Review of World Development Report 2012 : Gender equality and development

This report is in several ways an improvement on previous World Bank reports that deal with gender equality and development, but it has fundamental limitations that stem from the ‘modernization’ framework (reinforced by neoclassical economic theory) in which questions are posed and evidence interpreted.

The report does bring together large amounts of useful, interesting and well-presented information that can be deployed without accepting its interpretative framework. An example is the analysis of excess female mortality (‘missing girls and women’), which not only focuses on the girls who are missing because female foetuses are selectively terminated in some Asian countries, but also on girls who die in infancy and childhood, and women who die between the ages of 15 and 59. The rate at which girls and women die relative to men and boys is higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries, and the difference cannot be accounted for by differences in the overall health environment. The report estimates that in 2008 almost 3.9 million females below age 60 were missing across all low- and middle-income countries, two-fifths at birth, one-fifth in infancy and childhood and two-fifths between ages 15 and 59. The factors responsible are not just son preference (which is important in China and north India, but is not so prevalent in other countries), but also high maternal mortality and greater prevalence of HIV/AIDS among women (particularly important in sub-Saharan Africa). The report argues that economic growth alone does not result in the disappearance of excess female mortality (WDR 2012: 14) and that specific policy interventions are needed. It emphasizes the importance of investment in the improved delivery of public services, especially clean water, sanitation and maternal health care. But it never raises the question of whether the macroeconomic and globalization policies required by the World Bank and IMF assist or hinder the mobilization of resources for such investment. Feminist analysis has pointed to ways in which those policies constrain the ability of governments in low- and middle-income countries to mobilize tax revenue in equitable ways (Çağatay, 2003).

WDR 2012 does recognize that gender inequality is not just a feature of ‘underdeveloped’ settings, but persists in some important forms even in the most ‘developed’ countries. This is a step forward from the implicit assumptions that were built into the treatment of gender inequality in WDR 2006, Equity and Development, which presents gender inequality as an outcome of ‘traditional’ patriarchal societies in which women are denied property and inheritance rights, face restrictions on their freedom of movement and do not participate in paid work. Policies to increase women’s labour force participation are seen in WDR 2006 as the key to greater gender equality (Elson, 2009: 43). By contrast, WDR 2012 recognizes that women’s participation in labour markets is not a panacea, and it pays a lot of attention to the continuing unequal division of unpaid work. It refers to evidence that married women may not have control over their own earnings in a range of low- and middle-income countries, especially in lower-income households (WDR 2012: 82). It presents a wealth of data on gender earnings gaps and occupational segregation in high-income as well as in low- and middle-income countries. It shows that these cannot be explained by educational differences and argues that women are trapped in low-productivity activities by a combination of constraints stemming from the operation of markets, formal institutions, informal institutions and households, envisaged as a set of interlocking cogs which get stuck on certain settings, despite the forward momentum of economic growth pushing in the direction of gender inequality, and prevent women from enjoying equal economic opportunities (Figure 5.15, p. 237). Some policy interventions are required to free the stuck cogs, represented visually by an oil can.

This mechanical (masculine?) metaphor is used throughout the report, and is a variant of modernization theory, in which the forward momentum of ‘progress’ gets stuck at certain points, but can be freed providing the right policies are introduced. There is no recognition that development is a profoundly uneven and disruptive process in which large numbers of people are dispossessed of all resources except their labour power, and wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands. Nor is there recognition that while development tends to undermine and decompose some forms of gender inequality, it creates new forms of gender inequality that have elements of both the ‘old’ and the ‘modern’ systems of social relations (Elson, 2007; Elson and Pearson, 1981). Thus many of the ‘modern’ occupations in which women are concentrated tend to be monetized forms of the occupations that women carry out unpaid in households and communities: growing food, cooking, making clothes, taking care of other people, serving other people. These occupations are socially constructed as lower-status, lower-skilled, lower-earning occupations. Productivity is difficult to measure in many of them, as the products of service sector jobs are often intangible as well as tangible. Moreover, in the provision of care, quality of the output falls if measures are taken to reduce per unit costs, such as speeding up care and caring for more people at the same time. So output of care has to be quality-adjusted if productivity is to be properly measured. WDR 2012 presents no independent evidence of productivity for most occupations – the exception being agriculture, where it shows that lower productivity of women’s farming is related to their lower access to inputs not their inferior farming skills. For the rest, lower earnings are taken to be evidence of lower productivity, something that can only be taken for granted in the confines of the neoclassical model of labour markets, which does not allow for power and social norms to determine earnings. The labour market constraints to which WDR 2012 refers are primarily information constraints, with employers not having full information about women’s productive potential, and so confining them to lower productivity ‘women’s jobs’, rather than employing them in higher productivity ‘men’s jobs’.

The recommended policy interventions are mainly directed to making women more like men, from the perspective of employers, rather than changing the way that jobs are constructed and valued, so that, for example, care work is more highly valued and pays more and is undertaken equally by men and women. Thus the report recommends lifting constraints on women’s time through provision of (paid) childcare; investment in time-saving infrastructure; and overcoming information problems in labour markets, through measures that include affirmative action. It makes a brief mention of encouraging men to do more unpaid childcare through improved parental leave policies that apply to men as well as women. But much more attention is given to reducing the amount of unpaid care that women have to do, than to redistributing the remaining unpaid care equally between women and men. The report makes no mention of a re-evaluation of the skill content of jobs, so as to increase the pay and status of ‘women’s work’, a strategy that has been used in a number of high-income countries in sectors where there are trade unions.

