How does official development assistance (ODA) affect women\u27s rights in aid-receiving countries? We argue that ODA allows those donor countries who have more respect for women\u27s rights and who have the intention of spreading the norm of gender equality to successfully influence recipient countries, and thus improve women\u27s rights in aid-recipient countries. We argue that this is possible because aid is equipped with technical assistance, donor conditionality, and donor-recipient collaborative projects that can be tailored to address a specific policy objective and that are ripe with opportunities for transfers of technical know-how and synergistic exchanges of local and global norms. We further contend that the effect of foreign aid on the improvement of women\u27s rights is conditional on donors\u27 respect for women\u27s rights at home: foreign aid from countries with more equal women\u27s rights has a stronger positive effect than that from countries with less equal women\u27s rights. We illustrate the plausibility of our theoretical argument in the context of a case of aid projects in Bangladesh and use statistical analysis to test our argument more systematically. We show that aid in general, and aid from France and the Nordic countries - those with better provision of women\u27s rights at home among major aid donors - in particular exert positive effects on improving women\u27s rights in recipient countries from 1981 to 2011, after controlling for political, socio-economic, and regional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR
