Hillary Clinton World Bank

Hillary Clinton World Bank

Hillary Clinton World Bank. Reuters has just reported that Hillary Clinton, who has long sworn she only wanted one term at the State Department, is bidding to succeed Robert Zoellick as World Bank President when his term ends in the middle of next year. [Note: Reuters has three anonymous sources for its story, but an on-the-record spokesperson from the State Department is denying it. That may be deliberate, though, as a diplomat who is known to be on her way out has less leverage to do her job.] The Reuters story suggests that John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime Obama ally, would take over at State. It’s worth noting that all of this would happen in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign though I leave it to the political pundits to decipher what impact a shift like this would have.

If she gets the World Bank job, as is likely, given that an American has always headed the Bank and she’s assumed to be Obama’s pick, Clinton will be the first woman to hold that post. The number two job at the Bank, that of Managing Director, is already held by a woman, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former foreign minister of Nigeria. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister is widely regarded (including by me) as a shoo-in for the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. And Helen Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, has been running the UN Development Programme since spring 2009. All of a sudden, we might be on the verge of having four women in the four most powerful development policy roles.

I celebrate this. But I am not satisfied. Because despite the increased visibility of women in development policy, the central role of gender equality in economic development is under-appreciated or misunderstood.

It’s been almost two decades since Larry Summers (then World Bank chief economist) first made the case for the link between women’s empowerment and economic prosperity, but the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the international community in 2000 do a poor job of incentivizing investment in women. As this excellent brief from UN Women points out, gender equality is defined too narrowly (too often reduced to being simply about girls’ schools), and lacks the formal targets the MDGs set for progress in other areas like food security or public health. [It's also worth noting that it took 15 years of lobbying by activists to get the UN to establish UN Women last summer. For 60 years before that, gender issues at the UN were handled ad hoc, as subsets of other departments.]

But perhaps most disconcerting is that many of the resources invested in gender equality aren’t having the desired impact of improving women’s lives. Women hold just 1% of the world’s property, occupy less than 20% of the world’s legislative seats, make 66% of the male counterparts’ income or just 10% of the world’s income, are more likely than men to fall into poverty and often struggle twice as hard to emerge from it.

Because of the way that gender equality sits at the nexus of cultural transformation and economic advancement, it can be a sensitive issue for development organizations to handle. Some shy away from it, for fear of offending local traditions. Others double down, but fail to listen to women in the developing world, giving them help they didn’t ask for as opposed to the kind of help they say they need. Together, as William Easterly has noted, these tendencies create all kinds of structural sexism in the development world that having more women at the top won’t instantly correct.

It is important to have women in positions of power, because it raises the ambitions of young women and girls, but what really matters is that those in power, male and female, be feminists. I’m still waiting for the day when that’s true across the board.

Source:  Reuters