Seminar Summary — Strength in Numbers: The Impact of Bureaucratic Representation on Gender Mainstreaming at International Organizations

When representatives from 189 countries convened in Beijing, China in September 1995 for the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, they set up a platform for action to advance the objective of global gender equality. The platform established that “Governments and other actors should promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programs, so that, before decisions are taken, an analysis is made of the effects on women and men, respectively.” The call to consider the gendered effects of every decision on both women and men came to be known as “gender mainstreaming” and is now seen as the overarching strategy to promote gender equality across all sectors of society.

International organizations, like the World Bank, have made gender mainstreaming a key goal across all phases of the development projects they design, fund and implement. In 2002, the World Bank released a report that laid out the Bank’s plans to use gender mainstreaming tactics to improve its development impact. Specifically, the Bank committed to working with its client countries to identify gender-related barriers to poverty reduction and address them with solutions that benefit men and women equally.

In a new study, Catherine Weaver, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Mirko Heinzel and Samantha Jorgensen address the question of whether bureaucratic representation of women in leadership roles at the World Bank translates into increased gender mainstreaming of development projects. Weaver presented the team’s findings at the first session of the Spring 2023 Human Capital Initiative Seminar Series on April 5^th, 2023.

Weaver and coauthors were motivated to investigate the links between bureaucratic representation and gender mainstreaming by prior evidence showing that representation of women can, under certain conditions, lead organizations to increase attention to and adoption of policies aimed at empowering women. Additionally, Weaver noted that over 50 percent of World Bank projects her team studied fell short of their mainstreaming targets, making the Bank a critical case study of whether gender mainstreaming is improved when women are better represented in key staff positions.

The researchers compiled a primary dataset on the nationality, education and gender of World Bank staff from 2000-2021, drawing on online sources such as LinkedIn and dissertation databases. They simultaneously compiled a dataset of World Bank projects during the same time frame by scraping project documents available on the World Bank website. Each project was assigned a value of either zero or one according to whether at least one senior staff member was a woman. Each project was also assigned a gender mainstreaming index: a value from zero to three based on whether the project documents included an analysis of gender issues, specific gender actions and measurement and evaluation indicators focused on gender outcomes.

The final dataset comprised 2,076 development projects coded by level of gender mainstreaming. These projects were staffed by 4,949 task team leaders, 196 country directors and 280 project managers.

The authors’ analysis revealed that while there was no difference between women and men staff in the inclusion of any gender mainstreaming into the projects that they implemented, projects that were overseen by women included a deeper level of mainstreaming. Furthermore, when women made up a higher proportion of leadership positions in a given bureaucratic unit, all projects led by both genders implemented by that unit included deeper gender mainstreaming, implying that the behavior of female leaders influenced their male coworkers.

Weaver and coauthors also designed models to estimate the degree to which bureaucratic representation of women affects gender mainstreaming efforts. The models showed that if all task team leaders in a given sector of the World Bank were women, the gender mainstreaming scores of that sector’s project would increase by an average of 1.31 on a four-point scale. Overall, the results provide evidence of the potential of female leadership to positively contribute to gender mainstreaming of development projects.

Weaver cautioned against interpreting the results as a mandate that international organizations should simply hire more women to improve gender mainstreaming. While projects led by women tended to exhibit greater adherence to gender mainstreaming objectives, the authors also found that male staff with expertise on gender issues implemented deeper gender mainstreaming than women without gender expertise. The results support the idea that educating all leaders on gender issues can facilitate the achievement of mainstreaming agendas.

Further research into gender mainstreaming might seek to demonstrate the impact of mainstreaming policies on the state of gender equality among World Bank clients—also known as gender quality “on the ground,” according to Weaver. Although Weaver and coauthors limited the scope of their research to the contents of development project documents, their study identified a link between descriptive and substantive representation that can inform policymakers at international organizations who wish to align their organization’s diversity policies with its mainstreaming goals.

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