托福阅读练习：要对女性负起责任.docxVIP

Word文档下载后（可任意编辑） 第 第 PAGE 1 页 共 NUMPAGES 1 页 托福阅读练习：要对女性负起责任 托福考试阅读练习：托福阅读练习：要对女性负起责任 托福备考精品课程辅导  Gender budgeting  Making women count  An idea to help governments live up to their promises  性别预算  要对女性负起责任  一个帮助政府履行承诺的方法  IT IS easy to be cynical about government—and rarely does such cynicism go unrewarded. Take, for instance, policy towards women. Some politicians declare that they value women’s unique role, which can be shorthand for keeping married women at home looking after the kids. Others create whole ministries devoted to policies for women, which can be a device for parking women’s issues on the periphery of policy where they cannot do any harm. Still others, who may actually mean what they say, pass laws giving women equal opportunities to men. Yet decreeing an end to discrimination is very different from bringing it about.  对政府冷嘲热讽很容易，而且花在这方面的功夫很少会白费。以针对女性的政策为例。有些政客宣称自己重视女性独一无二的角色，简言之，就是让已婚女性在家带孩子。其他一些政客专门为制定女性政策成立了完整的部门，这么做可将女性问题推到大政方针的边缘搁置起来，如此便不会招来任何麻烦。还有一些人或许可算真心诚意，他们通过了法律，给予女性和男性同等的机会。然而，歧视的产生可不是颁布政令就可以终止的。  Amid this tangle of evasion, half-promises and wishful thinking, some policymakers have embraced a technique called gender budgeting. It not only promises to do a lot of good for women, but carries a lesson for advocates of any cause: the way to a government’s heart is through its pocket.  在这一片闪烁其词、虚与委蛇以及一厢情愿构成的纷乱之中，一些政策制定者欣然采纳了一个名为性别预算的方法。不仅女性有可能因此得到莫大的好处，为实现任何其他目标而努力奔走的人也可得到启发：要抓住政府的心，就得把手伸进它的钱袋子里。  What counts is what’s counted  At its simplest, gender budgeting sets out to quantify how policies affect women and men differently. That seemingly trivial step converts exhortation about treating women fairly into the coin of government: costs and benefits, and investments and returns. You don’t have to be a feminist to recognise, as Austria did, that the numbers show how lowering income tax on second earners will encourage women to join the labour force, boosting growth and tax revenues