Tax Policy and Feminism: Competing Goals and Institutional Choices

Abstract

Despite the dramatic increase in women's labor market participation in recent decades, women continue to perform a disproportionate share of "family labor," or the unpaid work of caring for children and other family members. Feminists have long been concerned that the gendered division of family labor reduces women's wages, contributes to the high and disproportionate rate of poverty among single mothers, limits married women's autonomy within the marital household, and circumscribes women's life choices and social and economic power.