 If you're not thinking always about how men and women are interacting differently with the production, distribution and consumption processes, then you don't really understand how economic policies are going to play out. It's become very fashionable to say that yes, we are conscious of the impact of gender and how it's cross-cutting and it's all of these things, but a lot of this is actually tokenism, not really translating it into content or real change in how you address policies. So let's begin with this whole issue of migration. There's a very strongly gendered pattern of migration now and it's something that has taken many countries, both the host countries and the origin countries, unaware because there was this whole assumption that migration is male dominantly and that there are relatively few women who migrate only for work. That's not true and it's highly gendered, but where there are lots of women going, they dominantly work in the services sector, in care, broadly defined domestic work, nursing and so on, but also in the entertainment sector. Men dominantly work in manufacturing and construction and then to a lesser extent in services. Now what this means is that this has actually significant implications for remittances, something that hasn't really been absorbed by the policy makers who are dealing with these kinds of international flows. Women migrants send more back home in remittances as a share of their own income than the men migrants do. However, men migrants earn more and so they may send more in absolute amounts sometimes, even though they're sending a smaller share of what they're earning, but where you have dominantly women migrants, you find that the pattern of remittance sending is very stable. It doesn't change with the business cycle in the host country and this is unlike, for example, when there are dominantly male migrants, because male migrants in construction and manufacturing especially are immediately affected by a downturn. They lose their jobs or they get reduced wages and they're much less able to send money back home. So we found that in periods of very, very significant economic shock or major downturns, the global financial crisis for example, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, countries that have sent dominantly male migrants, you see a big collapse in remittance income and that was a significant macroeconomic shock to those sending economies because remittance incomes become a very important part, not just in the balance of payments, but also for dealing with a whole range of other macroeconomic circumstances inside the country. But countries that sent dominantly women migrants, Sri Lanka, Philippines and so on, found continued remittance in flows. With significant macroeconomic impact, despite the significance you find that still migration policies both in the sending country and in the destination country, they are still completely gender blind. That is to say that they really don't recognize the specific difficulties that women face. So now in the Philippines, because it's so dominant and so major, they have finally realized that it's important to look at the specific constraints and issues faced by Balik Bayan by the women migrants, but it's taken a long time to happen and it's still not adequate. Migration policy is gender blind at a significant cost, not just to the migrants themselves, but to that sending economy. When the destination countries don't take account of the specific conditions of the women migrants, they're undermining that whole process on which their own accumulation process depends. When you cut public services, it's a double whammy for women. You are denying many women employment or reducing their wages, but also you are dramatically affecting the unpaid labor that women have to do at home simply to make up for that slack. So fiscal austerity, which typically involves cuts in social spending as one of the first and early things to do, is directly something that impacts on an increase in unpaid labor and in a decline in the earning capacities of women workers. Why then is this such a constantly chosen option? Why is it that governments always, whenever there is a fiscal squeeze, one of the things they do almost immediately is cut down on these things? Ultimately, it's because they can. It's because they are cynically aware that unpaid work within families and households will take up that slack. And so it's not really that this is genderblind. This is actually, unfortunately, quite gender aware. But it's not just spending policies. It's also regressive taxation policies. Thankfully, right now there is a little bit of an impetus to bring back more progressive taxation on higher incomes and assets. But in general, the shift has been towards value added taxes, taxes on intermediate goods, which adds to all other prices, and which then disproportionately affect women. Why disproportionately? Surely it should just affect the whole household. Why women in particular? Women are the ones who are responsible for actually provisioning for the household for making sure you have enough of this or that. And when prices go up, they are the ones who are forced to cut corners to reduce their own personal consumption to do various other things that would somehow allow the household to meet their requirements. We know that women owned micro enterprises and small enterprises are even smaller than those of men. And they are disproportionately affected by things like that by value added taxes, which require you to be much more formal, which require you to have access to a whole system where you can get rebates. And typically they cannot whenever monetary policies are tightened and access to credit is reduced. Women are at the bottom of that ladder in terms of access to credit. So when banks feel the strain, they start cutting from the bottom of the ladder. So they get much more chances of exclusion. All of this is of course bad for women, but it's not just bad for women. It's a very, very political choice to choose particular types of revenue raising and particular types of expenditure on which the burden falls on this group. Of course, within that group, especially on women in poorer families, but broadly speaking, women in general. What's extraordinary is that we find that this continues not just for national governments, but even for the international financial institutions. Even during this current pandemic, which we are observing has got created economic devastation in many parts of the world, both advanced and developing countries. Around 91 loans have been negotiated with the IMF with 81 countries just in 2020 because they're all get stressed. They're all fiscally tight. They all have balance payments problems. It turns out that 76 of those agreements involve very significant cuts in public expenditure. Deep cuts to public health care systems. Can you imagine in the middle of pandemic cut the health care system? Cuts to pension schemes, wage freezes for public sector workers, cuts for education workers, cuts for health care workers like doctors, nurses, teachers, cuts for benefits like sick pay. This is what the IMF is still requiring poor