Guide: How to Conduct a Gender Audit of Municipal Budgets

This guide offers guidelines for conducting a gender audit of local authority budgets

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What is the Guide? The main purpose of a gender audit is to improve municipal allocations in order to serve better the men and women who live in a locality. This Guide is based on manuals and models that have been used in many countries to perform gender audits of budgets. It is also based on the collective experience of the Women’s Budget Forum and the Adva Center in their analyses of Israeli municipalities in recent years.

What’s in the Guide? Three models are presented here:
1. Gender audit of budgets for municipal programs and projects. This model reveals how public spending on municipal services and programs differentially serves women and men and the need to introduce change, if necessary, to ensure that the needs of both women and men are adequately met.
2. Across-the-board analysis of a target group provides a closer look at one group of city residents whose situation we want to examine and improve. In this model, we evaluate all the amounts allocated to this group in the municipal budget, and examine all the relevant allocations within each municipal department.
3. Gender audit of patterns of municipal employment and decision-making. This model provides a gendered analysis of the employment conditions and salaries of municipal employees, and an analysis of the proportion of women and men in managerial posts, the City Council, municipal committees, and the directorates of municipal companies.

Who is the Guide for? The Guide was intended for all those who are, or want to be, involved in improving the municipal budgeting process – city residents, mayors, department heads, employees, city treasurers, City Council members, and mayoral advisors on the status of women.