双语阅读英语外刊精讲：社会性别预算(附音频)

2018-10-31 09:45:00来源：酷学英语

　　双语阅读是英语学习爱好者的天堂，在双语阅读里，不仅可以了解英美当地文化、习俗，还可以掌握地道英语表达，提高英语综合能力。本期主题：新东方刘琦老师为大家带来《双语阅读英语外刊精讲：社会性别预算(附音频)》，与大家一起分享。更多双语阅读资料，可点击查看：《双语阅读：英语外刊阅读精讲汇总》

　　Gender budgeting

　　Making Women Count

　　An idea to help governments live up to their promises

　　It is easy to be cynical about government and rarely does such cynicism go unrewarded. Take, for instance, policy towards women. Some politicians declare that they value women's unique role, which can be shorthand for keeping married women at home looking after the kids. Others create whole ministries devoted to policies for women, which can be a device for parking women's issues on the periphery of policy where they cannot do any harm. Still others, who may actually mean what they say, pass laws giving women equal opportunities to men. Yet decreeing an end to discrimination is very different from bringing it about.

　　Amid this tangle of evasion half-promises and wishful thinking, some policymakers have embraced a technique called gender budgeting. It not only promises to do a lot of good for women, but carries a lesson for advocates of any cause: the way to a government's heart is through its pocket.

　　At its simplest, gender budgeting sets out to quantify how policies affect women and men differently. That seemingly trivial step converts exhortation about treating women fairly into the coin of government: costs and benefits, and investments and returns. You don't have to be a feminist to recognize, as Austria did, that the numbers show how lowering income tax on second earners will encourage women to join the labour force, boosting growth and tax revenues. Or that cuts to programmes designed to reduce domestic violence would be a false economy, because they would cost so much in medical treatment and lost workdays.

　　As well as identifying opportunities and errors, gender budgeting brings women's issues right to the heart of government, the ministry of finance. Governments routinely bat away sensible policies that lack a champion when the money is handed out. But if judgments about what makes sense for women (and the general good) are being formed within the finance ministry itself, then the battle is half-won.

双语阅读：英语外刊阅读精讲(附音频)