Gender in the World Bank

The World Bank adopted a gender and development mainstreaming strategy in 2001 and issued a revised Operational Policy and Bank Procedures statement in 2003. Implementation of the strategy has been documented continuously since its inception. This page has links to these and related documents.

• About Us
• A World Bank Group Action Plan: gender equality as smart economics 
• Gender Mainstreaming Strategy Paper
• OP/BP 4.20, Gender and Development
• Annual Gender Monitoring Reports
• IEG Gender Evaluations
• Report on Engendering Development
  

The World Bank’s approach to promoting gender equality makes all staff responsible for ensuring that the Bank’s work is responsive to the differing needs, constraints and interests of males and females in client countries.  To support this approach, a Bank-wide team consisting of designated staff in the regions, country offices, and network anchors take special responsibility for promoting gender mainstreaming and assisting colleagues with strategy implementation.  World Bank attention to gender equality issues began in the 1970s, but the Bank’s emphasis on this issue has increased markedly since the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Gender equality is now a core element of the Bank’s strategy to reduce poverty. There is a clear understanding that until women and men have equal capacities, opportunities and voice, the ambitious poverty-reduction agenda set out in the Millennium Declaration, and the specific goals attached to it, will be achieved.

The Gender and Development Group’s major goal is to mainstream high quality gender analysis in the products that the Bank offers: lending, analytical work and advisory services. The Bank has made significant progress in mainstreaming gender issues in the social sectors of health and education, and now it needs to intensify its integration of gender in the non-social sectors that support shared growth and lead to increased economic opportunities for women, such as the energy, finance, transport and agriculture sectors, among others.

In this context, the Gender and Development Group  has commenced a substantive work program to increase the analytical work on the linkages between increased gender equality and greater economic growth. Current priority research in this area involves looking at the gender dimensions of migration flows, labor markets and firm productivity, and demographics and poverty reduction.

For more information, please write to us:  genderequality@worldbank.org