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In 2011, the then World Bank president Robert Zoellick delivered a speech where he spoke about the Bank’s newfound focus on gender: “Eighteen years ago, the World Bank rarely talked about gender... Today we know that gender equality is smart economics” (Zoellick 2011). This revelation prompts important questions: How was gender ‘discovered’ by the Bank? How did the Bank go from being an institution renowned for its technocratic and resolutely economistic approach to poverty, of which gender analysis was not a part, to the institution which

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The Doing Business Report is one of the Bank’s most influential publications and its most widely circulated (Bakvis 2009). The 2014 report suggests that, since the first report was published in 2003, over 530 regulatory reforms have been informed by Doing Business (World Bank 2014a). For a feminist analysis of the Doing Business reports, see Bedford 2009b.

today aims to be the leading source of development knowledge on gender equality?

In its early years as a Bank for post-war reconstruction and development, the initial focus was limited to providing loans to the governments of post-conflict states. As such, women were not viewed as important actors in this process or as a group that should receive special focus. For over thirty years, from its founding in 1944 until the appointment of its first Women in Development advisor in 1977, women as a group and gender as a concept were perceived as largely irrelevant to the World Bank’s work. This attitude began to change during the late 1970s and early 1980s though progress remained slow; the Bank’s WID unit was founded in 1986 and it introduced statistical indicators for gender in 1988 (Long 2006; Kuiper and Barker 2006; Weaver 2010). By its own estimation, the Bank began serious gender work during the 1980s, though this work still saw women as mothers confined to the social realm and uninvolved in the process of economic development. This understanding of women as mothers/ instruments of child welfare and as potential beneficiaries (still marginal to the development process) characterized the general position of women in Bank discourse until the mid-1990s. The Bank lagged behind comparable institutions in its willingness to accept gender as an important economic and political category, a lag which has been attributed to its gender-skeptic institutional culture, unwillingness to shift from a neoclassical economic approach, and failure to mainstream women into positions of power within the Bank itself (O’Brien et. al. 2000; Griffin 2009; Bedford 2009a; Weaver 2007, 2010). When the Bank did change its position and made concerted efforts to integrate a gender lens into its policies, albeit a conservative one, this shift was prompted by a change in leadership and development climate.

Four primary drivers contributed to the Bank’s transition towards gender and development policy during the 1990s, comprised of a combination of external pressures and internal institutional shifts: the emergence of the post-Washington Consensus, pressure from activists, a shift in the

Bank’s mission to anti-poverty lending, and the presidency of James Wolfensohn created a context in which gender issues gained attention.

First, and perhaps most significantly, the shift to the post-Washington Consensus created a new context for the Bank and challenged many of its previously fundamental principles. The Post-Washington Consensus reflects a few shifts in thinking: it acknowledges the role of the state in securing basic services, imagines a greater role for civil society and community participation, and concedes the significance of social issues like health and education in development. The PWC emerged partly as a response to critics of earlier structural adjustment and debt conditionality approaches and as an acknowledgement of the adverse impacts of market fundamentalism (Tzannatos 2006; Bergeron 2003). The newfound focus on participation, empowerment, and social capital in PWC discourse provided space for the consideration of gender, insofar as it allowed the Bank to accord importance to ‘social’ dimensions, like health and education, that are seen to fall into the realm of women’s issues.24

Second, the emergence of the PWC coincided with the Bank’s 50th anniversary and a shift in mission from adjustment lending to poverty reduction (Phillips 2009; Marshall 2008). This was accompanied by greater attention to social determinants of poverty and the impact of social factors on economic development. Changes in the Bank’s institutional climate and economic approach slowly created more conceptual space for the consideration of ‘social’ aspects of development and the inclusion of non-economists on the Bank’s staff (Bergeron 2006).

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An extensive debate over the substance of the PWC continues to rage among academics, with many Bank critics contesting the extent to which the PWC marks a significant shift away from neoliberal ideology (see Baylis et. al. 2011); among these Bank critics, feminist researchers tend to express skepticism of the PWC and suggest that the PWC represents more a rhetorical shift than a change in policy (O’Brien at al 2000; Bergeron 2003; Griffin 2009; Roberts and Soederberg 2012).

Third, engagement with non-governmental groups and pressure from the women’s movement during the anniversary ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign and initiatives that emerged from the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing prompted change (Bergeron 2003; O’Brien et. al. 2000). Fourth and finally, World Bank President James Wolfensohn’s personal influence in this area proved considerable in helping to shift Bank discourse. His speech at the 1995 Beijing conference, during which he acknowledged feminist criticism of the Bank and committed it to increasing funding for girls’ primary and secondary education, is frequently acknowledged as a turning point in the Bank’s turn towards gender (see Wolfensohn 2005). Wolfensohn shifted Bank discourses around women by making them “rhetorically central” to the Bank’s claims on inclusive and progressive development, peppering his speeches and statement with images of women and girls (Bedford 2009a: 7). This rhetorical shift created a discursive climate in the Bank in which women could be lauded as key agents of development who had yet to be adequately engaged in the process, laying the rhetorical groundwork for the dominance of the business case for gender that pervades the Bank today. This combination of external pressure from critics of the Washington Consensus, combined with internal shifts in the institutional climate worked to produce a change in Bank thinking and promote greater willingness to engage with gender in development.

