Is a Gender-Neutral Income Tax Feasible -- or Desirable?

It is increasingly recognized that the individual income tax leads to disparate treatment by race, ethnicity, and gender, even when the statutory tax code is written in a race-, ethnicity-, and gender-blind way. Partly in response to these disparate treatments, there have been many suggestions for moving the income tax to more neutral treatments of taxpayers. In this paper, we focus on a specific aspect of these reform efforts: making the individual income tax gender neutral. We first examine the many sources of gender non-neutrality in the income tax. We argue that gender non-neutrality arises largely because of deviations of "income" in the tax code from "comprehensive income," deviations that are driven by the many things that we want the tax to achieve, by the ways in which the specific features of the income tax interact with the economic decisions and roles of individuals, and by the differences in these decisions and roles between women and men. We illustrate the results of these tax features on gender non-neutrality with several specific examples drawn largely from Scandinavian tax practices. We conclude that it is possible to make the income tax more gender neutral, so that a gender-neutral income tax is feasible. However, we also conclude that complete gender neutrality would come at the expense of other desired goals; that is, complete gender neutrality is at odds with all that we ask of the tax code, including targeting tax benefits at groups like women who have experienced significant historical inequities in their tax treatment, so that a completely gender-neutral income tax is not desirable because we wish to use the income tax to achieve many other worthwhile goals. Safeguards actively promoting the specific circumstances of women may be necessary, as such biased tax features could be used as a way of moving toward more gender-equal outcomes. In light of these arguments, we suggest that one alternative to promoting complete gender neutrality in the tax code could be to consider affirmative action in some circumstances as a way of fostering gender-neutral outcomes, rather than to aim for a gender-neutral tax code with inequitable outcomes induced by societal and cultural influences. Another option that has proven successful elsewhere could be to actively employ gender budgeting assessments when introducing new tax legislation and budgets.