Gender budgeting: the Austrian experience

“Yes, we do gender budgeting, and no, it does not cost us an arm and a leg. On the contrary, as part of our performance-oriented budgeting concept, we expect it will increase value for money,” Gerhard Steger, Director General for Budget and Public Finances of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance, told an audience of OSCE delegates and budget experts at an event ahead of OSCE Advisory Committee on Management and Finance meeting on 12 October.

Among OSCE participating States, Austria has taken the idea of using the state budget as a lever for promoting gender equality the farthest. Each Austrian ministry has to define a maximum of five outcomes per budget chapter which are part of the annual budget decision in the parliament. At least one of these outcomes has to be a gender outcome. Each ministry has to define concrete measures to support the respective gender outcomes and define appropriate indicators.

Since 2007, the requirement to apply gender budgeting has been written into the Austrian Constitution. This was a major achievement, but only a beginning, Steger underlined. “The rules were set out clearly on paper, yet many still viewed the mainstreaming of gender with skepticism and treated it as a mere add-on.” Not so Mr. Steger and his office “We see gender budgeting as a doorway to facilitating targeted policy-making on a political level and enabling the administrative level to present its results and achievements,” he explained.

It is essential to focus on external sociopolitical outcome objectives. Offering special training for female staff of ministries might be a nice additional activity, but not at all sufficient for making a real difference.

In a budget reform process which will be put into effect from 2013, the Federal Finance Ministry made gender mainstreaming an integral part of a new budgeting procedure based on performance. “Performance-oriented budgeting means that to the usual question, ‘who gets what?’, we add the question, ‘who delivers which results and when?’. This way, citizens are provided a better insight into what their tax money is being used for.”

“Don’t make it too easy for them,” Steger advised those in his audience looking to introduce a gender perspective into the budgets of their own governments. “It is essential to focus on external sociopolitical outcome objectives. Offering special training for female staff of ministries might be a nice additional activity, but not at all sufficient for making a real difference. Furthermore, gender is not only a women’s issue, it concerns men as well. Improving the health of males over 50 by launching a campaign for free preventative medical checkups could be an outcome objective,” he said.

The decision on budget reform, including gender budgeting, was adopted unanimously by the Austrian parliament – an exceptional occurrence, according to Steger, the result of years of hard work and careful planning.  In this respect, he had more salient advice. First, incorporate gender budgeting into a package. “Introducing gender budgeting on its own would maybe not have worked as a single issue,” he said. “It was part of a package, which spoke to a variety of interests. What ultimately sold it was that it was part of a strategy to modernize the country.”

Second, start with a pilot project to win over all stakeholders. The pilot project for the Austrian budget reform was designed to help ministries save money, which they were then free to use as they saw fit. “You should have seen how the attitude of the people in the ministries changed when they were told they could keep unspent money for their own purposes,” he laughed. 

At the end of the discussion, one OSCE delegate asked Steger how the administrative staff had been trained to implement the new gender budgeting provisions. “The best decision we made was not to hire consultants,” Mr. Steger answered. “We trained one staff member in each unit, who was then in charge of training the rest. This way, we created a sense of ownership. Many of the designated trainers had never presented in public before, and they were shaking like leaves before their first presentations. But afterwards, they were three metres tall!” Doing a good thing, empowering staff and having fun: that is how Steger summarized the achievement of the budget reform, an achievement of which he, his colleagues and indeed Austria is extremely proud.