Doing Business with the Ladies: Gender, Legal Reform, and Entrepreneurship in the International Finance Corporation

Since 2007 the World Bank’s gender approach has moved away from the Wolfensohn-era emphasis on gender as central to social development concerns, towards a business case model that involves a far greater role for the private sector in efforts to reduce poverty and achieve gender equity. Using a case study of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and its project, ‘Doing Business’, to promote the ease of doing business across the world, I ask what this new direction entails for the Bank’s gender and development efforts, and examine the new links being forged between gender empowerment and free market reform. The article focuses on three themes in this regard: first, how attention to gender within the ‘Doing Business’ project helps promote labour market deregulation; second, the contested way in which free markets, legal reform, and gender equality are linked together; and third, the regional reconfigurations of Gender and Development (GAD) evident in the project’s report on Women in Africa, wherein women entrepreneurs are celebrated and new networks of GAD specialists are drawn together. Introduction In this article I examine how gender is being discussed in a recent International Finance Corporation (IFC) initiative to promote the ease of doing business across the world. I do this because, as a feminist interested in the Bank, I want to keep up with the on-going changes in the World Bank’s gender approach and understand how gender and development (GAD) initiatives are faring as the institution goes through a process of reform, adjusting its approach to reflect a greater concern with poverty. In this regard, the article takes as a starting point that the Bank has moved beyond its commitment to 1980s roll-back neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002), particularly in relation to its intensified 170 anti-poverty commitments, its support for institutional strengthening measures aimed at facilitating market expansion, and its moves to take gender more seriously. In particular, I suggest here that the approach to poverty reduction and gender that gained prominence within the World Bank under Wolfensohn’s leadership is being reconfigured, in a move that offers new possibilities for, and new constraints on, gender policymakers. More broadly, though, I intend to contribute to ongoing debates about how feminists on the Left can best respond to international development initiatives that promote women’s entrepreneurship and labour market participation as anti-poverty strategies. A variety of feminists have explored the links being made by free market advocates between paid labour and gender emancipation, and many urge critical interrogation of what Judith Squires and Johanna Kantola (2008) call “market feminism,” wherein gender empowerment merges with free market rationales. For example, Drucilla Barker notes the troubling links between certain feminist interests and the interests of global capitalism, cautioning against feminists’ potential complicity in promoting export-led growth strategies reliant on cheap female labour in the name of women’s empowerment (Barker, 2005: 2202). Likewise, Nancy Fraser has explored the “disturbing convergence” (2009: 97) of some feminist ideals with the demands of post-Fordist capitalism, focusing particularly on the way that feminist critique of the family wage has been, perversely, used to help legitimate neoliberal capitalism’s valorization of waged labour and flexible employment. This process is perverse because the feminist critique of the family wage was grounded in a commitment to value unpaid work. However, selectively interpreted, “our critique of the family wage now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and a moral point” (Fraser, 2009: 110) – the empowerment of women via waged work. Feminists from the Left are thus confronted with a general discursive construct of ‘feminism’ that they only partially recognize, a ‘feminism’ “gone rogue” (ibid.: 114) that functions as a generic signifier of the good while potentially shoring up the interests of global capital. This article aims to add to these conversations, by presenting a case study of how gender and labour are understood