tions more representative of a range of voices and change policy choices. In India, giving power to women at the local level led to increases in the provision of public goods, such as water and sanitation, which mattered more to women.
Gender equality can also help improve outcomes for the next generation. Women’s education and health have been linked to better outcomes for their children in countries as varied as Brazil, Nepal, Pakistan, and Senegal. In China increasing women’s income improved schooling for both boys and girls. Instead, a comparable increase in men’s income reduced educational attainment for girls.
So, what should policymakers do? The WDR 2012 identifies four priority areas: 1) addressing excess deaths of girls and women and eliminating gender gaps in education where these persist; 2) closing earning and productivity gaps between women and men; 3) giving women greater voice within households and societies; and 4) limiting the perpetuation of gender inequality across generations.
To be effective, policies need to target the root causes of these gaps. For some problems, as with high maternal mortality, this requires fixing the institutions that deliver services to expectant mothers—as Turkey did, targeting underserved women and areas. For other gaps, as with unequal access to economic opportunities, policies need to tackle the multiple constraints—in markets, in institutions and inside the household—that keep women trapped in low productivity/low earning jobs. This requires not just improving women’s access to productive resources, but also tackling information problems and institutional biases that work against women and lifting time constraints linked to care and housework.
What does this mean for the World Bank? These findings have implications for how the development community supports gender equality, starting with the Bank.
First, we need to enhance our country-level diagnostics so as to better inform country policy dialogue. The WDR 2012 shows that to understand gender outcomes we need to analyze carefully how markets, institutions (formal and informal) and households interact with each other to support or impede greater gender equality. The report also shows that the binding constraints are sometimes not where we think they are: for example, women’s over-representation in certain sectors or occupations may not be a result of discrimination in the labor market per se. Deeply rooted gender roles that, almost everywhere, allocate the bulk of responsibility for care and house work to women and force them into making difficult choices have a lot to do with it.
Another implication is that we need to scale up our lending and support for the four priority areas identified in the WDR 2012. In some areas, this will require sustaining or adjusting existing efforts, as in education or our work on adolescent girls. In other areas, it will demand new or additional action on multiple fronts—some combination of more funding (directed especially to helping poor countries reduce excess deaths of girls and women through investments in clean water and sanitation and maternal health services), coordinated efforts to improve the availability of gender-disaggregated data and to foster more experimentation and systematic evaluation of interventions (especially those that aim to improve women’s access to markets, services, or justice), and more effective partnerships.
And we need to think internally how we can all be more responsive and accountable for improving our work on gender equality.
I hope many of you (especially the skeptics) will take a look at the report and maybe you too, like I did, will gain new insights on how gender matters to our work.