Compared to other international organisations (IOs), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was late in introducing gender equality in its own research and policy agenda. Only in 2013 did the IMF recognise it as an issue for macroeconomics. Yet since the 1980s, a growing number of studies accused the IMF of not considering the impacts on women’s well-being of its structural adjustment programs. Moreover, the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action called governments and IOs to develop strategies for achieving gender equality.
The research presented during this seminar aims to explain the endogenous forces driving the IMF’s institutional change, and how this new discourse has been translated into rules and policies in Latin American countries. It argues that agency and female representation were the key drivers.
The Fund’s new discourse was constructed by the first woman to be nominated as Managing Director and female policy entrepreneurs who mobilised their internal resources to promote gender-sensitive policies and research. They also constituted the frame of this discourse: gender equality as a means to achieve economic growth. Based on this idea, they could overcome an institutional constraint: the strict legal interpretation of the IMF’s mandate. However, in the absence of gender-concerned national leaders and policy entrepreneurs, the translation of policies tends to be limited at local levels. Furthermore, policy visibility and invisibility are shaped by ideas, which impact outcomes.
This research develops an empirical investigation of the Fund’s intra-organisational structure, and a comparative study of IMF’s gendered analysis and recommendations to a panel of emerging countries in Latin America. It combines interdisciplinary approaches and insights from (a) the institutional analysis (particularly, three new, or revived, theoretical fields: discursive institutionalism, feminist institutionalism, and legal institutionalism), and (b) the sociology of international bureaucracies.
About the author
Camila Villard Duran is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of São Paulo (USP, Brazil), Senior Research Associate of the Global Economic Governance Programme of the University of Oxford and Visiting Researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne university (ISJPS).
Within the Gender Seminar Series
The purpose of this seminar is to offer a platform of exchange for students, doctoral students in particular, whose research includes a gender perspective. During this monthly series, students will have the opportunity to discuss their work, meet peers from different disciplines at the Graduate Institute, as well as interact with guest speakers and faculty members.