1 Feminist economics and the World Bank
An introduction
Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper
In the past decade the World Bank has made a substantial shift both in theory and policy. Previously economists in Washington determined the boundaries and conditions for World Bank programmes and loans. Now macroeconomic models and top-down approaches are augmented by cooperation with local groups and non-governmental organizations. This has been accompanied by a renewed focus on fighting poverty, a decentralization of authority, and an increased involvement of national governments. An increased attention to gender issues has been an important part of this process.
During the 1980s only scant attention was paid to gender and womenâs issues in the Bankâs publications and policies. This changed in the 1990s as the Bank began to study the effects of womenâs education on poverty and fertility rates. The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing provided further impetus for the Bank to pursue research on gender and development. At that conference James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank, made a commitment to develop a framework for gender and development in cooperation with NGOs and other international organizations working on these issues. In this process the attention paid to the relationship between gender and development broadened from a relatively narrow economic focus to a more interdisciplinary one that included discussions of identity, culture, and North-South relations. This research, which culminated in the 2001 report Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, calls for including womenâs economic status as a major economic indicator in the evaluation of World Bank projects (World Bank 2001).
Taking the economic framework of the World Bank as a starting point for analysis, Engendering Development makes the case that economic growth and development cannot be effectively addressed when gender inequality is not taken into account. It starts from the premise that poverty increases gender inequalities and that gender inequalities hinder economic development. As James Wolfensohn puts it in his Foreword to the report,
The World Bank is committed to a world free from poverty. And it is clear that efforts to achieve this must address gender inequalities ⌠ignoring gender disparities comes at great cost â to peopleâs well being and to countriesâ abilities to grow sustainably, to govern effectively, and thus to reduce poverty.
(Wolfensohn 2001: xi)
Of course, promoting gender equality is a complex undertaking, as the authors of the report, Elizabeth M. King and Andrew D. Mason, acknowledge in their preface. The research informing the report is multidisciplinary and draws on economics, law, demography, sociology, and other disciplines. The report is organized around the principal pathways through which gender inequalities are generated and persist: the role of social institutions, of economic institutions, of household power relations, resources and decision-making, and of economic change and development policy. Acknowledging that addressing persistent gender inequalities requires more than just economic growth, the Report proposes a three-part strategy for promoting gender equality:
- Rights: Reform institutions to establish equal rights and opportunities for women and men.
- Resources: Foster economic development to strengthen incentives for more equal resources and participation.
- Voice: Take active measures to redress persistent disparities in command over resources and political voice (World Bank 2001: 1â2).
Given the importance of the topic, and the sustained level of interest in it, Engendering Development can, in many ways, be seen as a major achievement for scholars, policy-makers and activists who have argued for including gender in economic theory and policy. The publication of this report, its explicit claim that gender issues are economic issues, the use made of feminist economic research, and the reception of the report in the World Bank motivated the editors of this volume to organize a set of sessions at the annual meetings of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in 2002 in Los Angeles.
The overwhelming interest in these sessions, attended by many of the authors in this anthology, most of whom have been involved in discussions about women, development, and the Bank for many years, as well as Andrew Mason, one of the authors of the report, motivated this project. It brings together a range of viewpoints from feminist economists and other social researchers on the paradigm shift articulated in Engendering Development. The essays in this anthology critically examine the relationships between gender, growth, development, and the World Bank from historical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, and explore futures directions for research, policy, and activism.
Gender and the World Bank: an institutional history and assessment
The first section of this book sets the stage for a feminist examination and critique of the World Bankâs policies on gender and development by providing a historical overview of the Bankâs gender policies and an examination of the institutional processes that culminated in the Engendering Development report. Zafiris Tzannatos, who has been involved in the research and development of gender policies and strategies at the Bank for many years, provides an insiderâs perspective. Carolyn Long, a consultant on the civil society organizations in development, connects the report to advocacy efforts carried out by both Northern and Southern womenâs organizations, and Sakuntala Narasimhan brings a journalistâs eye to the issues.
