Questioning market aversion in gender equality strategies: Designing legal mechanisms for the promotion of gender equality in the family and the market

This Article suggests that tax and welfare policies that promote gender equality require creative thinking about the design of social mechanisms for the promotion of women. It offers a framework for expanding the institutional imagination in order to recalibrate welfare state reforms to promote women. In particular, we advocate the creative use of legal tools and doctrine to dismantle existing dichotomies between private and public, understand the various goals different mechanisms can serve and reassemble them to promote different mixes of normative goals. We propose doing so by looking simultaneously at two fields of redistribution: welfare state benefits and services on the one hand and income taxation on the other. These two fields serve similar goals and accordingly, we argue, should be analyzed in light of the same policy considerations and normative underpinnings. Since the goals of these two fields are comparable, the mechanisms that both fields use should also be compatible.