WUNRN
Gender & Generosity: Does Women's Representation Affect
Development Cooperation?
By Kelan Lua* & Marijke Breuningb
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.