WOMEN IN POLITICS

Women in Politics

Women in Politics

Thesis Statement

“There is a myth-in-the-making at the moment: women tend to be less corrupt than men, therefore they are good politicians than man.”

Introduction

For international development agencies such as the World Bank, this produces a straightforward efficiency argument to justify the inclusion of women in greater numbers in the public arenas of politics, public administration, and management levels of firms. Efforts to increase women's numbers in public life, justified by feminists as a matter of human rights and democratic justice, are now seen to have an efficiency payoff - more women in power may have the effect of reducing corruption. Lower levels of corruption means more effective public spending - and ideally, poverty reduction. The World Bank and other donors are starting to cite statistical evidence that countries with larger numbers of women in politics and in the work force have lower levels of corruption, though, as we shall see, the causal relationship between numbers of women in the public arena and corrupt activity is not very clear. Women active in politics and civil society are also elaborating on this myth, capitalizing on this image of female integrity by using their gender as a virtually self-explanatory credential for their qualifications to engage in anti-corruption struggles. They are forming women-only anti-corruption fronts, such as the Latin-American Women's Forum Against Corruption based in Argentina.

As this paper will show in the next paragraphs, the notion that women are less corrupt than men, more likely to behave with probity and integrity, is ironically the reverse of a myth that has kept them out of the public realm for centuries. That earlier myth justified women's exclusion from politics and public administration on the grounds that their rootedness in the affective world of the family left them ill-equipped for rational public debate based upon principles of impartiality and universality. Feminist social reformers have often used this method - reversing negative gender myths - to challenge negative assumptions about women's capabilities and to justify policy attention to women. A good example is the way the notion of women as giddy spendthrifts has been replaced, in development thinking, with the icon of the frugal and selfless borrower in micro-finance schemes. But when myths are flipped around like this one has to worry about whether a new injustice is being done to women. Women's supposed propensity for selfless and community-oriented behavior may be the product of a range of factors that are part of their subordination: gender differences in educational endowments, in access to jobs, in control over resources, in access to information, in exposure to the outside world. If the behavioral consequences of gender-based discrimination are so productive for anti-corruption efforts, does this not also imply at some level an endorsement of gender-biased patterns of socialization? Women will be exploited for their supposed virtues - and will likely be eager to justify this new public trust in their probity and will do so by self-exploiting, by eschewing opportunities for making extra and illicit ...