Past Conferences

Information on Past Conferences in the Program

Gender Action
June 10, Elaine Zuckerman, Gender Action

Before being one of the first foreign students to study at Beida University in Beijing, Elaine Zuckerman had studied international development at McGill University in Montreal (B.A. 1969) and the University of Toronto (M.A. 1970). She received her doctorate-equivalent (no degrees were granted in China from 1966-1981) in 1978 in political economy from Beida where Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were the main subjects of study. During this period, she was an eyewitness to seismic shifts in Chinese politics—she attended Chairman Mao's funeral and witnessed the demonstrations that occurred around the time of the overthrow of the Gang of Four.

In 1980, she started working for the World Bank in the same year that China joined the organization. She worked on mostly environmental issues in China. In the late 1980s, after a 20-year involvement with China, she created the first position in the World Bank addressing the social impacts of economic policy reforms known as structural adjustment programs. In 1990, she moved to the Inter-American Development Bank and began working on Latin American issues. She stayed there until 1997. From 1998-2000, she returned to the World Bank to work on education and gender issues.

In her talk, Elaine Zuckerman recounted the story of her realization that so much of her work on poverty was closely tied to women's issues; in addition, poverty was feminizing in the fallout of so many post-war scenarios. She also realized that beyong failing to adequately address the increasing feminization of poverty, international lending and investment institutions such as the World Bank and other regional development banks were completely ignoring this trend, notwithstanding their rhetoric and promises to address it by better targeting aid money.

Three years ago, in an effort to publicize and bridge the gap between rhetoric/research and action, she set up Gender Action, an organization dedicated to promoting gender rights and equality in international investment. Despite its youth, Gender Action has a growing budget and counts on three main sources for its funding: foundation contributions, revenue from contracts to carry out projects for various government ministries of foreign affairs, and individual contributions. The organization has worked in Bangladesh, China, Malawi, Namibia, Serbia, Montenegro, Eritrea, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Ghana among other countries to promote action instead of mere rhetoric regarding gender issues among investment banks and institutions.

Gender Action programs:

  • Assess and try to mitigate harmful gendered impacts of structural adjustment loan measures that include public spending cutbacks in the provision of key services like healthcare, the deregulation of prices, lay-offs, and privatization;
  • Analyse Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which are national plans with budgets and do advocacy with local partners to ensure that they promote gender equality and address the feminization of poverty issue;
  • Address the gender dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction, including the rise and prevalence of female-headed households and promote women's representation in governments.

All of these program activities highlight a disturbing trend among investment institutions such as the World Bank: many of their policies, projects, and practices breach their own standards when it comes to gender equality, especially during project implementation while aid is being disbursed.

The question and answer session began with a question about the general government reception Gender Action has received during its tenure. Ms. Zuckerman stressed that as of yet government reception had been mostly positive, but in response to a more pointed question about her dealings with Muslim countries, suggested that as the organization grows, resistance to the organization's gender equality stance might cause resistance in some quarters. She added that initially the Chinese government wasn't particularly fond of Gender Action's recent gender review of China.

Other questions and answers included:

Q: Why are there more NGOs in developed counties than in developing countries?
A: Ms. Zuckerman's response was a bit of a surprise. She responded that if there were a measurable disparity between countries that have an active NGO culture and countries that don't, it was more likely to reflect not a rich/poor divide, but the old Capitalist/Communist divide, for many developing countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Bangladesh have numerous NGOs. Because of government restrictions, the former socialist countries—China, Vietnam, the Balkan countries, among others—have lagged far behind in establishing NGOs.

Q: How is Gender Action different from the All-China Women's Federation?
A: The All-China Women's Federation exists in order to promote women's issues in China, while Gender Action has a very specific focus: to encourage international financial institutions in their funding and investment activities to more equitably promote poverty reduction. This can be done by targeting women who make up 70% of the world's poor.

Q: Does Gender Action work on domestic violence?
A: Gender Action is going to expand in the near future to work more intensely on issues such as domestic violence and trafficking in women.

Through Ms. Zuckerman's talk, students gained a valuable perspective on how a new NGO is built from the ground up and uses a very specific focus, the practice of loan and aid disbursement among international lending institutions, to shine a light on the broader subject of international poverty reduction and gender inequality.