Bureaucratic Representation and Gender Mainstreaming in International Organizations: Evidence from the World Bank

The term “gender mainstreaming” refers to the practice of assessing the impacts that a policy or action will have on both women and men and weighing both sets of impacts equally.

International organizations such as the World Bank have made gender mainstreaming a key goal across all phases of the development projects they design, fund and implement. At the same time, the World Bank has made gender equality within its workforce an institutional priority and been recognized for its efforts to increase women’s representation in leadership positions. Can bureaucratic representation of women translate into increased gender mainstreaming of development projects?

In a recent study, Catherine Weaver, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and coauthors use a primary dataset on World Bank staff and over 2,000 projects to study the effects of women’s presence and position in project teams on the implementation of gender mainstreaming policy guidelines into practice. They find distinct evidence of two ways in which descriptive representation of women leads to substantive effects on gender mainstreaming. For scholars of international organizations, the study offers important empirical evidence on what factors may perpetuate disconnects between talk and action within international organizations around gender equity and development, as well as how the gendered composition of bureaucracies matters in global governance.

Join the Human Capital Initiative on Wednesday, April 5, 2:00-3:30 PM EDT for an in-person research seminar with Catherine Weaver on the relationship between bureaucratic representation of women and gender mainstreaming in international organizations.