ABSTRACT
Indeed, in the forward to Engendering Development, James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank, explains that the World Bank is concerned with two main issue areas with regards to gender and development: (1) Poverty, which perpetuates gender inequalities; and, (2) The extent to which these resultant
gender inequalities undermine or slow down development (Wolfensohn 2001: xi). In his stated goal to promote gender equality in development, Wolfensohn does not question the current neo-liberal conceptualization of development itself nor its presumed “benefits.” The authors of the subsequent preface also assume this stance, and commend the World Bank for taking on the difficult questions of gendered, religious, and cultural norms and moving these issues to the center of the policy dialogue (King and Mason 2001: xiii). They further map out the research methodology of the report, suggesting that it is multidisciplinary (not inter-or transdisciplinary, as is most feminist research), and “rigorous” (read: reliant on econometric studies to the exclusion of qualitative research). Both of these methodological claims, as we shall see below, extend the neoclassical/liberal project of the World Bank.