The limitations of WDR 2012 are most evident in its discussion of the impact of globalization. Globalization is defined as greater integration and interdependence, giving people more access to information and technology (WDR 2012: 255). There is no mention of globalization as a process that empowers owners of wealth at the expense of those with no wealth, and creates growing inequality and insecurity. The financial crisis of 2007–2009 is not seen as an outcome of financial globalization but is briefly mentioned as an external ‘shock’, which did not impact on women any more than men (WDR 2012: 87). The report claims that globalization has increased access to economic opportunities for many women, especially in manufacturing and ICT-enabled jobs, but does not discuss the destruction of employment opportunities through land grabs by big corporations (aided and abetted by governments) in rural areas. It does recognize that increases in export sector jobs for women do not necessarily reduce gender wage gaps, and that the manufacturing sector in some middle- and low-income countries has been ‘defeminized’ as production has become more automated, and there is less need for ‘nimble fingers’. The report is optimistic about the impact of ICT on jobs for women, claiming that ICT requires ‘brains’ rather than ‘brawn’, but has no discussion of the mind-deadening effects of work in a call centre, sitting in front of a screen mouthing a predetermined script, under intense pressure to deal with calls as quickly as possible. Much is made of the liberating impact of women’s access to the internet and cell phones, but there is no discussion of internet pornography and cyber-bullying.

The report does argue that gender equality is an important goal in its own right, but in the discussion of globalization a more instrumental approach comes to the fore, and the report argues that gender inequality has more costs to countries in a globalized world, and thus that globalization promotes gender equality. In making this argument the report states that ‘Economic theory says that greater competition in product markets should reduce discrimination in factor (labor, capital, and land) markets’, citing two (male) neoclassical economists, Becker and Bhagwati (WDR 2012: 264). It does not discuss the critique of this theory by many feminist economists, who show how discrimination can increase rather than reduce profits. WDR 2012 also cites new empirical research commissioned for the report which shows that: ‘Countries with higher female labor force participation, lower fertility, and higher educational attainment have larger export shares in sectors intensive in female labor’ (WDR 2012: 265), the implication being that if a country does not have high female labour force participation, low fertility and high educational attainment (for women), it will be harder to compete in global markets. Feminist economists do not necessarily disagree, but also point to the possible importance of relatively low wages for women as a source of competitive advantage. (Educate women as much as men, but pay them less than men.) Evidence of the impact of trade and investment liberalization for gender wage equality is mixed. Some studies show that gender wage differentials have declined, in large part due to narrowing educational gaps. Yet in several developing countries, including China and Vietnam, the discriminatory portion of gender wage gaps has increased (see, for example, Berik et al., 2004; Menon and Rodgers, 2009).

WDR 2012 briefly discusses globalization and wages, and cites feminist economist Seguino, but misunderstands the point she makes, implying that her argument is simply that women’s wages in export industries in middle- and low-income countries are lower than in high-income countries. The report argues that that though this is true, these wages are often higher than in alternative employment for women in low- and middle-income countries. Seguino’s point, however, is not about the wage gap between women in middle- and low-income countries as compared to high-income countries, but about the larger gap, within middle-income and low-income countries, between female wages and female productivity, as compared to male wages and male productivity, that stems from women’s lower bargaining power. Though Seguino’s analysis has strong empirical support, it challenges the assumptions of neoclassical theory of the labour market, and is, apparently, not intelligible to World Bank economists for whom neoclassical theory IS economic theory. Given this, it is not surprising that globalization is seen as an essentially benign process, which just needs to complemented by public policies to ensure that the benefits extend to all women.

The report concludes with a ‘Global Agenda for Gender Equality’, focused on closing gender gaps in education and health, promoting women’s access to economic opportunities, closing gender gaps in voice and agency, preventing the intergenerational reproduction of gender inequality and supporting evidence-based public action. These are all good objectives, and the policies advocated to achieve them are on the whole helpful; though the report is too optimistic about the beneficial effects for women of access to a mobile phone, which is expected (among other things) to improve maternal health, increase access to economic opportunities and to justice, and facilitate knowledge sharing and learning about ‘what works’. Yet many of these policies (which are sectoral or micro-level) will not be implemented, or their beneficial effects will be undermined, because of macro-level policies (fiscal, monetary, investment and trade) which create economic instability, insecurity and inequality; and which promote profit-led consumerism, in which women are sexually objectified (often in the name of a spurious ‘empowerment’ – ‘because you are worth it’, as the cosmetics advertisements say). The report has nothing to say about these challenges, on which there is a substantial body of feminist research. Business corporations are seen mainly as potential allies, not as existing obstacles. The World Bank itself is absent as a player in this text; it is not one of the institutions that are subject to scrutiny. There is no discussion of the difficulties of mainstreaming gender equality in World Bank operations, and of the failure of the Bank’s much publicized slogan ‘gender equality is smart economics’ to have any impact on most of the Bank’s economists. The danger is that the useful, and to some extent valuable, aspects of WDR 2012 will be used as evidence that the Bank has significantly improved in its understanding of and policy towards gender equality. The report must not be allowed to become a fig leaf that obscures the ways in which Bank operations and policies are themselves obstacles to the achievement of gender equality.