Abstract 
of the speech at the conference on "Gender Budgets, Financial Markets, Financing for Development", February 19th and 20th 2002 at the Heinrich-Boell Foundation in Berlin.

"In 1999, at the time that France’s Finance Bill for 2000 was voted, members of parliament stipulated that thenceforth each year, the government would present, along with the Finance Bill, an account of financial efforts being made to promote women’s rights and gender equality. Thus it was that the yellow budget paper on women’s rights and gender equality came into being.

This document derives its name from the colour of the paper on which it is printed. Two initial observations can be made about the yellow budget document. First, it has a legislative base. Second, it reflects the legislature’s concern that, during annual debates on the Finance Bill, it has the means to effectively measure and monitor financial efforts being made to promote women’s rights and gender equality. This concern parallels the government’s avowed intention to implement a strong, dynamic policy on this issue, as reflected in the national action platform presented by Nicole Péry, Secretary of State for Women’s Rights and Vocational Training, in June 1999, as well as the eight-line priority action programme decided upon by the Interdepartmental Committee responsible for women's rights on 8 March 2000.

Thus the yellow budget paper simultaneously acts as an information and monitoring instrument for the legislature. It gives the government a means to display the results of its pro-active policy, to measure the development of that policy, and to detect its shortcomings when translated into budgetary terms.

The yellow budget paper on women’s rights and gender equality is not the first of its kind. Over time, members of parliament have initiated the production of some 30 yellow papers. The common thread in these supporting information schedules is a presentation of the state’s financial investment and an analysis, sometimes very detailed, of actions undertaken to support this investment, in an area involving all or several ministerial departments. The documents essentially have to do with crosscutting sectors of intervention or action; their main function is to bring together data that are scattered over several budget lines. For example, since higher education in France is a concern not only of the Ministry of State Education, but also of the Ministries of Agriculture (for advanced training in agriculture), Health (for medical and paramedical education), Culture (e.g., training for architects) and so on, a yellow budget paper presents the coordinated budget for higher education.

A Tool for Gender Mainstreaming
Gender equality is an area of intervention that is ideally suited to this yellow budget paper exercise, especially in view of the global approach that the government has resolved to adopt. In addition to programmes and actions aimed specifically at female sectors of the public, each ministerial department must identify and itemize the actions it has taken that contribute to gender equality or that promote awareness of this issue. Each one is also called upon to state explicitly its policy on gender equality and to present the indicators it finds most pertinent in its field of competence. This makes the document an excellent gender mainstreaming tool, requiring each ministerial department to examine its activities on the basis of how gender equality is taken into account and translated into the budget.

Of course, not all measures adopted or considered for reducing the unequal treatment of men and women or for promoting equality have a financial impact. This is true for example of endeavours to ‘feminize’ staff at the Ministry of Defence. It is also true in the case of regulatory measures taken by the Ministry of Public Service and Government Reform aimed at improving women’s access to jobs and positions in senior management (balanced representation of women and men on panels of examiners for competitive and professional examinations as well as administrative parity on advisory bodies).

The amount of effort involved in preparing the first yellow budget paper on gender equality, in 2000, attest to the difficulty that the administration has encountered in integrating this concern with gender equality throughout the different ministries. How the document changes over time will reveal how and to what extent each actor has mastered this process.

A Tool for Gender-Sensitive Budget Impact Analysis
It is easy to identify budget allocations to actions specifically aimed at female sectors of the public, whether they are intended to accommodate the particular risks women face or to reduce the inequalities that have been observed in the treatment of men and women. One can point to a special guarantee fund that supports the establishment of women-owned businesses, for example, which has been authorised several times over by the state, or to the financial support granted to operate shelters where women survivors of gender-based violence are welcomed, listened to, and given counselling and special support and attention. Additional examples are the systematic health screening programmes for breast and uterine cancer and the special HIV/AIDS prevention programme set up in response to the rising rate of infection in women compared to men.

Similarly, it is not particularly difficult to identify expenditure on awareness-raising or capacity-building activities designed to enable policy-makers and budget officials to address gender inequalities: these include resources for the creation and dissemination of training modules, train-the-trainer workshops and seminars, videos, publications, and the like.

However, actual budget expenditures for these gender-specific activities are relatively insignificant compared with the overall national budget: about 40 million Euro compared to a national budget in the neighbourhood of 260 billion Euro. The state’s commitment to promoting equality for all of its citizens, female and male, goes far beyond these expenditures for catch-up activities or activities designed to correct specific inequalities. Its approach is far more wide reaching and involves a considerable number of public mechanisms. However, the financial impact of this global approach is more difficult to quantify.

Nevertheless, the gender-specific impact of the entire budget can be evaluated by means of the indicators that each of the ministerial departments must now supply. The yellow budget paper can take advantage of the revision of the statistical system that was also initiated in March 2000: at that time, the Prime Minister requested all departments to collect gender-desegregated statistics so as to reflect gender differentials along several different indicators.

Take the case of the Ministry of Education’s 2000 enrolment indicators: at the tenth grade level, more than 99 per cent of girls were enrolled in general or technology courses, representing over 55 per cent of the students enrolled. By senior year, by contrast, girls accounted for barely 43 per cent of high school students enrolled in science courses. Another example: one of the indicators that the Minister of Sports has adopted is the percentage of women who hold licences authorising them to participate in sports federation competitions. In 2001 this figure stood at 33 per cent.

Thus, the yellow budget paper can help to evaluate how mechanisms that are thought of as being gender neutral do in fact have different effects on men and women. This then makes it possible to analyse the nation's entire budgetary activity in terms of the extent to which it promotes or retards gender equality. For example, the budget devoted to combating unemployment can be compared to changes in the respective unemployment rates for men and women, or an analysis can be made of the sectors of the population that receive a state-provided minimum income, and so on.

A Tool for Guiding Government Action
This tool, the initial purpose of which was to simplify parliament’s supervision over the budget, can thus be seen as having considerable importance. A mainstreaming tool, a tool for assessing the different effects of mechanisms that are theoretically gender neutral, the yellow budget paper can also be seen as a tool for guiding the overall direction of government action, in such a way that gender equality will progressively become a reality."

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Aktualisiert: 13.02.2005, hbr