By Sumarie Swanepoel
Sumarie Swanepoel is a senior lecturer in the Department of Taxation at the University of Pretoria.
She has over 15 years of experience in lecturing and tax training, having also been the senior manager of the Deloitte School of Tax.
Her research interests include gender and taxation, and she is currently enrolled for her PhD degree in taxation entitled: Assessing and Mitigating Gender Bias in Direct Income Tax Legislation in South Africa.
Swanepoel says: “Our child grants are too low to be truly effective. These grants also do not even begin to acknowledge the extent of the unpaid care work women do including elder care and care work in the community. But our direct tax base is under huge pressure.
“The solution that in my view could work best is to incentivise women’s participation in the labour force, increasing the tax base. Tax has often been used to enforce social policy, and we need to start somewhere.
“We have had a youth employment incentive in operation via our direct tax system which essentially entails government subsiding youth employment. We could have similar women’s employment incentives.
“Studies show that women’s participation in the labour force exponentially increases economic growth. In addition, economically empowering women by pulling them into the labour market could address a lot of other systemic issues.”