The title of my presentation really says what this is. “Gender Budgeting in the United States: The San Francisco Experience” is the experience of gender budgeting in the United States. So my presentation is going to be somewhat different from the previous presentations because I will be focusing on a local government. One of the lessons here, really, is that gender budgeting can be implemented at all levels of government.
Here is just a brief word about San Francisco. It's one of the 20 largest cities in the United States. It has about 750,000 people and a budget of about $6 billion, so it's a very large government.
Also, just for a very quick background, I know you're all familiar with the fact that the United States is, actually, the only industrialized country in the world that has not ratified CEDAW, and that really sets the stage for San Francisco.
In 1998, in frustration with the failure of the United States government to ratify CEDAW, the City of San Francisco became the nation's first government to pass its own CEDAW ordinance. This is very important because the gender budget initiative in San Francisco is in the context of human rights, so human rights has set the stage for gender budgeting in San Francisco. The CEDAW ordinance requires that city departments use a gender and human rights analysis to review their policies regarding budget allocations, as well as employment and service delivery.
San Francisco's CEDAW resolution is significant in its explicit treatment of budget issues. Unlike the international CEDAW treaty adopted almost 20 years earlier, which makes no specific reference to public expenditures or revenues, CEDAW's ordinance in San Francisco specifically requires that agencies integrate the human rights principles set forth in the ordinance into local policies, programs, and budgetary decisions.
The adoption of the San Francisco CEDAW ordinance resulted from the efforts of a public-private coalition, spearheaded by the Women's Institute for Leadership Development, called WILD, and the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. Other members of the coalition included Amnesty International and the Women's Foundation of California. I'm just going to quickly tell you about these groups.
WILD is the non-profit organization primarily responsible for the introduction and subsequent adoption of the CEDAW ordinance. The founders of WILD saw the ordinance as a way to implement the Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. WILD spent 18 months building support for the ordinance among other advocacy groups, politicians, and the general public. This is critical, what WILD did.
WILD had a partner, the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. The commission was established in 1975 by a resolution of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and in 1994 was made a permanent body under the city charter. San Francisco, I should say, is both a city and a county, so San Francisco has a city council that is also the county board of supervisors.
The commission, whose seven members are appointed by the mayor, establishes policy priorities that are implemented by the city's Department on the Status of Women. The involvement of the commission in the CEDAW coalition provided what has been called “a valuable government partner with key contacts in City Hall”. So here we had women's groups, human rights groups, and the government all involved in implementing CEDAW.
Who else was involved? The Women's Foundation of California is a statewide organization focused on investing in women and girls. The foundation's strong relationships with many women's rights groups were a critical element in the coalition efforts to implement the CEDAW ordinance.
Also involved was Amnesty International, a worldwide human rights organization, with many chapters in the United States, and its western region chapter provided a membership base and a strong human rights network to the CEDAW coalition.
So this is really the background for gender budgeting in San Francisco. In addition, the board of supervisors, which is composed of 11 members, is headed by a president and is responsible for passing laws and budgets.
At the time of the CEDAW ordinance enactment, the board's president was Barbara Kaufman, a supporter of women's rights who was heavily involved in drafting the ordinance.
They also had an ally in Mayor Willie Brown, who was San Francisco's first African American mayor and was well-known for his support of human rights and CEDAW. He signed the ordinance at the conclusion of San Francisco's first mayor's summit for women.
The CEDAW ordinance specified the establishment of an 11-member task force to advise the mayor, the board of supervisors, and others, on the local implementation of CEDAW. Task force members included elected officials and representatives from a wide range of organizations: labour, government, and community advocates. There was a broad base here.
At the core of the ordinance is the requirement that the city integrate the human rights principles set forth in the treaty into local policies, programs, and budgetary decisions. To accomplish this, the ordinance required the city departments to undergo a gender analysis in three areas: budget allocation, service delivery, and employment practices.
In March 1999, consultants were hired to work with the task force to develop guidelines to help governments with the gender analysis, and there was a five-step process formulated to do this. Just quickly, the five steps were: collecting the data, analyzing the data, formulating recommendations, implementing an action plan, and monitoring the results.
For each of the five steps, the CEDAW guidelines provided information to departments as to what should be included in their gender analysis. Seven of the 50 departments in San Francisco were selected to undertake the first gender analysis.
I've just taken excerpts from the gender analyses of two of the departments to show you the challenges they said they faced in doing the budget component of their gender analysis.
The two departments I'm looking at are very different. One is the department of public works, and when they first heard about gender budgeting they said, “What is that? We're public works.” But they did find out, when they began looking at all of the different aspects of public works, that it was not gender neutral and there was an impact on men and women. They said it was difficult to conduct the gender analysis because they didn't have the data. I know our previous speaker said that shouldn't stop them--and it really didn't stop them--but they said it made it difficult. I'll come back, hopefully, during the question period to talk more about what they actually did.
The other department that was interesting was the department of adult probation. They said their budget priorities did not reflect the consideration of gender; they reflected a consideration of the needs of the total clientele, even though the department of women and others looking at this found out that there definitely is a difference between what's available for females on probation and males on probation.
The city got all this information, and it recognized that to move its gender budgeting initiative along, it had to provide assistance to departments, especially in their efforts to collect gender disaggregated data. The city then came up with a five-year strategic plan--called for in the CEDAW ordinance--to provide the structure for departments to move ahead in integrating gender into everything they did, including their budgets. The action plan was prepared by the task force I referred to earlier, which worked with the city's department on the status of women, and it was supposed to provide a road map for how departments were to move along.
Now that I've given you the background, I'll tell you what happened.