In the article that she recently published in Feminist Economics, Elisabeth Prügl examines the growing research on gender at the World Bank as a site for the construction of a new hegemonic consensus around neoliberalism.

Research for this article was carried out in the context of the Gender Centre's collaborative research project on Gender Experts and Gender Expertise funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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? 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. Prügl’s argument is derived from an interpretive analysis of thirty-four Bank reports, books, and working papers on gender published between 2001 and 2014.  

Making gender equality compatible with economic growth. Many feminist critics have 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 neoclassical macroeconomic commitments have thus been ring-fenced from feminist critique. However, Bank research that draws on feminist insights has begun to destabilize other core commitments.

Beyond equal opportunity. Prügl shows that 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 of outcome. Instead, they have recognized feminine difference and its potential to produce unequal outcomes within an otherwise nondiscriminatory market. Such difference is not simply a matter of preferences, but of intrinsically different orientations toward 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. Prügl argues that gender researchers at the Bank have broadened the range of institutions they see relevant for creating markets and thereby brought core feminist agendas to the table. 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. Prügl demonstrates that Bank publications argue the necessity of enabling women to compete in markets. This approach includes an argument for overcoming “gaps and lacks,” that is, 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 into the existing market environment.

An alternative narrative in Bank publications focuses on empowering women by giving them agency, meaning 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.

Neoliberalism with a feminist face. Prügl argues that the totality of the World Bank’s arguments represent neoliberalism with a feminist face that reveals 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 new approach 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.