Tzannatos provides a historical overview of the World Bankâs genesis, mandate, and approach to development, poverty, and gender. He locates the evolution of the Bankâs position on women and gender against the background of the larger changes in the Bankâs policies from reconstruction, to structural adjustment, to its current focus on poverty alleviation. His discussion of the evolution of gender issues within the Bank in terms of philosophy, internal organization, and activities allows the reader to better understand the institutional character and culture of the institution.
The Bankâs preoccupation with macroeconomic issues and structural adjustment policies meant that thematic issues such as gender equality received scant attention until it began to prepare for the 1995 Beijing conference. Since then the Bank came to endorse the position that gender inequalities hamper growth, called for attention to gender equality in development efforts, and outlined how gender issues were to be identified and incorporated into Bank-supported projects and programs. Tzannatos concludes that although attention to gender issues at the Bank continue, and have become particularly visible since the onset of the new millennium, their impact on development and on women in developing countries and more generally on development is unclear.
From her extensive experience in womenâs organizations and other international NGOs, Carolyn Long assesses the Bankâs attention to the promotion of gender equality in its policies and projects. Her account of the Bankâs approach to gender in terms of history, organizational structure, and institutional culture is framed in terms of gender advocacy efforts carried out by womenâs organizations and other external actors, and complements Tzannatosâ insiderâs account. She includes a discussion of the actions that a number of Northern and Southern womenâs organizations consider essential in promoting gender equality in Bank-funded initiatives.
Longâs account is particularly critical of the lack of real institutional support for gender at the Bank. She considers the Bankâs gender strategies and adoption of Country Gender Assessments (CGAs), which analyze the gender dimensions of development across sectors and identify gender-responsive measures that will contribute to poverty reduction, growth, and human well-being, as an important step forward. The problem, however, is the lack of real institutional support, in terms of either budgets or administrative authority. The integration of gender concerns into projects and policies varies by region and depends on the interest, or lack thereof, of the particular Bank employees and countries in promoting gender equality. External pressure from NGOs and womenâs organizations in both the North and South will be necessary to create the institutional changes necessary to turn the rhetoric of gender equality into real integration of women and womenâs issues into Bank policies.
This section concludes with a comment by Sakuntala Narasimhan. She asks whether the Bank has learned from its past mistakes and whether the changes now under way will make a positive difference in the ways that development funding affects women. Dam projects on the Narmada river in upper India, a road development project on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and the building of a coal-fired power plant in Orissa state in India are just three examples that lead her to doubt the learning abilities of the Bank. She concludes that development funding continues to have a negative effect on the well-being of many poor women in the South. Narishimhan agrees with Long that external pressure on the Bank is necessary to effect real reforms, and this in turn requires that the voices of poor, mostly rural, mostly uneducated, women in the South be heeded and the chasm between them and privileged, urban, educated women be closed.
Policy evaluations
The second section of the book examines the explicit and implicit policy implications of the report in light of the actual economic conditions in three different regions: Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. As all of these chapters point out, the Bank assumes that economic growth is, for all practical purposes, synonymous with development. In development literature and in development practices, however, the concept has evolved to include a variety of non-economic dimensions including freedom, dignity, capabilities, inclusion, and so forth. Defined in this broader sense, development and gender equity can go hand in hand. In contrast, economic growth alone may not improve the well-being of the vast majority of people in the developing world, nor will it necessarily contribute to gender equity and the empowerment of women.
