Are women more tax compliant than men?
It depends which step of paying tax you measure, and which businesses you compare. Uganda's tax administration data shows a clear gap at one step and a mixed picture at another. We show where the data stops, too.
30%
of individuals on the URA register are women (May 2018).
24.4% vs 14.2%
women and men who filed at least once, FY2013/14 to FY2017/18.
0
gender splits of tax revenue in URA's FY2024/25 Data Book (its only gender table covers URA staff).
The research behind this story
Jalia Kangave, Ronald Waiswa and Nathan Sebaggala (2021), Are Women More Tax Compliant than Men? How Would We Know?
African Tax Administration Paper 23, ICTD, Institute of Development Studies. Open access, CC BY-NC 4.0. DOI 10.19088/ICTD.2021.006. Every figure on this page comes from that paper. Jalia Kangave leads ICTD's Gender and Tax Programme; Ronald Waiswa works at the Uganda Revenue Authority's Research, Planning and Development Division; Nathan Sebaggala is at Kyambogo University. Thanks to the URA officials who gave interviews and access to the data. Any errors on this page are ours.
A tax system can only see what it has registered
Before anyone can ask whether women pay their taxes differently, the tax authority has to know they exist as taxpayers. That happens at registration, and it only works if gender is recorded then. Uganda's revenue authority does record it, which is why the women in this story are visible at all.
Seeing is not the same as understanding. The question below is narrower: among taxpayers the system can see, do women and men comply differently, and what do we mean by “comply”?
Why surveys cannot answer it, and administrative data can
Most research on gender and tax compliance relies on attitude surveys or laboratory games in which people pretend to be taxpayers. The paper behind this story argues both can say something about attitudes, but very little about what people do when a bill arrives. It uses URA's own databases instead: the taxpayer register, filed returns and tax payments.
Three terms, defined once. A TIN is the number every registered taxpayer holds. A return is the form that declares income. A liability is the tax the return shows is owed. An assessment is the tax authority's own decision on what is owed, which can differ from what the taxpayer declared.
Who is on the register, and what they earn from
The register is mostly men, and most people on it earn employment income. Women who are not employed are concentrated in retail, agriculture, financial services (mostly mobile money agents) and beauty and hairdressing. Men are concentrated in transport, boda-boda and taxis, retail and agriculture. Each chart below shows the same register from a different angle.
Register composition · Table 1, p.10
Who is on the register
How to readHover or tap a slice. The slice grows, and the centre gives that group's share. Use the Focus switch above to dim the other group everywhere.
Income share · Table 2, p.10
The same register, shape by shape
How to readHover a corner. Each corner is one income source and the distance from the centre is that group's share of its own register.
Income source by gender · Table 2, p.10
Where each group's income comes from
How to readHover a ribbon or a node. Ribbon width is the count of individuals; employment is the widest path for both groups.
Income mix · Table 2, p.10
The shape of each group's income
Women, 356,261 individuals
Men, 832,239 individuals
How to readHover a tile to read its count and share. Darker tiles hold a larger share. The Focus switch dims one panel to compare the other.
What to notice
- Employment is the largest income source for both genders: 73% of women and 60% of men.
- Among those not employed, the spread is different. Men are more often in business income from transport, women more often in retail-linked businesses.
- The paper notes that most individuals outside employment fall under the presumptive tax regime, which taxes gross income by band.
Five steps, and where the data stops
Paying tax is a sequence: register, file, show a liability, receive an assessment, pay. The panel on the right follows you down the page. It highlights the step you are reading, and it shows only the figures the paper actually reports. Steps three and four have no gender split in the paper, so they are left blank rather than estimated.
Step 1 of 5
1. Register
-40.0 points, women above men
2. File a return
3. Return shows a liability
4. Assessment received
5. Pay
Step 1 of 5
1. Register
Table 1, p.10. The paper cannot measure registration compliance, because it has no reliable count of who should be registered.
Step 2 of 5
2. File a return
Table 4, p.14. The paper's clearest finding: women file more, and the gap widens.
Step 3 of 5
3. Return shows a liability
The paper has no gender split of filed returns that show a liability. Left blank, not estimated.
Step 4 of 5
4. Assessment received
The paper has no gender split of assessments. Left blank, not estimated.
Step 5 of 5
5. Pay
Table 7 gives the male coefficient on paying, not a level for either gender. Results are mixed by year (see the payment chapter).
Women file more, and the gap widens
The paper's clearest finding is on filing. In FY2013/14 about 16% of women on the register filed a return, against 12% of men. By FY2017/18 about 26% of women filed, against 15% of men. Filing rose for both genders from FY2015/16, when the Taxpayer Registration Expansion Project launched and URA introduced simplified e-filing for small businesses. Women's filing rose four points that year, men's by one.
