cover image Taxing Women

Taxing Women

Edward J. McCaffery. University of Chicago Press, $32.5 (324pp) ISBN 978-0-226-55557-7

Any contemporary woman who believes that strides toward gender equality are reflected in the tax laws of the U.S. should read this book, a wake-up call regarding the inequities of an archaic system that actually penalizes women for working. Author McCaffery, a USC and Cal Tech law professor, offers an array of numbers, charts and historical anecdotes to demonstrate how women are kept on the margins of economic life--particularly by the joint filing system that deems working wives ""secondary earners"" in a tax bracket dictated by their husbands' salaries. ""The average working wife in a middle- or upper-income household sees two-thirds of her salary lost to taxes and work-related expenses,"" he writes, offering examples of women who found they could not afford to work once they factored in child-care costs. But he makes clear that staying at home is also a no-win situation--one that can be ruinous to divorced women entering old age with little work experience, no pensions and ""no social security benefits saved up from their years of marriage."" McCaffery's stinging critique of the way things are could have benefited from real-life stories instead of his cartoonish constructs ""Emma Equal"" and ""Sally Single."" Still, his book makes a persuasive case that ""taxing men more and women less"" is a step in the right direction. (Apr.)