Rose-Marie Avinâs chapter challenges the reportâs assertion that womenâs status and gender equality actually improved in parts of Latin America during the structural adjustment period of the 1980s and 1990s. Case studies from Brazil and Nicaragua provide the evidence for her challenge. In the Brazilian case, large numbers of women migrated to Rio de Janeiro and SĂŁo Paulo to find work. However, due to capital-intensive import-substitution many of these women were not able to find jobs in the manufacturing sector and found work in the informal sector as street vendors, prostitutes, cooks, maids, and nannies. All women were not, of course, affected equally. Segmented labor markets meant that middle-class, Euro-Brazilian women were able to take advantage of educational and occupational opportunities while millions of poor, working-class women were relegated to the low-paying, low-status occupations. Thus the Bankâs assertion that economic growth improves the status of women depends on its disregard of the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in determining womenâs economic status.
The Nicaraguan case tells an interesting story. During the period between 1979 and 1990, when the Sandinista government was in power, major policies were introduced that enabled women to participate fully in the political, economic, and social life of the country. For the first time working-class and peasant women had voice. With the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, advancements toward gender equity came to a halt. Structural adjustment policies resulted in widespread female unemployment and womenâs burdens in households also increased.
Cheryl Doss explores gender and development in an African context. She begins with the premise that improved agricultural technologies are key to reducing poverty and increasing the standard of living in Africa and notes that the report does not directly address issues of agricultural and technology, nor does it directly address issues of power relations. In order to improve the well-being of women in Africa it is necessary to develop policies and technologies that will improve agricultural productivity, and for such polices and technologies to be efficacious, it is necessary to investigate power and gender relations in households, communities, and countries. Women will only benefit from new technologies if the accompanying policies increase their options and control over their own lives.
Doss considers three dimensions of the effects of technologies on women farmers. First she considers their effects on womenâs workloads. Technologies that increase productivity may have a negative effect on well-being if women have to work harder or longer or lose control over the output. Technologies can also impact womenâs access to resources, land in particular. Since women often acquire land rights through male relatives or village heads, technologies that increase the value of land may actually make it more difficult for them to acquire such rights. Finally, if women lose control over their activities once they become profitable, then their well-being will be harmed. Since womenâs lives and situations are so varied, it is not possible to tell a priori how technologies will affect them. A nuanced sense of power relations in particular contexts is necessary to understand whether technologies will enhance or diminish womenâs power and hence their well-being, and the report fails to provide this.
Concerns about the effects of economic growth on womenâs well-being inform the chapter by Stephanie Seguino. She notes that well-being is improved by paid work at living wages and by gender-wage parity. In developing countries, however, the combination of womenâs segregation in export industries and increased capital mobility constrains their ability to improve their wages and working conditions. Credible threats of firm relocation effectively dampen womenâs bargaining power relative to that of capital even as the demand for their labor increases. This leads her to question the Bankâs assumption that trade and market liberalization are beneficial to womenâs well-being.
Using the case of the Asian semi-industrialized countries (SIEs), she demonstrates an inverse relationship between economic growth and gender-wage parity. Evidence shows that the countries with the largest gender-wage gaps were the ones that grew the most rapidly during the period between 1975 and 1995. Using a neo-Kaleckian model to further illuminate the relationship between female wages and macroeconomic outcomes in an open economy, she shows that the decline in output and female employment resulting from higher female wages is more likely to occur if capital is footloose, if the price elasticity of exports is high, and if the spending propensities of capitalists and workers are similar. A more optimistic scenario in which higher female wages are consistent with economic growth is possible if firms have an incentive to innovate or if higher wages stimulate productivity. The case of South Korea demonstrates that this is possible, and the precise conditions need to be investigated further.
A comment by Karin Schoenpflug concludes this section. She uses Michel Foucaultâs discourse analysis to reflect on the arguments made by Avin, Doss, and Seguino and to deconstruct the rhetoric and policies of the World Bank. Four localities are particularly germane to her analysis: the constitution of subjectivity and issues of voice, processes of legitimization and the power of definition, the role of hierarchal dualisms, and the material consequences of practices of inclusion and exclusion. From this framework she concludes that Engendering Development is a powerful piece of institutional rhetoric that creates its own logic and legitimizes World Bank policies. These issues are explored further in the next section.