Filing by year · Figure 1, p.13
One hundred women, one hundred men
Women: 25.7% filed in 2017/18
Men: 15.4% filed in 2017/18
How to readPress play, or drag the scrubber. Each mark stands for one of every 100 people on the register; a filled mark filed a return that year. Hover any mark for detail.
Filing by year, year by year · Figure 1, p.13
Each year on its own: the gap between women and men
How to readEach panel is one financial year. The bars show the share who filed; the label at the top gives the gap in percentage points. Hover a bar for its exact value.
Women against men · Figure 1, p.13
Both rise; the distance from the line grows
How to readPlay the years, or hover a point. Points above the dashed line mean women filed at a higher rate than men in that year.
The regression results agree. Men were 22.6% less likely than women to file in FY2013/14, 43% less likely in FY2015/16, and 71% less likely in FY2016/17 (Table 5). The paper states these percentages itself; the conversion method is not given.
What to notice
- The women's line sits above the men's in every year. The gap grows from about 3.5 points to about 10 points.
- Use the play button in the waffle to watch the register fill in year by year.
- The paper offers three possible reasons: more awareness, the simpler e-filing system, or filing out of fear of penalties tied to the registration drive. It cannot tell them apart.
Paying is mixed, and the answer changes by year
Filing is one thing. Paying is another, and here the paper finds no stable answer. Scroll through the four findings below: the overall picture, then year by year, as the direction of the gap changes.
Step 1 of 4
Table 7, p.15. Positive: men more likely to pay. Negative: less likely.
Step 1 of 4
Across the whole window
Pooling every year with controls, men were less likely to pay than women, by about five to nine points depending on the specification. That is the paper's headline payment result.
Step 2 of 4
FY 2015/16
The direction flips. The coefficient turns positive and is significant: men were slightly more likely to pay than women this year.
Step 3 of 4
FY 2016/17
The coefficient sits close to zero and is not significant. This is also the year with a payment sample of about 610,000 observations, nearly ten times any other year in the table, a gap the paper does not explain.
Step 4 of 4
FY 2017/18
The coefficient swings sharply negative, the largest gap of any single year: men were much less likely to pay than women.
The amounts tell a second story. Men pay more on average under both regimes. Under the real income tax regime, women average about UGX 1.45 million and men UGX 2.40 million (Table 8). Under the presumptive regime the gap is about UGX 20,000 on an average near UGX 230,000. The gap widens with age: for taxpayers over 55 in the real regime, the paper reports women at about UGX 2.46 million and men at UGX 3.70 million (Figure 2). Switch between the two regimes in the chart below.
Tax payable by age · Figure 2, p.15
Average income tax, real regime, by age
How to readSwitch between the two regimes. In the real regime, height is the average tax payable and bubble size is the presumptive average. Hover a bubble for both values.
What to notice
- The same question has three answers in three years. The paper calls the results mixed and does not smooth them into one headline.
- Most taxpayers pay very little. Of presumptive taxpayers who paid, 97% paid in the lowest bracket, under UGX 50 million turnover.
Same sector, same size?
A gap between women and men can come from who they are, not how they behave. Women are concentrated in small retail. In the wholesale and retail sector, 85% of women are in small retail trading, against 74% of men (Table 9). Men run the larger wholesale businesses.
Average turnover · Table 11, p.16
Average gross turnover, women and men
How to readTeal circles are women's average, ochre squares men's. The grey bar is the gap. Right-hand labels give the paper's significance mark. Hover a year for the figures.
Size follows the same pattern. Under the presumptive regime, men's average gross turnover is higher in every year, and significantly higher in four of the five (Table 11). The paper uses turnover as its size measure, because most sole proprietors are presumptive taxpayers who do not report profit. Under the real regime, profit after tax shows the same direction, significant in two years (Table 10).
Size and profit · Tables 10 and 11, p.16
How much men's average exceeds women's
Profit after tax, real regime
Table 10, p.16
Gross turnover, presumptive regime
Table 11, p.16
How to readEach dot is men's average minus women's average for one year. Filled dots are differences the paper marks significant. Hover for both averages.
Tax paid by band · Table 12, p.16
Where the tax paid sits, band by band
| Group | Below 100K | 100K to 150K | 150K to 200K | 200K to 350K | 350K to 937.5K | Above 937.5K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women, presumptive | 1.1% | 21.4% | 20.6% | 41.8% | 13.0% | 2.1% |
| Men, presumptive | 1.5% | 20.3% | 20.1% | 37.2% | 17.3% | 3.7% |
| Women, real regime | 4.5% | 15.2% | 14.8% | 38.9% | 17.4% | 9.2% |
| Men, real regime | 4.8% | 12.7% | 12.7% | 31.2% | 21.0% | 17.6% |
How to readEach row is one group and regime; each cell is the share of that group in a tax-paid band. Darker cells hold more of the group. Hover for the exact share.
