With the introduction of its Gender Action Plan in 2007, the World Bank decisively began to mainstream gender into its core business of economic growth and poverty alleviation. How has the Bank reconciled this reorientation with its continued privileging of neoclassical economics? In this article, Elisabeth Prügl argues that the heightened attention to gender equality at the World Bank is crafting a new hegemony that can be described as “neoliberalism with a feminist face.” This new hegemony combines elements of cooptation and openings for transformative feminist agendas. The argument is derived from an interpretive analysis of 34 Bank reports, books, and working papers on gender published between 2001 and 2014.
Making gender equality compatible with economic growth. Feminist critics have long argued that economic growth hurts women. To counter such assertions, the Bank made a major effort to establish a definitive relationship between gender equality and economic growth. But findings have been inconsistent and have varied depending on definitions of gender equality. Bank researchers have thus reversed the directionality of the argument: Growth may or may not be good for women; however, gender equality may be good for growth! They have successfully established the relationship at the household level, producing a wealth of research in support. The Bank’s neo-classical macro-economic commitments have thus been ring-fenced. However, Bank researchers also have managed to destabilize core commitments by bringing to bear feminist insights
Beyond equal opportunity. Bank researchers have pushed beyond the narrow definition of gender equality as equality of opportunity. They have questioned the neoclassical idea that eliminating discrimination and giving equal opportunities to all would generate equality. Instead, they have recognized that feminine difference also can produce unequal outcomes within an otherwise non-discriminatory market. Such difference is not simply a matter of preferences, but of intrinsically different orientations towards risk, and of external power relations producing “adaptive preferences.” Feminine difference contradicts the rationality of a disembodied market actor, questioning a logic that defines equality as narrowly based on opportunity.
Making markets work for women. Gender researchers at the Bank have broadened the range of institutions they see relevant for creating markets and thereby brought to the table core feminist agendas. They have argued that family laws circumscribe markets by limiting women’s rights to inheritance and property, freedom of movement and contracting. They also have made a topic of informal institutions, such as women’s unpaid care labor.
Making women work for markets. Bank publications argue the necessity of enabling women to compete in markets. This includes an argument for overcoming “gaps and lacks,” i.e. differences in various forms of physical and human capital endowments. The implicit comparator in this argument is the male-imagined market actor – women in this logic need to fit the existing market environment.
An alternative narrative focuses on empowering women by giving them agency, i.e. the capacity for autonomous choice free of violence and fear. This formulation recognizes that patriarchal power relations circumscribe women’s freedom. Gender-based violence and women’s exclusion from politics and decision-making become core issues in this argument.
Conclusion. Neoliberalism with a feminist face suggests a new understanding in which markets do not produce inequality but equality, in which the pursuit of profit and gender equality go hand in hand. This is not simply a matter of cooptation: introducing ideas about feminine difference, family law as market-making institutions, and embodied, rights-bearing subjects profoundly broadens the field of vision and fundamentally questions the viability of an economic orthodoxy based on abstract actors and free markets.
Elisabeth Prügl has published a longer article on this topic in Feminist Economics.