A community of practice is a collaborative space where people who share a common issue, interest, or activity exchange their knowledge and expertise through regular interactions. These spaces respond to a growing need to transcend organisational silos and create spaces for exchange and lesson-learning, especially on technical topics. Knowledge sharing and collective learning are key levers for improving practices and methodologies.

The Community of Practice (CoP) on Gender and Tax emerged from discussions held during the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) Conference in July 2023. As work in the field of gender and tax expanded, it became important to coordinate and share technical information among practitioners involved in research and public policy advisory, particularly in public finance.

The CoP on Gender & Tax was officially launched in September 2024 and was co-led for its first year by Giulia Mascagni, Executive Director of the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), and Caren Grown, Senior Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development, Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings Institution.

The objective of this CoP is to promote technical exchanges among its members in order to generate evidence-based knowledge in a field that remains relatively unexplored: the intersection between gender and the design and implementation of tax policies. The geographical and institutional diversity of its members greatly enriched the discussions. Between September 2024 and May 2025, three meetings brought together the CoP’s 34 members—academics, development actors, and representatives of international organisations from around the world—to share knowledge, perspectives, and ideas on several topics, including:

• The use of administrative data to advance knowledge on gender issues in tax policy design and implementation
• The integration of gender into microsimulation models in public finance to improve tax incidence calculations
• Gender considerations in research on the determinants of tax compliance

Beyond these discussions, the CoP was instrumental in achieving several tangible results, including:

• Establishing a networking dynamic among members, which helped strengthen the participation of experts in this field in international events and enhance collective awareness of these issues.
• Producing a dedicated newsletter to share updates and scientific outputs on gender and tax.
• Developing a knowledge repository—a shared platform for research documents, toolkits, and event summaries on gender and tax.
• Identifying new and unexplored areas of research on gender and tax, forming the basis of a strategic research agenda.

To encourage the production and dissemination of knowledge on gender and tax, the Gender Equality in Taxation - GET project, funded by the French Treasury and implemented by Expertise France, funded the position of the CoP coordinator, Daisy Attu, during its first year. The aim was also to connect academic experts in the field with practitioners - namely, officials from tax and customs administrations and civil society organizations working on related issues.

Progress in gender and tax research—particularly in low-income countries—had until now been almost exclusively led by English-speaking researchers and focused primarily on anglophone contexts. The involvement of the GET project in this CoP therefore also sought to bridge this gap by linking existing knowledge to francophone countries, whose tax systems often differ, and by making recent research results available in French.

The CoP is still in its early stages, and new funding will be needed to sustain this initiative.

For more information, please visit the CoP’s webpage.