Public agencies allocate a part of their budget each year to Expenditure Annex 13 for equality between women and men; however, this item lacks a methodology that allows knowing the scope to eradicate gender violence, wage gaps and the changes that are obtained through policies with a “gender perspective”.
According to public finance specialists, the agencies only show the percentage of their budget that they allocate to Annex 13, without having the objectives of these resources well defined, and they only limit themselves to saying that a social program is with gender perspective just because the benefit is delivered to more women.
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“This is not to say that the 30 percent of the budget I will spend on women and for this reason policies with a gender perspective are carried out. We need to understand what the needs are and the gaps to close and then implement actions aimed at it and see how much they would cost”, said Alejandra Macías, executive director of the Center for Economic and Budgetary Research (CIEP).
For this year, the budget in Annex 13 of Expenditures for equality between women and men will have an annual increase of 49.5 percent, with a total of 348 billion pesos.
Among the dependencies that assign the most resources to this annex are those that execute key programs of the governmentsuch as the Welfare Secretariat, which has a budget of 205 thousand 834 million pesos for this year, of this total 54.9 percent will go to attachment 13.
The program Senior welfare pension, It has a budget of 191 thousand 235 million pesos and 51 percent will be for this annex.
“To say that the program has a gender perspective because 51 percent was assigned to it, sample They don’t understand what the gender perspective is. If you want to make it differentiated, then give more resources at women because most of their lives they were in the informal sector or flat out, they had an unpaid job and they could not contribute to have access to a pension,” said Macías.
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Another sign that policies with a gender perspective are not being implemented is the pension reform that was approved in 2020. Mariana Campos, Coordinator of the Program of Budget and Accountability of Mexico Evalúaexplained that this reform seeks for both men and women to contribute 700 weeks and retire at 65 years of age, without considering the disadvantages that women face in the labor market.
“When we talk about budget with a gender perspective, What I always say is that we have to go one step earlier, that is, we must talk about the design of the policies and then you set a budget. If we do not recognize the gaps beforehand, the differences that we have, well, we will never have policies with perspective gender,” Campos said.
