Why Women’s Representation Matters: Evidence from Gender Mainstreaming in the World Bank

The World Bank’s recently released 2024-2030 Gender Strategy offers an unequivocal commitment to expanding jobs and advancing women’s participation in decision-making. Yet how well does the World Bank uphold these principles in its own organizational hiring, promotion, and managerial practices? Perhaps more critically, why does it matter if the World Bank itself is achieving greater gender equity within its own hallowed halls?

Previous contributions to this blog series on gender equity within the IFIs offer persuasive evidence that the World Bank has made significant progress in achieving greater representation and pay equity for women in its ranks. Nonetheless, according to Masood Ahmed and Eeshani Kandpal, women still hold disproportionately fewer positions in technical and managerial grades, where the key decision making over the World Bank’s development policies and operations are made. The absence of women in these roles underscores the challenges of building pipelines and achieving greater pay equity. More critically, the dearth of representation of women in leadership inhibits opportunities for passive representation–the proportional increase in the number of women in the Bank’s staff–from producing active representation–the ability and willingness of women staff to promote the interests of clients who share similar identities.

In our new article at the American Political Science Review, “Bureaucratic Representation and Gender Mainstreaming in International Organizations: Evidence from the World Bank,” we use primary data we collected on the gender and staff positions of Bank staff from 2000-2021 in conjunction with a pre-registered elite survey experiment with 178 World Bank task team leaders (TTLs), and key informant interviews. We specifically set out to determine whether–and how–the gender of project leaders made a difference in how operational staff responded to the World Bank’s gender mainstreaming mandate. 

What we find is compelling evidence of how women’s representation matters. Using the World Bank’s own Gender Mainstreaming Index, we show first that all Bank TTLs–regardless of gender–respond to requirements under gender mainstreaming policy by including more gender-related activities in project design and management. However, when projects are led by women, the score on the GMI is significantly higher, indicating that women-led projects more deeply mainstream gender across project objectives, core activities, and monitoring and learning elements. (see Table 1 below)

 Table 1: Regressing gender mainstreaming on women staff

Our data also substantiates the bureaucratic representation claim that the higher presence of women in organizational units has a “contagion” effect  (Table 2). Simply put, when bureaucratic subunits (including project teams) include more women staff and/or when their superiors are women, all staff in that unit show deeper commitment to gender mainstreaming. In other words, men in these units may become more sensitive to (or socialized) around gender equity goals.  This could also be linked to Ranil Dissanayake’s argument that women may be more likely to speak up and assert their preferences when their own units, and the managers they report to, are more diverse.

Table 2: OLS-models regressing gender mainstreaming on average women appointed in sector

A reasonable criticism levelled against efforts to increase passive representation is that we should not assume that women are more favorable towards gender mainstreaming efforts. It is especially important to avoid such an essentialist argument when the people that are meant to benefit from these initiatives (those in developing countries) are far removed from the bureaucrats implementing them. The World Bank, and other development agencies, are a case in point. The beneficiaries of Bank projects live very different lives than staff, and Bank staff members rarely benefit directly from Bank-funded projects.

Thus, to probe the assumption that women staff in the Bank are actually more favorable towards gender mainstreaming, we conducted a survey experiment with 178 Bank TTLs. The experiment reveals that women TTLs are more like than men TTLs to believe that including gender disaggregated targets in projects activities (see Figure 1 below) increases the development impact of projects. This result suggests that there is indeed a difference between women and men, on average, with respect to their views on gender mainstreaming.

Figure 1 (Figure 4 in article): Marginal means of support for profiles with and without gender mainstreaming components (95% confidence intervals)

Why does this matter?  Despite the plethora of scholarship and declarations espousing the values of gender diversity in organizations, skepticism is readily offered in conversations regarding how such goals would affect specific organizations. Numerous interviews with both men and women staff working inside the World Bank reveal that, while there is widespread normative support for gender equity hiring and promotion, there remains a lingering reticence regarding how to accomplish this goal. This reticence is rooted in concerns that  key academic disciplines–such as economics–do not recruit and produce enough well-trained women to enable gender equity goals in hiring practices. In addition to creating a natural impediment in the staff pipeline, organizational efforts to achieve greater gender representation may thus entail hiring from “lower ranked and less prestigious” universities. This is an uneasy prospect at the World Bank, where the organizational culture privileges an economistic approach to development and the vast majority of economists (who also dominate the managerial ranks) currently come from a relatively small number of large Anglo-American economics graduate programs (for more details, see our other paper on bureaucratic representation in the World Bank here). 

Moreover, as Das and Joubert  have shown in their own study of the World Bank using internal human resources data, hiring more women into entry-level positions to enhance pipelines will actually increase gender wage gaps in the short term, which may generate cynicism and backlash. This pattern is exacerbated when higher level positions are few in number and organizational leaders draw from an internal pool of candidates that will inevitably overrepresent men in middle management positions.

In face of such concerns, it is critical to demonstrate–preferably with non-anecdotal data–why and how women’s representation directly benefits organizational performance, especially around strategic goals important for external legitimacy. The analytical task here is not easy, especially for researchers outside the World Bank who do not have direct access to human resources data. Further study will require greater transparency in hiring and promotion practices as well as public access to disaggregated (albeit appropriately anonymized) staffing data.

Moreover, as Ana Revenga  suggests, more work will need to be done to uncover the other factors that lead to the proverbial glass ceiling. This will involve in depth qualitative investigations, including interviews, focus groups and surveys, to better understand where and why women drop out of the managerial pipelines. What is perhaps most important, and most difficult, to discern through this additional work is how the very culture of the World Bank should and can be transformed to amplify voice opportunities and create a more conducive work environment for women, especially women from underrepresented races, regions, and disciplines.

The World Bank, under the current leadership of Ajay Banga and the new Gender Mainstreaming Strategy, is poised to do this. But diligent oversight is key. Gender equity cannot simply continue to be part of the rhetoric of the World Bank’s global development agenda. It must become a central tenet in its own internal life, so that the World Bank can lead in the global gender and development work through example.