Disciplinary paradigms/development paradigms
The third section of this book examines the ideological and methodological commitments of the report from a variety of feminist and interdisciplinary social science perspectives. It explicitly considers the ways in which disciplinary paradigms and boundaries contribute to the sense-making and legitimization of the report. These chapters note that although the Bank has adopted a new, multidisciplinary paradigm that includes attention to problems of poverty and other social issues, the changes are more apparent than real.
We begin this section with Suzanne Bergeronâs examination of the Bankâs break with a narrow, economistic approach in favor of an approach that is responsive to poverty and inequality. She argues that although economists are encouraged to take a multidisciplinary approach and account for social and cultural factors in their analyses, they do in ways that preserve and strengthen the disciplinary core of economics. Rationality and market efficiency remain privileged concepts, and the critical and the transdisciplinary methods that characterize feminist theorizing remain outside the Bankâs framework.
The new approach does account for the significance of market failures and externalities, norms, values, and institutions. It draws attention to the importance of health and education for women. However, the disciplinary boundaries of economics remain intact and intersectionality, a central concept in womenâs studies, remains absent. Differences among women are obscured by universalistic accounts of womenâs behavior and experiences. Integration into formal labor markets is seen as the key to womenâs emancipation from traditional, patriarchal cultures. Womenâs emancipation is not, however, seen as an end in itself, but rather as instrumental to the goals of economic growth. In contrast, a feminist transdisciplinary methodology would call on social constructivist and post-colonial insights to consider difference and representations and consider how both market and non-market social processes affect womenâs agency and well-being.
Cynthia Wood agrees with Bergeron that neoclassical economics remains the dominant paradigm at the Bank. She argues that as long as it remains dominant, neither political pressure nor other institutional changes will eliminate gender bias in adjustment policies. Neoclassical economics, with its emphasis on markets, prices, and economic growth, precludes gender analyses and marginalizes any consideration of the effects of structural adjustment on unpaid domestic labor.
The Bankâs discussion of gender downplays considerations of structural adjustment and macroeconomics and focuses instead on social issues such as education, population, and health. Wood argues that publication of Engendering Development will do little to change this because, in reality, engendering macroeconomics entails considering unpaid domestic labor, and the current paradigm precludes doing this in any meaningful way. Moreover, eliminating gender bias in economic theory and policy requires not only that non-market activities be recognized and valued, but that differences in intrahousehold relations be considered.
Intrahousehold relations are the subject of the next essay by Aida Orgocka and Gale Summerfield. Although the fourth chapter in Engendering Development analyzes intrahousehold bargaining processes, Orgocka and Summerfield argue that it has limitations. It does not include new interdisciplinary developments, and it is quite selective in the work it does include, stressing econometric studies rather than qualitative approaches. Moreover, the Bankâs analysis is focused on adult, heterosexual partners, and considers children mainly as the recipients of the parentsâ largesse or as investments for the parentsâ future support. Orgocka and Summerfield, in contrast, argue that understanding parent/child dynamics would contribute to a deeper understanding of the distribution of power and resources in households. And a better understanding of mother/daughter relationships is fundamental to constructing policies that promote gender equity since history is replete with examples of mothers passing down hurtful traditions to their daughters because their economic well-being was dependent on adherence to patriarchal gender norms.
They use their qualitative research on gender and Muslim immigrants in the Midwestern United States to illustrate how factors overlooked in the Bankâs discussion enrich our understanding of mother/daughter interactions within the household regarding sex education for young women. Sex education is, of course, a key component of policies concerning health and reproduction. Orgocka and Summerfieldâs work points to the importance of using qualitative research methods so that policy-makers can better understand different contexts and different expressions of agency in diverse groups of people.
V. Eudine Barriteau provides a contextualized critique of the Bankâs report. She argues that it is best understood as a form of gender mainstreaming and explores the major shortco...
