World Bank Policy-Making (1): Gender in/and the World Bank

Abstract

World Bank discourse is gendered, not because as an institutional environment the Bank is itself particularly sexist or discriminatory, but because it reproduces gendered identity, meaning and behaviour through the discourse with which it medicates the developing world. Bank discourse is predicated on the attainment of certain, entirely gendered, desirable behaviours, identifications and attributes: the attributes most required in appropriate, active but malleable and responsive market participants are not the abstract qualities of disembodied, raceless, sexless and cultureless individuals but are the result of years of Western hierarchy, regulation, colonisation and conquest.