Add women and stir? Exploring the gendered dimension of corruption
Add women and stir? Exploring the gendered dimension of corruption
Rrita Ismajli and Miranda Loli
Moving from ‘fairer sex’ arguments to gender equality
Many anti-corruption strategies emphasize a change in governmental structures, often toward a ‘lean government’, yet one more recent alternative instead focuses on the gender diversity of those in power, also considered as the ‘fairer sex theory’. These types of anti-corruption policy proposals hinge upon the ‘women are less corrupt’ paradigm, prescribing the employment of more women in sensitive, highly corrupt sectors such as policing. Such a strategy rests on two interconnected ideas. The first one is that women will engage less in corruption when they reach positions of power and it is not hard to find numerous behavioral experiments which present empirical evidence in favor of such effects. The understanding here is that women inherently behave more ethically than men and therefore their recruitment into positions of power could result in a decrease in corruption. The second hope is that women’s presence will also help clean up the corruption around them. In a recent study, Transparency International found that women in business, politics and in other key contexts were less likely to engage in corruption. In light of this, a new all-female squad of uniformed patrols was set up in Mexico in order to lower levels of corruption and increase women’s public participation. Moreover, as a vulnerable group within most societies, women are disproportionately impacted by corruption and thus the suggestion of projecting them as the solution to this issue appears fitting.
However, we should be wary against the ‘incorruptible women’ myth as the fundamental logic behind gender mainstreaming of anti-corruption. As argued by Goetz, the need to include women in public life is a fulfilment of their basic right to participate fully in society rather than their instrumental use as “political cleansers”. This is reminiscent to some degree of the pro universal suffrage argument employed in the United States in the 19th century saying that women should be allowed to vote because this “would increase the proportion of educated voters”. While this might be true, should it be the legitimation for the political enfranchisement of women? The assumption that gender will directly reduce corruption does not only ignore that gender has a socially constructed character, but also implies that participation of women in powerful positions is contingent on their higher ethical values, which is not very different from saying that voting should be contingent on women’s education level as opposed to being a basic right. Many academics have approached the topic and have taken a slightly different stance upon the matter, offering novel theoretical ideas whilst interrogating the normative assumptions of corruption and gender themselves. Sung’s paper ‘Fairer Sex or Fairer System? Gender and Corruption Revisited’ argues that it is not an increased participation of women in government that causes a decline in corruption, but rather, it is an increase of liberal democracy. Sung further argues that it is ‘the liberal tradition of fairness, pluralism and tolerance that facilitates the entry and permanence of women in key political positions’. In other words, using this notion of women as keener to ‘control’ and ‘refrain’ from corruption goes against many feminist ideas and theories. What seems crucial here is to shift the debate from the ‘fairer sex theory’ to gender inclusion as equal members of society or as Stensöta and Wängnerud put it: it is the “gender equality processes, rather than the exclusionary categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’” that need to be highlighted. As with many other myths, the problem with perpetuating the ‘incorruptible women’ myth is that it only takes one counterexample to disprove, which has inevitable repercussions. If and when women fail to meet the higher standards set upon them, the not so quiet voices of those who oppose women in powerful positions grow louder and reiterate women’s lack of fitness for the job.
Intersectionality matters – and so do non-monetary forms of corruption
An even bigger issue with this essentialist argument is the view of women as a monolith. This is visible not only in the flawed incorporation of gender in reducing corruption, but also when we discuss the impact corruption has on women’s lives. As previously mentioned, there is a disproportionate impact of corruption on women and there are certainly many reasons for this. Partially it is due to the fact that “poverty is not gender neutral” and because women are excluded from networks of trust that high level corruption depends on. It would nevertheless be misguided to leave out the fact that not all women are impacted in the same way. The exclusionary impact of corruption will inevitably be greater for women in lower income conditions and for women of ethnic and racial minorities. Simply put, intersectionality matters.
Furthermore, the non-monetary forms of corruption that highly impact women deserve some long-overdue attention. This non-monetary dimension is particularly exemplified in two examples, namely sexual extortion and sexual harassment in the workplace. There have already been attempts to accommodate sexual extortion into the corruption definition. As Sarah Gitlin notes, a situation in which people are forced into exchanging sexual services with public services they are entitled to, rather than bribes “is neither hypothetical, nor rare”. The International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ) has had a crucial role in coining the term “sextortion” in 2008 and ultimately also co-authoring the very thorough Comparative study of laws to prosecute corruption involving sexual exploitation. In the report they describe a wide-ranging realm of sextortion examples including “government officials granting permits in exchange for sexual favours, to teachers and employers trading good grades and career opportunities for sex with students and employees.” The report does a great job at dismantling the aura of secrecy generally surrounding these issues, which as they note “makes it difficult to discuss, let alone analyse or develop strategies to combat, an abuse you cannot name”. The pushback from including these forms of abuse of entrusted authority for public gain into anti-corruption policies can be summed up through the argument that sexual harassment laws are already in place. However, in their extensive review of laws, the IAWJ points out that relying only on these laws has many limitations, as they are restricted to employment settings and only to civil and administrative penalties. More recently the International Bar Association also formed a working group on sextortion which includes World Bank officials.
The voices arguing for an inclusion of sextortion into the range of abuses of entrusted power for private gain are certainly growing. The inherent danger of instrumentalizing women in key positions as a tool to combat corruption, coupled with the lack of institutional effort to include gendered dimensions (such as sextortion) as part of the fight against corruption, cannot result in more than a kind of ‘add women and stir’ strategy. Instead, it is vital that anti-corruption policies take into account the sexual extortion and sexual harassment component of abuses of entrusted authority in order to create meaningful measures.
Rrita Ismajli is a researcher and policy analyst at Democracy Plus, a local NGO in Kosovo, as a researcher and policy analyst.
Miranda Loli is a PhD candidate at the University of Darmstadt and at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” in Frankfurt.