WUNRN
UNRISD News - Issue 7 - December
2011
United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development
World
Bank's World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development - An
Opportunity Both Welcome and Missed
Author
- Shahra
Razavi - 7 October 2011
That
the World Bank has devoted its 2012 flagship publication to the topic of gender
equality is a welcome opportunity for widening the intellectual space. However,
it is also a missed opportunity. By failing to engage seriously with the gender
biases of macroeconomic policy agendas that define contemporary globalization,
and by reducing social policy to a narrow focus on conditional cash transfers,
the report is unable to provide a credible and even-handed analysis of the
challenges that confront gender equality in the 21st century and
appropriate policy responses for creating more equal societies.
This
is the first time the World Bank has devoted its annual flagship publication to
the topic of gender equality. Given the stature of the World Development
Report and its influence on development debates, the 2012 edition is likely
to attract the attention of numerous actors, both governmental and
non-governmental. So what are we to make of the analysis and the messages that
emerge from this report? Does it provide useful policy insights that can
further the cause of gender justice, especially the interests of those women
who find themselves on the lower rungs of our increasingly unequal and
polarized societies?
To start with, a number of significant messages emerge from the
report—significant because they are coming from the World Bank, and more
specifically from the organization’s annual flagship publication, rather than
being novel or cutting-edge in a more general sense.
First, those who have heard the World Bank always make the instrumental
argument for gender equality will be pleased to know that this report
underlines the intrinsic value of gender equality (without forgetting that it
is also “smart economics”). Second, the attention to the intrinsic value of
gender equality seems also to have triggered some interest in gender equality
as a political project. Third, and importantly, going against the “growth is
good for gender equality”–type of argument put forward by World Bank economists
in the past, the report acknowledges that gender equality will not occur
automatically as countries get richer. Fourth, attention is paid to the unequal
division of unpaid domestic and care work between women and men.
Despite these positive features, which take the World Bank’s work on gender
equality forward in important ways, there are a number of major gaps and
problematic policy implications that require critical scrutiny.
First, despite the welcome attention to labour markets, employment issues
and persistent gender-based segregation (chapter 5), the analysis of these
timely issues falls short in several important respects.
Informality. Although WDR 2012 makes occasional reference to “the
important challenges [that] remain for those outside formal employment”
(p.267), there seems to be little recognition of the tremendous changes that
have swept labour markets throughout the world, adversely affecting the
security of workers. As research by the ILO and others has shown, informal
employment tends to be a greater source of employment for women than for men in
most developing regions, with women often concentrated in the most casual and exploitative
segments. As women have increased their participation in the labour force—which
WDR 2012 celebrates—the structure of the labour market has also changed,
making informal/unprotected types of work the norm.
Gender wage gaps. Women’s disproportionate care responsibility, as the
report points out, is one of the factors that limits and shapes their access to
paid work. The failure of labour markets to acknowledge the contribution of
unpaid reproductive work to the functioning of any economy is not, however,
seen by the Bank as a reflection of the fact that labour markets, as social and
political institutions, are “bearers of gender”. Labour markets are gendered
institutions also by operating on the basis of formal rules and informal
practices that value male and female labour differently, regardless of the
levels of “human capital” they embody. WDR 2012 acknowledges that with
the closing of the education gap it is difficult to explain the observed gap
between women’s and men’s wages in terms of educational attainments (p.203),
but then cautions that the remaining gender wage gap may reflect “additional
unobserved or unmeasured differences in worker and job characteristics between
women and men” (p.205). The problem with this reasoning—as with the human
capital “explanation”—is that differences between female and male workers are
themselves very often the outcome of structural and discriminatory forces, such
as fewer years of labour market experience due to care-related reasons, and
gendered definitions of skill that are saturated with sexual bias.
Moreover, the report provides a rosy assessment of employment generation for
women in the export-oriented sectors. There is no mention of employer
strategies in these sectors to manage risk by creating a dual labour market,
consisting of a “nucleus” of largely male, skilled, permanent workers and a
periphery of “flexible” relatively “unskilled” female workers. Nor is there any
mention of the health hazards of being exposed to pesticides and other harmful
substances (in the horticultural sector, for example), or the intense “burnout”
suffered by workers in garments and electronic manufacturing, who are
predominantly women. There is also complete silence about job losses in the
context of trade liberalization (i.e., trade liberalization is a two-way
process: cheap imports displace local manufacturing employment).
The report’s policy recommendations in the area of employment more
broadly—facilitating “part-time work” for women (despite its well-known
disadvantages in terms of earnings and social benefits) and “labour activation
policies” to better connect labour supply and demand—are very weak. How such
steps are going to tackle the problem of structural unemployment and
underemployment that grips the global economy is far from obvious. Nor is there
mention of the deleterious affects of the “deflationary bias” of macroeconomic
policy on employment generation. As far as WDR 2012 is concerned,
employment remains an issue for micro policies, completely detached from macroeconomic
policy.
Second, moving to the analysis of unpaid work, the recommendations about
the critical importance of public investment in infrastructure, especially the
provision of clean water and sanitation, are perhaps among the more strategic
elements emerging from the report. Yet the fiscal constraints that are likely
to shape such investments and the policies that are needed for mobilizing or
safeguarding revenues, especially in the current climate of fiscal austerity,
are either not examined at all, or given short shrift. When it comes to the
provision of services, for health and child care, the analysis is equally vague
and problematic. Maternal mortality, a major concern of the report, can be
reduced by providing skilled birth attendants (p.293). This can be through
either public or private providers, the private option deemed to be “a
cost-effective [cost-effective for whom?] alternative to the public provision
of maternal health services” (p.293), or by providing “poor women with cash
transfers conditional on their seeking health-care services known to reduce
maternal mortality” (p.294). One would have thought that this would be the
place for a much stronger emphasis on the critical importance of accessible
public health services. A missed opportunity indeed!
