Accounting for Gender: the Role of the COAG Reform Council in Tracking Outcomes for Women and Girls Across Australia

Abstract

The COAG Reform Council has played a critical role in tracking progress, nationally and on a state-by-state basis, against the COAG reform agenda. The council has analysed and publicly reported on governments' performance against outcomes, performance indicators and targets agreed by COAG. However, until 2013 gender analysis was not directly incorporated in the assessment of governments' performance. The council's first report on gender, Tracking equity: Comparing outcomes for women and girls across Australia, redressed this omission. This article explores how taking account of gender greatly enriches our understanding of governments' performance in critical areas, and enhances public accountability as a result. An understanding of gender differences also provides a better basis for government decisionmaking on ways to improve outcomes.

Gender budgeting in public financial management: a literature review and research agenda

“…Studies looking at budget execution (concurrent stage of gender budgeting, 4%) and reporting and auditing ex post stages (13%) are scarce (exceptions are, e.g. Clancy and Mohlakoana, 2020;O'Loughlin and Newton, 2014).…”

“…The academic discourse on gender budgeting is interdisciplinary, encompassing research from accounting and finance, education, feminist economics and non-profit studies, among others (Budlender, 2002; Elson and Sharp, 2010; Morrissey, 2018; Nolte et al, 2021; Steinthórsdóttir et al, 2020). Thus a growing body of the gender literature points out that interdisciplinarity ‘mediates the status of feminist knowledge’ (Pearse et al, 2019: 116). In addition to this interdisciplinarity, studies also differ in their aims.…”