The World Bank In Gender

Gender equality is a fundamental human right and essential for a more peaceful, prosperous, and livable world.

• Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are central to addressing the world’s unprecedented intertwined global crises from food insecurity and climate change to conflict, fragility, and violence, to sluggish economic growth.
• Urgent action is needed to address gender-based violence (GBV). One in three women worldwide has experienced violence. Gender-based violence hurts not only the individual survivors, but their families, communities, and entire societies – often across generations, undermining a women’s quality of life, and access to paid work and employment.
• Women’s employment can be a central driver of inclusive growth. Low female labor force participation and occupational segregation lead to inefficiencies and misallocation of talent that, if addressed, would boost incomes, and stimulate growth.  On average across countries, long-run GDP per capita would be almost 20% higher if gender employment gaps were closed.
• Women’s leadership can enhance long-term economic, environmental, and social outcomes, and strengthen institutions.  Research has correlated higher net profit margins for firms and lower CO2 emissions with more women in decision-making roles.

Innovation, finance, and collective action are urgently needed to end gender-based violence, expand and enable economic opportunities, and engage women as leaders.

The World Bank has committed to accelerate gender equality. In 2022, the Bank launched a year-long #AccelerateEquality initiative, to explore progress made and lessons learned over the last 10 years in closing gender gaps and promoting girls’ and women's empowerment. 

A series of thematic policy notes and causal evidence briefs, along with data, research, global knowledge, and lessons from experience informed the draft of a new World Bank Gender Strategy 2024-30.  Formal consultations on the draft Strategy will be held through November 30, 2023.

Last Updated: Sep 27, 2023

Gender equality is an urgent moral and economic imperative. Yet achieving gender equality is uniquely challenging and complex. Gender equality for all people is a fundamental human right and a matter of fairness and justice.

The draft World Bank Gender Strategy 2024–30 puts forward the ambition to accelerate gender equality for a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive future in alignment with the World Bank’s ongoing evolution .

Building on implementation of the World Bank Gender Strategy 2016-23, the new strategy proposes to engage with greater ambition—approaching gender equality for all as essential for global development—and to engage differently.

The WB Gender Strategy 2024-30 strategic objectives include to end gender-based violence, elevate human capital, expand and enable economic opportunities, and engage women as leaders. 

The Strategy is being shaped by extensive and inclusive engagement with public and private sector clients, development partners, civil society, and other key stakeholders through formal consultations, and will be formally launched in 2024. 

A series of thematic policy notes and causal evidence briefs, along with data, research, global knowledge, and lessons from experience are informing the strategy.

Last Updated: Sep 27, 2023

The World Bank’s key corporate targets are on track, while our work aims to heighten attention to gender inequalities and put greater emphasis on impact and results. Three recently published retrospectives feature lessons learned from the World Bank’s work on gender equality:

• Gender Equality in Development: A Ten-Year Retrospective
• Retrospective of IFC’s Implementation of the World Bank Gender Strategy 2016- 2023
• Gender-Based Violence Prevention and Response in World Bank Operations: Taking Stock After a Decade of Engagement (2012-2022)

The World Bank uses a “gender tag” to indicate Bank operations that close gender gaps analysis, design, and indicators for results. There has been a dramatic rise in the share of operations that are gender tagged, from 50% in 2017 to 92% in 2022. This increase in number is matched by increased ambition to take these operations to scale and to tackle the most impactful gender gaps.

Similarly, the IFC uses a “gender flag” to indicate IFC investments and advisory services operations that close gender gaps by conducting an analysis of the gap between women and men the project can contribute to reducing; defining at least one gender-related intervention to reduce the identified gender gap; and including sex-disaggregated indicators to track implementation. IFC operations with a gender lens have risen, with delivery on its 2030 commitments on track. In FY22, all gender-related targets in the IFC Corporate Scorecard and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) were exceeded.

In support of this, the WB curates data through the Gender Data Portal, which is a comprehensive source for the latest sex-disaggregated gender statistics providing open access to over 900 indicators compiled from officially recognized international sources covering demography, education, health, economic activities, assets, leadership, gender-based violence, and more. This Portal allows users of all technical backgrounds to easily access and explore the data through interactive data visualizations and compelling narratives with the goal of influencing policy and decision-making.

Gender Innovation Labs (GILs) in Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia, generate public goods to promote gender equality. GILs conduct impact evaluations of development interventions seeking to generate evidence on how to close gender gaps in human capital, earnings, productivity, assets, voice, and agency. The GIL research supports evidence-based policy making for governments, development organizations, and the private sector to address the underlying causes of gender inequality.

Selected results highlights:

Ending Gender-Based Violence:

• By 2023, the World Bank had increased the percentage of incorporated GBV prevention or response in its operations from 38 in 2012, to 390 in 97 countries. These operations exist in every sector, every region, and at every level of country income.  Tracking just four percent of the 390 operations where financing is clearly specified totaled $680 million in investments.
• In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a $100m GBV Prevention and Response Project aimed to increase participation in GBV prevention programs and to increase utilization of quality, multi-sectoral response services for survivors of GBV. Working through non-governmental and civil society organizations, the project reached 7 million people.

Economic Opportunities

• Zambia: The World Bank is putting more cash directly into the hands of women to help them take control of their economic destinies and that of their families. These cash transfer programs have helped more than 973,000 families, and sent livelihood packages, including, life and business skills training, mentorship, and support through savings groups, to 75,000 women.
• South Asia (SA): WePOWER – The World Bank supports a women’s professional network that aims to close gaps in women's employment in the energy sector and enrollment in STEM education. By 2021, WePOWER completed 1,400+ gender focused activities: STEM awareness sessions, study tours, internships, hiring, technical trainings, and building female-friendly facilities – benefitting more than 28,000 women.

Engage Women as Leaders:

• Panama:  World Bank support to the National Indigenous Peoples Development Plan project has helped increase the participation of indigenous women in decision-making spaces such as the National Council for the Integral Development of Indigenous Peoples (CONDIPI). In 2018 only 8% of CONDIPI participants were indigenous women. In 2023, more than 35% are women, including 12 advisors, reaching 17 indigenous women out of a total of 48 representatives.
• Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (“We-Fi”): has shown the essential role of women entrepreneurs. Since 2018, We-Fi has worked with hundreds of partners in over 60 countries to support women entrepreneurs, catalyzing billions in funding to provide finance and training, and address systemic data & policy gaps.

Last Updated: Sep 27, 2023