What to notice
- In the presumptive regime, 3.7% of men pay above UGX 937,500, against 2.1% of women (Table 12). In the real regime the gap is wider: 17.6% of men against 9.2% of women.
- Composition is a possible explanation for part of any gap. The paper does not control for sector and size together in its payment comparisons.
What public voices say
Three public voices on market and informal taxes. Two are direct quotations from Monitor in September 2021; the third is a government visit reported in our own words. Each was checked against its page.
“Women-run businesses seem to suffer the most tax burden.”
Milly Isingoma Nalukwago, Assistant Commissioner, Research, Planning and Development, Uganda Revenue Authority. Monitor, 1 September 2021.
Market traders are charged for bringing produce in, for entering the market, for their trading space, and for cleaning, garbage and toilets inside. “It's just too much to bear.”
Julius Mukunda, Executive Director, Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group. Monitor, 1 September 2021. The first sentence is paraphrased; the quotation is direct.
At Isingiro market, women traders told Hon. Balaam that they pay for their trading space but work in poor conditions, and asked for better market structures. He directed the Town Clerk to help build them.
Retold in our own words, not quoted: the Ministry of Local Government website reports this visit in reported speech only, with no direct quotation. The item is undated; it was checked on the ministry's own page.
Test a claim against the data
Claims about women and tax are often made with more confidence than the data allows. Choose a span of years and check four common claims against the paper's own figures. The verdicts change with the span, so you can see where a claim depends on the years chosen.
Test a claim · Figure 1, Table 7
Does the paper's data back this claim?
Holds
Women file a return at a higher rate than men.
Women's filing rate is higher in 5 of 5 years selected. Average gap 6.4 points (women minus men). Figure 1, p.13.
Partly holds
Men are less likely to pay tax than women.
Over the whole window the male coefficient is -0.095 (***), so men are less likely to pay. It is negative in 2 of 3 individual years, and the sign flips in FY2015/16. Table 7, p.15. Table 7 does not follow the year span above.
Does not hold
The filing gap is about the same size every year.
It is not. Across the years selected the gap runs from 2.1 to 11.4 points.
Cannot be tested here
The data shows why women file more.
The paper did not investigate the reasons. It lists three possibilities (awareness, the simpler e-filing system, and fear of penalties tied to the registration drive) and cannot tell them apart.
How to readChoose a span of years. Each claim is checked against the paper's own figures for that span. Verdicts show where the data supports a claim, where it partly does, and where no table can test it.
The evidence, and what this data cannot draw
Every number above comes from the paper, with its table or figure and printed page. Where a number was checked against a printed total, that is noted. Charts that need raw data for each person, such as violins, ridgelines and boxplots, are not drawn: the paper reports averages and shares only, so those shapes would have to be invented.
| Figure | Source | Caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Women 30%, men 70% of register (1,188,500 individuals) | Table 1, p.10 | As at May 2018 only |
| Income source by gender | Table 2, p.10 | Row totals checked; layout scrambled in text, verified visually |
| Women 24.4%, men 14.2% filed at least once | Table 4, p.14 | Share of registered individuals, not of active businesses |
| Filing by year, women 15.6% to 25.7%, men 12.1% to 15.4% | Figure 1, p.13 | Read from data labels; cross-checked against the text |
| Male filing coefficients by year | Table 5, p.14 | Logit coefficients; the paper's percent conversions are not explained |
| Male payment coefficients by year | Table 7, p.15 | Units not stated; FY2016/17 sample size unexplained |
| Average tax paid: women UGX 1.45m, men UGX 2.40m | Table 8, p.15 | Averages, skewed by large taxpayers |
| Tax paid by age group | Figure 2, p.15 | Read from data labels |
| Wholesale and retail: women 85% small retail, men 74% | Table 9, p.16 | Sole proprietors in the sector |
| Profit after tax, real regime | Table 10, p.16 | Significance marked only where the paper marks it |
| Gross turnover, presumptive regime | Table 11, p.16 | Size proxy, not profit |
| Tax-paid bands by gender and regime | Table 12, p.16 | Two count totals do not sum to printed totals; shares used |
| Kampala vs outside Kampala | Table 13, p.17 | Averages in UGX; difference marked by the paper |
What the data cannot answer
- The liability and assessment steps: no gender split in the paper.
- Whether returns are accurate: no audit data for this group.
- Why women file more: the paper says it did not investigate the reasons.
- National totals: URA publishes no gender split of tax revenue, and the paper's percentages apply only to its own population.
Kangave, J., Waiswa, R. & Sebaggala, N. (2021). Are Women More Tax Compliant than Men? How Would We Know? African Tax Administration Paper 23, ICTD. Open access, CC BY-NC 4.0. DOI 10.19088/ICTD.2021.006.