Gender Budgeting in the Constitution – A Look at Formal and Real Conditions in Austria * ELISABETH KLATZER/ MARGIT SCHRATZENSTALLER/ BIRGIT BUCHINGER/ NICOLE SCHAFFER Introduction – Gender Budgeting in Austria According to Art. 13(3) of the Austrian Constitution, which has been in force since January 1, 2009,»[t]he federal state, the ›Länder‹, and the municipalities must aim at achieving the actual equality of women and men in budget processes.« Austria thereby became the first country to embed gender budgeting and make it legally binding for all public ad­ministrative bodies. This provision was introduced in the wake of a far­reaching budget reform, the core element of which was the inclusion of outcome-oriented budget processes. In addition to the Article cited at the beginning, it was standardized under constitutional law that out­come-orientatedness – to be introduced by 2013 – must be applied»in particular with regard to the aim of the actual equality of women and men«(Art. 51(8) b ­vg ). In this way, Austria has imposed some exacting requirements on itself at constitutional level. The point of departure for gender budgeting is that budgets consti­tute a central element of political action. They reflect societal and politi­cal power relations and therefore also gender relations. Budgets are social policy in numerical form(cf. beigewum 2002: 12). Basically, gender budgeting addresses the issue of the distribution of financial resources and their gender equality policy outcomes(cf. Elson 2002; Bakker 2002). Gender budgets»provide a means for determining the effect of govern­ment revenue and expenditure policies on women and men«(Budlender et al. 2002: 52). In the past 25 years, gender budgeting – or gender mainstreaming in budgetary processes – has developed as a strategy for integrating the * This contribution originated in an article produced by a group of authors, Buch­inger et al.(2009). We would like to thank, in particular, Luise Gubitzer, Karoline Mitterer, Katharina Muhr, Sybille Pirklbauer, and Christa Schlager for a stimulat­ing discussion on the state of gender budgeting implementation in Austria. 48 Klatzer/ Schratzenstaller/ Buchinger/ Schaffer, Gender Budgeting in Austria ipg 2/2010