WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

Full Text: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IhbkdiHR73VchvARnXPR/full

Gender & Generosity: Does Women's Representation Affect Development Cooperation?

By Kelan Lu^a* & Marijke Breuning^b

Abstract

Does women's representation influence foreign (aid) policy? And, if so, is this best explained as a function of women's unique values or attributable to the impact of greater gender equality? Building on previous work, we investigate whether women's greater presence in political life – evidence of greater gender equality – is associated with greater generosity, or whether women's values and (some) women's ability to influence policy as ministers affect aid's generosity. We find that women's representation in the parliament and in the cabinet is positively associated with a donor state's generosity, but that female ministers of foreign policy-related ministries do not influence the state's generosity. These findings suggest that gender equality is a more promising explanation for the generosity of states' foreign aid than women's values.

Conclusions

The findings reported in the previous section confirm that women's representation in the parliament and in the cabinet does play enea significant role in increasing the generosity of the donor state's development aid even after controlling for other potentially confounding variables. In contrast, when women serve as minister of foreign affairs, economics and trade, or development cooperation, this is not associated with more generous aid. In fact, female foreign ministers are associated with less foreign aid. This combination of findings suggests that it is gender equality in the donor state that matters, rather than women's values. Before elaborating on the implications of this finding, we briefly review the impact of our remaining variables.

Consistent with the literature we find that left-oriented governments tend to provide more foreign aid. We also find that the proportion of women in the parliament has a stronger impact in party-centered system than in candidate-centered systems.

In addition, by including women's representation in the parliament, women's representation in the cabinet, as well as a measure of whether relevant ministries are headed by women, we are better able to untangle the effects of gender equality and women's values. Taken together, our findings suggest that greater descriptive representation of women is best understood as an indicator of greater gender equality. In other words, our findings do not support the notion that women bring unique values to foreign policy-making.

However, we do find that a female minister of foreign affairs has a particularly strong and negative impact on foreign aid, while female ministers of economics and trade and of development cooperation do not have a statistically significant impact on the generosity of foreign aid. This means that the female foreign ministers in our data-set were associated with less generous aid policies than their male counterparts. One reason for this finding may be that female foreign ministers are still relatively rare – or at least they were quite rare during the period covered by our analyses. It is therefore difficult to evaluate whether the specific women who served as foreign minister are representative of women more generally. Others have suggested that women in foreign policy decision-making roles “must still overcome stereotypes of being ‘weak’ in foreign policy.” If so, this might explain the difference in our findings regarding female foreign ministers as compared to female ministers of development cooperation or economics and trade – neither of these two portfolios is as clearly associated with traditional notions of masculinity as the foreign ministry.

The non-significant impact of female ministers of development cooperation, as well as those of economics and trade, points to the conclusion that the donor state's generosity does not depend on whether a woman or a man holds these positions. Instead, greater women's representation in the parliament and in the cabinet tends to be more important than the gender of the relevant minister. In other words, greater gender equality, as evidenced by a larger proportion of women in the parliament and in the cabinet, appears to drive our results.

What do these findings suggest regarding the impact of women's political prominence on the generosity of donor states? On the basis of the previous literature, our hypotheses suggested that women's representation in the parliament and in the cabinet would be more indicative of the impact of gender equality, whereas the presence of women in the various ministries would be indicative of a direct impact of women on foreign (aid) policy-making. Our empirical investigation was focused on the DAC members of the OECD, which means that the countries in the data-set are all wealthy, democratic states of the Global North. Interpreted narrowly, our findings may be limited to the impact of gender equality on the foreign (aid) policies of these countries. However, the finding that gender equality contributes more to explaining differences in generosity than women's unique values, may very well have implications that reach beyond the specifics of this study. Whether this is indeed the case will need to be ascertained by future research.