nalyze 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.