The period between 1995 and 2001 saw the Bank formulating a new attitude towards gender and development, with two primary features: firstly, the Bank began to encourage consideration of the non-economic aspects and measures of wellbeing, and secondly, began to stress the importance of gender relations for economic growth (Tzannatos 2006; Kuiper and Barker 2006). In 1994, the Bank’s Board endorsed a policy paper on women’s participation in economic development (which included a discussion of the ‘pay-offs’ of investing in women) and the Bank issued an Operational Policy statement establishing the goal of reducing gender disparities and enhancing women’s participation in development. Nonetheless, significant gaps existed: this Operational Policy statement on gender did not require all investments to address gender aspects and it did not include Structural Adjustment Policies

(Tzannatos 2006). By 2001 and the publication of its first major gender report, Engendering Development, the Bank was positioning itself “as

the disseminator of ‘good practice’” in the GAD community (Bedford 2008: 86; see also Kuiper and Barker 2006).

In 2006, the World Bank launched its 2007- 2010 Gender Action Plan (GAP), which first set out the “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” framework and sought to promote the business case for expanding women’s economic opportunities. It committed the Bank “to improve women's economic opportunity” through investment to improve women’s access to jobs, land rights, financial services, agricultural inputs and infrastructure (World Bank n.d. “Gender Equality as Smart Economics”).25

In response to civil society critics who highlighted the harmful and gendered impact of the Bank’s loan conditionalities, the GAP introduced guidelines to “engender” policy-based loans (World Bank 2006). Nonetheless, the GAP did not take action to challenge loan conditionality or acknowledge that policy based loans remained exempt from efforts to “engender” them (Zuckerman 2007: 1). Moreover, the 2007-2010 GAP marked a shift towards engaging the private sector in the Bank’s gender equality agenda, as it was the first set of Bank gender guidelines which applied to the International Finance Corporation (previous guidelines were confined to the IBRD and IDA); the GAP outlined the IFC’s role in increasing the numbers of women participants and beneficiaries of private-sector development projects.

Near the end of the 2007-2010 GAP, the Bank chose to dedicate the 2012 edition of its flagship report, the World Development Report, to the

25 _{Its ‘roadmap’ involved five aims: “1) To intensify gender mainstreaming in Bank}

and IFC operations and in regional economic and sector work; 2) To mobilize resources to implement innovative projects that empower women economically; 3) To facilitate the transition from school to work for girls through the Adolescent Girls Initiative; 4) To improve knowledge and statistics on women’s economic

participation and the relationship between gender equality, growth, and poverty reduction; 5) To create global partnerships for women’s economic empowerment with governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector and civil society” (World Bank 2006).

issue of gender equality, in line with the GAP agenda of ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’. At the close of its 2007-2010 GAP, the Bank produced a “Road Map” for 2011-2013 to evaluate the success and apply the lessons of the GAP; the evaluation placed focus on “managing risk and vulnerability” for women and girls, as well as on “harnessing demographic opportunities for economic growth” through gender-related interventions (World Bank 2010b). It committed to continuing to mainstream gender in the Bank’s work, continuing the focus on economic empowerment, expanding the scope for country-led program design, and expanding the Bank resources dedicated to gender-related work, including “knowledge creation and dissemination” (World Bank 2010b), though it maintained a severely constrained focus on economic empowerment at the expense of a human rights framework (see Arend 2010).

The World Bank as “Knowledge Bank” has dedicated resources to disseminating knowledge about gender and development, but what of lending activity? In terms of gender-focused spending by the Bank, accurate (and widely accepted) numbers are difficult to obtain because the Bank lacks a clear coding system26 to assess gender spending; Bank staff admit that “it is not possible to accurately estimate the amount of funding from the Bank’s core budget that goes to mainstreaming gender” (Bibler and Zuckerman 2013: 7; see also Lauterbach and Zuckerman 2013). As such, significant disagreement

26 _{Gender Action’s 2013 report on gender spending in the Bank contains an}

interesting side note, and one that is perhaps indicative of the institutional difficulties of gender mainstreaming. A Bank staffer interviewed by Claire

Lauterbach explained that “‘given the limitations of the existing coding system and that the very essence of mainstreaming gender is to make it the job of all Bank staff, it is not possible to accurately estimate the amount of funding from the Bank’s core budget that goes to mainstreaming gender” (quoted in Lauterbach and

Zuckerman 2013: 8). The idea that gender mainstreaming requires all staff to engage with gender in their work means, for this Bank employee, that gender is somehow sufficiently diffused within the organization so that it cannot be easily measured. This highlights the difficulties of the integrationist approach and the potential for gender mainstreaming to lose a focus on women (see Mukhopadhyay 2007; Walby 2005).

exists over the Bank’s gender-focused expenditures. In May 2011, the Bank’s four-year progress report on the GAP claimed to have “allocated more than $65 billion … to improve girls’ education, women’s and mothers’ health, and women’s access to credit, land, agricultural extension services, jobs and infrastructure services” (World Bank 2011b). The NGO Gender Action contested these numbers, however, claiming instead that social development, gender and social inclusion investment by the Bank have decreased from US$1.25 billion in 2007 to US$952 million in 2010 (1.6% of its 2010 annual budget) according to its 2010 annual report (Arend 2010; Bretton Woods Project 2011). Another report from UN Women in July 2011 criticized the Bank’s gender spending on public administration, law and justice projects during the 2000-2010 period, because only 0.001% of the Bank’s grants and loans allocated in this sector had a gender equality component (UN Women 2011; Bretton Woods Project 2011).

The troubling signs of continuity here between a ‘gender neutral’ and ‘gender sensitive’ Bank raise questions about the extent to which institutional and cultural shifts discussed above have had substantive impact on Bank policy and the position of women and gender within its discourse. Given the Bank’s tendency to “adopt the language of its critics in order to silence them” (Bergeron 2003: 404), recent developments in the Bank’s gender policy leave feminist research in an important but challenging position. The Bank’s rhetorical turn towards gender, embrace of the ‘business case’ and ‘Smart Economics’ discourses, and emergent partnerships with private sector actors for the promotion of empowerment demand critical engagement by feminist political economists.