research wants to contribute to the debate on "accounting gender" and specifically to the literature on gender budget in the higher education field, which is still underdeveloped and mainly normative (Oppi et al, 2021). By so doing, the research aims at fostering discussion on the conditions that can drive successful implementation of gender budgeting and thus enhance its effectiveness, i.e.…”

Gender Narratives in Academia: how gender is constructed through gender policies in Italian universities

“…However, the two most important changes that have been introduced in Italian universities are recent: using soft law and peer pressure tools, in 2019 the Conference of Italian University Rectors (CRUI) approved the Guidelines for adopting university gender budgets, giving a great impulse to the adoption of this type of documents in Italian universities (Oppi et al, 2021), so much so that as of April 2022 40 Italian universities have already adopted a gender budget and another 7 are about to publish it (data presented by the CRUI Gender Working Group). However, most Italian gender budgets consist of a context statistical analysis and do not contain a financial analysis of the university budget.…”

The balance between status quo and change when minorities try to access top ranks: a tale about women achieving professorship

“…It is worth mentioning that universities are expected to have three-year-long equality plans and monitor gender representation at different levels (Directive 2/2019 on equal opportunities in the public sector). However, these interventions are often not well integrated within institutional strategic plans, and they struggle to tackle cultural change (Oppi et al , 2021; Galizzi and Siboni, 2016). Recent research has shown that the Italian academic system is still highly masculine (Roberto et al , 2020; Bozzon et al , 2017; Murgia and Poggio, 2019; Gaiaschi and Musumeci, 2020).…”