We’re excited to announce that NWLC, in partnership with Groundwork Collaborative, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, released three reports about gender and racial bias in the tax code and how to harness our tax laws as a tool for equity.Reckoning With The Hidden Rules of Gender in the Tax Code, tackles some aspects of the tax code that shape corporate and individual behaviors in ways that have negative downstream effects on women and especially women of color. Among other things, this report analyzes how the tax code incents or enables exorbitant executive compensation at the expense of worker pay; how the tax code’s treatment of debt fuels predatory behavior by private equity firms; how particular tax provisions could encourage worker misclassification; and how corporations with a high share of women and people of color as employees engaged in big stock buybacks at the expense of increasing worker pay in the wake of the 2017 tax law. We call out specific examples from Starbucks, Toys R Us, and Hilton.
You can access the final reports and executive summary here, and an article by Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic here.
This article was originally published at National Women’s Law Center. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: This report, co-authored by Katy Milani (Roosevelt Institute, https://rooseveltinstitute.org), Melissa Boteach (NWLC), Steph Sterling (Roosevelt Institute), and Sarah Hassmer (NWLC), discusses how low taxes for the wealthy and corporations have played a role in enabling – and in some cases encouraging – those with the highest incomes and the most capital to accumulate outsized wealth and power in our economy. Centuries of discrimination and subjugation of women and people of color interact today with widening income inequality, such that white, non-Hispanic men are disproportionately represented among the wealthiest households, while labor and economic contributions from women of color are consistently undervalued. An agenda to advance racial and gender justice must reckon with provisions in our tax code perpetuate and enable these inequities.