On childcare services, likewise, while some reference is made to the advantages
of subsidized care services and the exclusionary effects of high prices (p.222)
based on evidence from developed countries, the main policy recommendation of
the report for meeting care needs in developing countries is to make part-time
work possible for mothers (p. 223) so they can meet their children’s care
needs, or to provide affordable “community-based” child care. But many
low-income women who work informally are already making adjustments to their
paid work (in terms of its duration and location) in order to meet the care
needs of their children, and being penalized for it by lower earnings.
Moreover, there is no mention of the concerns that have been raised about the quality
of “community care provision” which very often means less professionalized
and cheaper services with lower staff/child ratios, and fewer facilities and
materials, targeted to poor children. Nor is there any mention of the fact that
those running these “community” services are “voluntary” and informal workers,
which very often means unpaid or poorly paid women.
Third, another missed opportunity is with respect to social policy (now
widely termed social protection), and its gendered character. Throughout the
report there are repeated references to conditional cash transfers (CCTs).
There is no discussion of social insurance programmes and the gender-specific
barriers they present to women; there is only a passing reference to the
importance of pensions for women’s old age security (p.154), but no discussion
of the gender biases in pension privatization so eagerly promoted by the World
Bank in the 1990s. Moreover, in the frequent references to CCTs, there is no
mention of the concerns that have been raised by feminists about the added work
burdens that conditionalities very often impose on mothers, nor is there any
acknowledgement of the evidence that shows that the same results (in terms of
children’s school attendance or nutritional status) can be obtained without the
conditionalities.
Fourth, there is no attempt to explore the relations between gender equality
and macroeconomic policy, despite the burgeoning literature on this topic.
The reasons for this major oversight may be partly conceptual: the report’s
framework is grounded in neoclassical microeconomics. While this microeconomic
framing may have blinded the report to macroeconomic policy, there is probably
more to this oversight than conceptual/methodological consistency. There is a vague
mention of “the recent food, fuel and financial crises” (p.255), but no
acknowledgement (despite all the concern expressed about women’s heavy unpaid
work burden) that the current and previous economic crises and post-crisis
fiscal retrenchments may have contributed to the intensification of the time
women and girls devote to the unpaid reproduction of their households. One
cannot help but conclude that macroeconomic policy is seen as a risky terrain
for the World Bank’s gender analysts to venture into.
Finally, a couple of additional issues emerge prominently from the report:
one being the need to strengthen women’s access to land and their ownership
of property, including land. The report notes the ways in which both land
and credit markets often work to women’s disadvantage. While it would be a
welcome move for formal credit institutions, agricultural extension services
and marketing outlets to be more responsive to the needs of women farmers, as
the report recommends, one is left wondering if this would be sufficient to
solve the challenges that confront smallholders in many contexts: volatile
commodity markets, rising food prices (bearing in mind that most smallholders
are net food-buyers) and environmental hazards. Moreover, one wonders what land
titles and tenure security for women would mean in practice when the granting
of individual titles (or joint titles) is part of a larger programme of
individualization and commodification of all collectively held land, as in many
parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The implication here is that legal reforms have to
be judged by multiple criteria: women’s interests are very often best served by
simultaneously addressing broader community interests as well as gender
discrimination—especially in the context of contemporary large-scale “land
grabs” undertaken by both corporate and public interests for agricultural or
industrial purposes.
A related theme—family laws—is also given prominence in WDR 2012.
This again is a welcome move and addresses one of the areas of feminist
activism that has been relatively neglected within mainstream policy debates.
However, the report’s discussion of family laws could have thrown some light on
the social forces that stand in the way of reforming family laws and
realizing reproductive and sexual rights. There is no mention, however, of the
worldwide rise of socially conservative religious forces of various stripes
that virulently oppose the reform of inegalitarian family laws. Similarly, as
far as WDR 2012 is concerned, sexual and reproductive rights are largely
about pregnant mothers (as in the MDG focus on maternal mortality), and access
to contraception in order to facilitate the welcome drop in fertility rates
(population control having been a long-term preoccupation of the World Bank)—avoiding
the far more controversial area of access to safe abortion that has been under
attack in recent years.
To sum up, WDR 2012 marks a watershed in the World Bank’s thinking on
gender equality: by acknowledging the intrinsic value of gender equality, by
questioning the “growth is good for gender equality” orthodoxy underpinning the
World Bank’s earlier work, by drawing attention to women’s unpaid reproductive
work, and by highlighting the persisting gender biases in family laws,
intra-household relations, and “segregations” in labour markets. However, in
avoiding serious engagement with the gender biases of macroeconomic policy
agendas that have defined contemporary globalization, and their adverse
outcomes for women’s work, both paid and unpaid, within the context of rising
inequalities and extensive labour informalization, WDR 2012 fails to
provide a credible and even-handed analysis of the challenges that confront
gender equality in the 21st century. The unfortunate reduction of
social policy to a narrow focus on CCTs and the shading out of controversial
issues (such as the rise of fundamentalist religious forces) will also reduce
the report’s usefulness to the “policy maker”, as well as its staying power for
other constituencies who care about the subject.
Razavi’s extended commentary on WDR 2012: World Development Report 2012: An Extended Commentary
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Direct
Link to World Bank World Development Report: 2012
GENDER
EQUALITY & DEVELOPMENT