developing countries to do. In some cases, they have said stop the cash transfers for those unable to work and increase the role of regressive taxes, value-added taxes. Those impact women much more, and yet we find that the IMF is encouraging governments to do all of these things that will have a disproportionate impact on women and will really make women bear that burden of the adjustment. Everybody knows that it's much better to be a formal worker than an informal worker. It gives you some legal protection. It gives you increased social protection. I mean, it seems to be a no-brainer that we would want more and more formalization. But it turns out that it's much more complicated. The way many of these policies are designed, especially in the developing world, ends up working against women workers. How is that? So first of all, there's a very big difference between formalizing enterprises and formalizing employees or workers. You can formalize enterprises. That is, you can say you have to subject yourselves to regulation. You have to register yourself. You have to do various things which allow us to tax you as you should be taxed and will enable you to get bank credit and other government benefits and so on. That's the idea and that's why governments really prefer formalizing enterprises. We know that women-run enterprises have many more difficulties than men and the costs of the formalizing would make many of these women-run enterprises absolutely unviable. That's what we've seen that when there is a drive to formalizing women-run enterprises are much more likely to drop out altogether and basically stop existing. But also it doesn't mean that you are really benefiting the workers, even the ones in that formal enterprise. It can get away with manipulating the labor laws to really provide those workers very little protection and that is what has happened in many, many countries. But also women on the ground, let's say street vendors, formalizing also makes you much more prey to over-regulation, to various kinds of local level corruption, various kinds of things that actually make it impossible for you to function or raise the costs of your functioning because you'd have to give bribes periodically to the local functionary in adverse labor market conditions. That is to say where there's too many workers chasing too few jobs, which is what is the case right now across the world. If you're just going to try and formalize even workers, it can often go against you. So in India there was a plan to insist that women workers should get maternity benefits. And of course that's ideal, right? It sounds good. Why should women workers not get maternity benefits? Yet when they tried to implement it, it really meant that employers stopped hiring women. They were more anxious to just choose men for whom they would not have to provide this benefit. So you have to think this through. You have to think of a strategy that will provide that maternity benefit, but not that it will then mean that women get thrown out of jobs or not hired for jobs. You have to find a way in which some of that is taken up by the state, some of that cost of the maternity benefit and where women are ensured equal access to the employment even while they are given what is definitely their due. And the trouble is that so much of the implementation of these policies is done by men who are deeply patriarchal. Local level officials, middle level officials, everybody are often very dismissive of women. When you're dealing with very patriarchal bureaucracies, even at the lower level, it's much harder for you to get even that minimum benefit which the whole formalization strategy is supposed to entitle you to. Okay, let's take another example. Another thing that seems definitionally good, afforestation, right? Everybody loves it. It's green, it's desirable, it's necessary. And in many countries, there has been a significant drive for afforestation. In India, afforestation strategies were seen to be very successful for two reasons. One, they actually managed to increase forest cover. I think something like 7% increase over 15 years, which is really very good. But also they were decentralized. They were community based. They were not top down. They were designed to be based on local village forest management committees who would decide about which bits to block off to prevent access so that those forests could regenerate. All of those things were done locally at the village level. So this seemed ideal. This seems like a really good way of dealing with the problem of afforestation, except that then studies were done, Pina Agarwal and others, who looked at the time that women spent in collecting fuel wood. Even in the 1990s and early 2000s, about 70% of rural households didn't really have any other fuel other than the wood they would collect. So it was something that had to be done. Fuel wood was the dominant form of fuel for cooking and all of those other things. Women who were the ones in charge of collecting this fuel wood had massively increased labour time in just collecting this fuel. In some cases it was found that the time they spent every day had gone up from two hours to four, five, six in one case, even eight hours just collecting firewood. So massive increases in the unpaid labour time of women in collecting this firewood because of the way in which this whole strategy was devised. Now you can say, well, unfortunately that's a trade-off. You need to forest this region and I'm sorry if you have more unpaid labour time but it's a trade-off. Well, not really because of course these village forest management committees, what was the norm that it's one person per household? Guess what happens when it's one person per household? The male head of household, the man in the family goes and represents the family. So now here's the thing. What do you need from the forest? You need fodder and you need fuel wood. So the men are really interested in the fodder. They don't care about the fuel wood because that's their wives are or sisters or mothers are spending hours. That's not their problem. In some districts of different parts of India, they actually experimented with having women only village forest management committees and there were some remarkable success stories. It was found that these women only committees also tried to regenerate the forest but they did this in a more flexible way. So it's possible to have conservation without increasing labour time and collection. It wasn't necessarily that the men were, you know, bad. It's just that it hadn't occurred to them. It was not something they lived through in their daily lives. So they didn't see this as a specific issue that they had to do something about and I think it's that absence of a gender perspective which covers so many different aspects of economic policy. I've just given you a few but I'm sure you look around you think about it you yourselves will find so many examples of how having a gender perspective would completely transform the attitude to a particular policy and sometimes you only need a little tweak to change the nature of that policy to change its impact and to give you better outcomes overall.