Sarah Cheverton
WVoN co-editor

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2012 is the first ever devoted to the issue of gender equality. But does it go far enough to challenge the more complex – and controversial – issues impeding global gender justice?

Fundamentally, the report holds that gender equality is “smart economics” – making a better and more productive workforce, healthier children and families, and a more representative society.

More importantly, it also makes clear that gender equality is a human right, which marks a notable departure from the World Bank’s usual line that gender equality is good for development.

Kudos is rightly given for improvements in global gender equality over the last 40 years – more women in the labour force, in education, and increased women’s average life expectancy.

But other gender gaps persist.

The worst of these is that women and girls are more likely than males to die in less wealthy countries than their counterparts in richer nations – there’s an estimated 3.9 million “excess female deaths” under 60 each year. Of these, about two-fifths are never born due to a preference for sons, one-sixth die in early childhood, and one third die in their reproductive years.

More broadly, school enrolment for girls remain lower than boys, and unsurprisingly, “women everywhere tend to earn less than men.”

Women also continue to struggle to make their voices heard – in their homes, in their governments and in the media.

So what prevents gender equality?

Well the picture is complex, but most importantly, the report asserts that income growth alone does not deliver gender equality. Geography, ethnicity and disability, for example, all have an impact.

In China and India, for example, while economic growth has been rapid, excess female mortality has either stayed the same or grown worse.

The report makes four main domestic policy recommendations.

Firstly, governments must address the ‘excess deaths’ of women and girls by improving services such as maternal care and sanitation.

Secondly, address the gender gap in employment and economic opportunity, including through improved childcare, access to resources, and through quotas.

Thirdly, allow the voices of women to be heard at all levels. Improve women’s control over household resources, ownership of assets and property rights, and increase representation in politics and professions.

Finally, shift the message to young people so that gender inequality is not reproduced. The report recommends education and health information programmes, providing job and life skill training and improving access to positive role models for young women.

The report is a positive step forward, but Shahra Razavi, UN Research Co-ordinator for UN Research Institute for Social Development, highlights some critical shortfalls, describing it as “an opportunity both welcomed and missed”.

One of the glaring problems, says Razavi, is the assumption that labour markets are gender neutral rather than being “’bearers of gender’” through, for example, gendered definitions of skills that result in gender-based wage gaps.

Discussion is also absent on the disproportionate impact on women of a shrinking public sector now increasingly under attack, or the concentration of women in its lower-paid frontlines.

But even more problematic is the lack of attention paid to the more controversial and complex rise of fundamentalist forces attacking, for example, women’s sexual and reproductive rights, as well as their access to employment and education.

The World Development Report takes a strong view that “globalization can help.” However, this neglects the more negative impacts of globalization upon women.

For example, says Ravazi, “women often intensify both their paid and unpaid work to compensate for cutbacks in public welfare expenditure and drops in the earnings of other household members.”

Razavi warns that the report places too much emphasis on conditional cash transfers or CCTs (that pay recipients for certain actions, such as keeping a girl in school), despite evidence that they can reinforce traditional gender division.

“While [CCTs] have some potential to support women in their role as caregivers…they do not broaden their options beyond that role…discouraging men from care-giving, while they overburden women.”

Whilst the 2012 World Development Report should be noted as representing “an important turning point in the World Bank’s thinking on gender equality”, what is missing from its discussion is arguably more important than what is included.

This more than anything else, says Razavi, will limit both its “usefulness to the policy maker as well as its staying power” for those with a real and lasting interest in global gender equality.