‘A More Receptive Crowd than Before’: Explaining the World Bank’s Gender Turn in the 2000s

In the mid-2000s, the gender work of the World Bank took a different turn with a new Gender Action Plan. Up until then, gender equality had been on the margins of the World Bank, concentrated around a small number of advocates. This particular articulation of gender took as its tagline ‘gender equality as smart economics’. The Plan attracted three times the original budget of US$24.5 million, and moved gender analysis into new fields of work: labour, work, land and agriculture rather than the more usual areas of health and education. It emerged at a time when gender work was becoming more legitimate in the field of development economics; where World Bank economists were ‘a more receptive crowd than before’. The mid-2000s was also a time when the World Bank was becoming more conscious of its use of media technologies. The article draws on these two elements—economics and the use of media—to suggest the broader environment against which gender agendas take on meaning. Structural shifts in the field of development economics—the dominant discipline at the World Bank—made work on gender more legitimate and credible, and made World Bank staff ‘a more receptive crowd than before’, while the increasing use of media technologies meant the World Bank was conscious of how its work looked to outside audiences. These elements, only loosely related to what we might think of ‘gender’ as a normative agenda, nonetheless, changed what gender meant to many people working within the World Bank

Post poverty, gender and development?

Summaries Poverty reduction lies at the heart of development discourses and practice. Yet it is a notion which is rooted in Enlightenment thought, and increasingly questioned by the intellectual currents which deny universalist ideas of progress and well?being. Similarly, much western feminism also invokes the promise of modernity, and faces postist challenges. This article looks at postmodernist arguements which critique the universalising character of current poverty reduction approaches – Sen's capabilities framework in particular – for what they signify for GAD's own emerging agenda on poverty: gender relationships. It attempts to indicate a way through what can be experienced as a disempowering critique. It does this by bringing together ‘materialist’ and ‘culturalist’ perspectives on poverty in the idea of the embodied subjectivity of women which transcends physical/mental dualism. The article draws on the work of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib towards a more discursively oriented way of thinking about gendered poverty and development. It also argues for the validity of universalist concepts of gender justice, and envisages a role for development intervention

Religion and discrimination in the workplace in Turkey

Discrimination based on grounds such as gender or disability has been widely studied in recent research, but the issue of discrimination on grounds of religion or belief has proven to be far less traceable, less studied and more ideologically charged. In Turkey, a state discourse stating that 99% of the population is comprised of Muslim citizens conceals religious diversity in the country. Our contribution focuses on two main manifestations of discrimination within this framework: discrimination on the basis of wearing a headscarf in (or outside) the workplace and discrimination based on religious affiliation, specifically beliefs other than the majority Sunni-Hanefite Islam, in particular Alevis and non-Muslim minorities. Since there are a number of recent studies dealing with the issue of the headscarf, our primary focus will be on the latter topic. Our findings suggest that in the Turkish case, while the headscarf has dominated the issue of discrimination on religious grounds, a more egregious discrimination takes place against members of belief groups other than the Sunni-Hanefite majority. The issue of discrimination in the Turkish workplace on grounds of religion or belief presents interesting questions and challenges. Firstly, in a non-litigate society, discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation is hard to track and quantify. Secondly, recognition of difference does not always lead to pluralism

Review of explicit family policies in Turkey from a systemic perspective

In the last decade, Turkey has been going through rapid and extensive change in policies, laws and regulations. Most has stirred substantial public debate. Although the constitution Article 41 openly states the importance of government's role in regulating family life, very limited explicit debate around family policy issues are evident. We discuss current day direct family policies and evaluate the status of these policies from a systemic perspective. In so doing, we review the current Turkish Civil Code as well as the Law on the Protection of the Family, the relevant parts of the labor law and the healthcare policy