Brace for impact: Social and gender inequality in IMF surveillance

The Bretton Woods Project is publishing a new briefing on IMF surveillance, ahead of discussions on the IMF’s Comprehensive Surveillance Review at the 2025 Annual Meetings in Washington DC.

The briefing uses data from the recently released IMF surveillance scanner, and Article IV reports since the publication of the IMF’s Interim Guidance Note on Mainstreaming Gender in January 2024, to analyse the Fund’s evolving approach to gender.

Findings indicate that the IMF’s core policy direction has remained consistent over a 14-year period and is identical to that previously described as “structural adjustment”, consisting of austerity measures, a shrinking of the state and empowerment of the private and external sector. The data reveals that, while there has been an increase in narratives around social and gender impacts, current policy responses are inadequate and where responses are present, they are hampered by policy incoherence.

Key recommendations:

• The IMF should conduct mandatory ex-ante and ex-post assessments of the distributional, gender and climate impacts of its policy advice.
• Impact assessments should be designed on a ‘best practice’ model including participatory approaches and should be publicly available.
• The results of those assessments should feed into evaluating trade-offs between different macro policy options and alternative pathways in Article IV reports.
• Country-level consultation with local experts, academics, NGOs, parliamentarians and unions should be made mandatory and follow a clear calendar in the process of surveillance.

This briefing has been produced as part of BWP’s Gender Equality and Macroeconomics Project,  whose goal is to challenge the ways in which macroeconomic policies currently promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs), with a focus on the World Bank and the IMF, undermine gender equality and women’s rights.