24 Mar 2017

The UK Income Tax Gender Gap Increased AGAIN... To £75.5 BILLIONS

By Mike Buchanan: Four years ago AVfM published my piece titled, ‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune. Or does he?’ It was an analysis following the discovery that in the 2010/11 tax year, men paid £108.0 billion of the government’s £151.6 billion income tax receipts (71.2%), while women paid just £43.6 billion (28.8%). The income tax gender gap that year was £64.4 billion. We’ve been following the issue ever since.
The state’s numerous assaults on the human rights of men and boys, as outlined in our 2015 general election manifesto, happen despite men paying the majority of income tax collected in the country. Income tax is the largest single source of government tax revenue.
The income tax gender gap increased in each of the three years following the 2010/11 tax year.
So, what of the latest year for which we have gendered data, 2014/15? The relevant Table from the ONS is here. It shows that in the 2014/15 tax year, men paid £121.0 billion of the government’s £167.0 billion income tax receipts (72.5%), while women paid £45.5 billion (27.2%). The figures don’t add up to exactly 100% because of some crude rounding in the income tax receipts, leading to a discrepancy of £500 million. The bottom line? In 2014/15 men paid £75.5 billion more income tax than women, a new record.
The data for 2014/15 also gives an insight into the average income tax paid by tax-paying men and women:

  • 17.6 million men paid £121.0 billion, an average of £6,875
  • 13.1 million women paid £45.5 billion, an average of £3,473, barely half (50.5%) that paid by male taxpayers
Of course if we look at men and women as classes, rather than men and women as taxpayers, the relative contributions of men will be considerably higher, despite the fact that male unemployment has long been higher than female unemployment, and government initiatives to ‘support’ women into employment (often into male-typical lines, e.g. engineering, on which £30 milion of taxpayers’ money is being wasted).
The ‘Conservative’ government’s policy direction of driving women into more paid employment, which leads to a great deal of unhappiness among women and children, poorer outcomes for children, and higher unemployment among men – the latter point demonstrated by Belinda Brown in a paper in 2013, here – has been a failure even in terms of income tax generation. Women paid £43.6 billion in 2010/11, and £45.5 billion in 2014/15. The relative figures for men are £108 billion and £121.0 billion.

Year after year, the income tax gender gap increases.
In the space of just four years – from 2010/11 to 2014/15 – the income tax gender gap increased from £64.4 billion to £75.5 billion, an increase of 17.2%.
Source

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