Find the full briefing in English here.

Acceda al contenido en Español aquí.

The objective of this briefing is to stimulate debate and raise critical questions on the latest developments in the IMF’s approach to gender, both between civil society communities and within the IMF itself. It sets the IMF’s latest work against the background of long-standing feminist thinking, with the aim of encouraging the Fund to be ambitious in genuinely and meaningfully ways addressing feminist concerns in its work.

It aims to do so by firstly summarising the IMF’s gender work since 2013 and documenting various civil society responses to that work. It then moves on to laying-out some of the most recent developments, leading to an in-depth dive into new IMF guidance on gender. In doing so this briefing examines the IMF’s macro-criticality standard for gender issues, methodologies for measuring gendered impacts of conventional IMF policy advice, and the IMF’s approach to policy alternatives.

This briefing concludes with an analysis of the wider direction of travel the IMF is heading towards in relation to gender issues and provides the Fund with concrete recommendations to move forward. A central question running throughout the thinking behind this briefing has been, ‘What is the appropriate role of the IMF in creating an enabling macroeconomic environment for women’s rights and gender equality?’ The analysis in this paper builds on BWP’s previous work addressing that question, specifically in Chapter V of its Compendium of feminist macroeconomic critiques of the IMF.

Find the full briefing in English here.

Acceda al contenido en Español aquí.