World Bank makes progress on gender parity, but future remains unclear

The World Bank is being asked to do more to ensure gender parity on its board, which currently only has five female members out of 25. At the World Bank annual meetings this week, a gender working group, set up by the bank’s board in 2017 to improve the gender balance within the board, launched a gender declaration for better female representation at the board level. They want to see a 40%-50% representation of female executive directors and alternate executive directors — members who can act in place of executive directors when necessary — at the board level within the next two election cycles. Board members are elected or appointed by member countries, not the World Bank. The current co-chairs, Nathalie Francken and Olga Fuentes, are both alternative executive directors on the board. Francken and Fuentes sent the declaration to leadership on Friday last week and are currently speaking with governors to encourage them to sign. They will have until the end of the year to do so. The two co-chairs of the group developed the declaration with the hope that gender parity at the board level will encourage gender parity in managerial and senior managerial roles as well. “On the board, we are the upper organ of the bank,” Francken said. “We want to set an example for the organization.” The gender working group’s recommendations address only the board, but the World Bank’s record on gender parity at all staff levels has also been scrutinized. The bank has made strides to improve gender equality within the institution but is still struggling to establish gender parity in its higher ranks, according to research done in 2023 by the Center for Global Development. The CGD study — which collated data from seven international financial institutions — found that at the end of 2023, only a third of all managers at IFIs were women. The bank reached gender parity in administration and professional ranks in 2010, but the higher you go, the smaller the share of women. Between 2012 and 2022, the growth in women’s share of the “feeder” managerial position — the rank just before senior management — slowed, according to CGD research. “At every step, at every promotion, women are sort of being left behind,” said Eeshani Kandpal, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and former senior economist at the World Bank. “And that starts with the very first promotion.” Mixed picture The World Bank has improved hiring practices for women at junior professional grades and it has reached gender parity among its four managing directors at the top. Promotion rates for women from mid-level to senior positions have been slower. The bank’s 2022-2023 report on diversity, equity and inclusion says that promotions at the professional and technical level — one below managerial — are “close to parity.” At the levels below that, women account for more than 50%. The report adds that “promotions for women among Managers and above improved significantly from 2022 to 2023.” When looking at a shorter period, there is progress. A figure from the World Bank report indicates that there was an increase in promotions for women to manager positions between 2022 and 2023, but a slight decrease in the number of women in managerial positions in total. Kandpal said that it’s necessary to take a longer look at the numbers. She found that progress toward gender parity is uneven, with periods of rapid hiring followed by significant backsliding. “There are periods of rapid change that are at the institutional level for whatever reason and that’s when we see very dramatic backsliding on diversity,” Kandpal said. This is also true when factors outside of the institution cause disruption. During the Great Recession in 2008, for example, there was a contraction of the IMF workforce. After the recession, men’s employment rates took about four or five years to recover while women’s roles took nine years. These rapid changes can have lasting impacts on representation in the institution, according to Kandpal. This spells the “uneven growth story” of the bank. “While the World Bank is already at parity in many grades, and we expect to be at parity across all professional grades, if current progress continues, that’s not going to be the case for management or senior management,” Kandpal said. She said that policies need to be put in place to ensure steady progress. While human resources has diversity targets for recruitment, there are no systemic efforts to ensure gender parity among promotions, according to Kandpal. For example, there are no institutional policies requiring gender equality in shortlists for promotions to managerial positions. “The path to parity in leadership positions is very unclear in the World Bank,” she said. Digging deeper Out of 25 individuals on the World Bank board, five are women. The International Monetary Fund has a similar stark division. Out of 24 board members, just three are women. Despite the low proportion, this is an improvement over time. “Since I joined the bank, I’ve seen a positive trend,” said Francken, the alternate executive director in the bank. “But it’s not good enough. We should go to parity.” Francken and Fuentes are hoping that the working group can become a space for individuals to bring complaints about microaggression, find support in dealing with issues related to gender bias, and learn from other women in the organization. “We see that there is an improvement in female representation at middle management and higher management, but there are bottlenecks,” Francken said. “And that is especially at the high level.” They recently conducted a survey to better understand the major issues women are facing, though the results are not public. Based on their mentoring program, they found that some women found it difficult to voice ideas and thoughts in meetings. “In the mentoring that we did, people found that if they had an idea, their boss wouldn’t recognize that it was their idea,” Fuentes said. “Or if they tried to speak in a meeting, the focus would be shifted to someone else. More broadly, we identified some difficulty in the balance between family and work.” So far, they have found that people are not coming to them to complain about these issues, however. “We are fairly new,” Francken said. “So we still have to find our way around. But we would tell anyone, if they notice issues because they are a woman to please come talk to us.”