Women’s Descriptive Representation and Gendered Import Tax Discrimination

Women’s Descriptive Representation and Gendered Import Tax Discrimination

We identify a form of gender-based governmental discrimination that directly affects billions of women on a daily basis: the setting of import tariffs for gendered goods. These tax rates, which can differ across otherwise identical gender-specific products, often impose direct penalties on women as...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 2021-02, Vol.115 (1), p.307-315
Main Authors: BETZ, TIMM, FORTUNATO, DAVID, O’BRIEN, DIANA Z.
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Clothing industry
Consumer goods
Consumers
Cotton
Democracy
Economic justification
Fines & penalties
Fines and penalties
Gender
Imports
Legislatures
Penalties
Political power
Politics
Public policy
Quotas
Schedules
Sex discrimination
Tariffs
Tax rates
Taxation
Taxes
Textile industry
Wholesalers
Women
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Summary:We identify a form of gender-based governmental discrimination that directly affects billions of women on a daily basis: the setting of import tariffs for gendered goods. These tax rates, which can differ across otherwise identical gender-specific products, often impose direct penalties on women as consumers. Comparing nearly 200,000 paired tariff rates on men’s and women’s apparel products in 167 countries between 1995 and 2015, we find that women suffer a tax penalty that varies systematically across countries. We demonstrate that in democracies, women’s presence in the legislature is associated with decreased import tax penalties on women’s goods. This finding is buttressed by a comparison of democracies and non-democracies and analyses of the implementation of legislative gender quotas. Our work highlights a previously unacknowledged government policy that penalizes women and also provides powerful evidence that descriptive representation can have a substantial, direct impact on discriminatory policies.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943