Issues Trends - Gender and Development - Global

Countries That Reduce Gender Gaps Have Less Corruption and Faster Growth - says New World Bank Study

WASHINGTON, June 1, 2000 -- Countries that adopt specific measures to protect women's rights and increase their access to resources and schooling have less corruption and achieve faster economic growth than countries that do not, according to a new World Bank research report. Drawing on multidisciplinary research and the experience of countries around the world, Engendering Development finds that countries with smaller gaps between women and men in areas such as education, employment, and property rights not only have lower childhood malnutrition and child mortality, they also have cleaner business and government and more rapid economic growth. And economic growth helps to further narrow the gender gap, creating a positive feedback loop, the report says.

Two years in the making, Engendering Development is the most extensive systematic analysis to date that examines the much-discussed relationship between gender and economic progress in developing countries. The report has been released on the Internet for a discussion timed to coincide with the upcoming UN Special Session of the General Assembly "Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century."

"Much of the recent debate about gender and development has pitted growth-oriented approaches against rights-oriented approaches," said co-author Elizabeth King. "But the evidence we examined suggests that economic development and institutional change are complementary-and that both are necessary."

World Bank President James Wolfensohn has reached similar conclusions based on his extensive travels in developing countries. "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the single most important issue in most of the countries we are dealing with is the enfranchisement of women," he said in a recent speech. "Everywhere I have been it is so clear that if you do not deal with the questions of women's education, of women's opportunity and women's rights, you simply cannot have effective development."

Report co-author Andrew Mason said the research team's review of experience in more than 100 countries concluded that "although income growth and economic development are good for gender equality in the long run, growth alone cannot deliver the desired results." Mr. Mason further said that societies progress more rapidly if they also adopt specific measures to narrow gender gaps. Examples include ensuring equal rights to land and other property, and designing infrastructure and services, such as water, transportation, education, health, and credit, to better meet women's needs. Other steps include eliminating gender bias in the workplace and increasing women's participation in politics.


Advancing Gender Equality: World Bank Action Since Beijing The UN Special Session and associated events to be held in New York City June 5-9 are a follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995. The New York gathering, also known as "Beijing Plus Five," is expected to draw upwards of 15,000 people representing both governments and civil society.


World Bank participation in the Special Session includes a June 6 panel discussion on the draft of Engendering Development. The World Bank is also releasing a new report titled Improving Women's' Health: Issues and Interventions that provides new updated information on such concerns as safe motherhood, malnutrition, violence against women, and genital mutilation. In addition, a report on the World Bank's work on gender issues "Advancing Gender Equality: World Bank Action Since Beijing" will also be distributed at the conference.


(For information on World Bank work on gender issues and participation in the conference, click here) During the 1995 Beijing conference, the Bank pledged to take four follow up actions: increase lending for basic education, health, and credit programs benefiting women; adopt a gender perspective in the design and implementation of projects; promote the participation of grassroots women's groups in the formulation of economic policy; and increase the number of women in the Bank's senior management.


"Since Beijing, the World Bank has acted in each of these areas," said Karen Mason, World Bank Director for Gender and Development. "But our actions are not limited to these initiatives. Our gender-related lending has advanced beyond traditional areas such as health and education and we have increased attention to gender issues in areas such as partnerships, research and capacity building."

World Bank actions since the Beijing conference include:

• Education: Since 1995, lending for girls' education has totaled 3.4 billion. The Bank's education programs give special emphasis to the 31 countries where gender gaps in elementary and secondary education are especially large.
• Health, nutrition and population: To date the World Bank has lent more than $4 billion to support population and reproductive health activities throughout the world. - it is the single largest source of external financing in the areas of health, nutrition, and population. In 1999, two thirds of the loans in these areas included actions aimed at promoting gender equality.
• Credit and savings programs: The Bank is integrating credit and savings programs that cater to women's needs into its projects in many sectors; and it is working with partners to strengthen microfinance programs. In Tajikistan, for example, the Bank helped to establish a microfinance firm that has made more than 10,000 small loans to more than 4,000 clients, most of whom are self-employed women.
• Including gender in project design: Since Beijing, the percentage of Bank projects that includes some consideration of gender issues in their design has almost doubled, to more than 40 percent. The World Bank has also taken specific actions to include women's groups and other NGOs in the policy dialogue with client governments.

"There has been quite a bit of progress on gender issues since the Beijing conference, both in the work of the World Bank and in among the countries that look to us for assistance," said Ms. Mason. "Those of us who have been working on gender issues are proud of what has been achieved but we are also keenly aware of how much remains to be done."

Despite Progress, Gender Gaps Persist

Ms. Mason said that she hoped the research findings on gender equality, reduced corruption and growth would help the development community to more fully appreciate the central role of gender issues in development. "The findings won't surprise advocates for gender equality," she said. "But we hope that it will help to convince others that attention to gender issues really is crucial to development and poverty reduction."

The report confirms that girls and women have made significant progress in recent decades. For example, over the past 25 years girls' primary school enrollment rates doubled in the Middle East, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the past half century, women's life expectancy has increased by 15-20 years in developing countries, to the point that in the 1990s, for the first time, women in South Asia began living longer than men. Despite this progress, women continue to have less control than men over important resources. In South Asia, women have only about half as many years of education as men, and female secondary school enrollment rates are only two-thirds of male rates. Control of land and of other forms of capital is also highly unequal. In Latin America most female household heads in rural areas are either landless or own very small, fragmented holdings. The same is true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women are the major producers of food crops.

Throughout the developing world, female-managed enterprises are often undercapitalized, having less access to credit and using fewer inputs and machinery than male-managed enterprises.

Beyond the direct effects on women's welfare and their ability to generate income, these factors reduce women's power to allocate family resources and to shape such basic family decisions as how many children to have. This lack of power to influence family resource allocations has a negative impact on children's well-being. Lack of control of resources also means that women are made more vulnerable in the face of personal or family crises.


In politics, women continue to be vastly underrepresented in national and sub-national assemblies, accounting for less than 10 percent of the seats in parliament in all but a handful of countries. In Eastern Europe, female representation has fallen from 25 to 7 percent since the beginning of the economic and political transition.

Countries that reduce gender inequality can reap significant rewards. Some benefits, such as falling infant and child mortality, improved nutrition, and lower fertility rates, are already well known. The report demonstrates how the positive impacts of reducing gender gaps also includes lower corruption and faster economic growth, outcomes that not traditionally been linked to gender equality.