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Gender-based Analysis as if *everyone* matters

By August 1, 2018March 18th, 2020No Comments

In the Sun newspapers on 8 June 2018 Sean Speer and I had some fun at the expense of self-righteous government social engineers by pointing out the hypocrisy and double-standards implicit in Ottawa’s policy of “gender-based analysis”. We argue that if GBA is a serious policy, we must look at the differential impact of policies on each sex and seek to mitigate sex-specific harms wherever they may occur. But of course the government thinks that it only matters if *women* are disadvantaged by a policy, not men. A case in point: the many policies currently in place that are placing enormous strain on the natural resource economy. As Sean and I wrote:

“One currently-ignored area ripe for more people-centred analysis, for example, is natural resources and the trade-offs that policymakers are implicitly making between employment and other considerations such as reducing carbon emissions. Proper GBA would reveal that the effects of this policy are relatively minor for women but devastating for men.”