Women and Public Policy Program Seminar Series

Feminism Triumphant and Tamed: The Politics of Knowledge in Gender and Development with Elisabeth M. Prügl

How can we foster and integrate feminist ideas into development conversations that take place in large international organizations? WAPPP fellow Elisabeth Prügl finds that feminist ideas have triumphed and been tamed at the same time within the World Bank. Prügl analyzes a variety of documents and interviews with gender experts to identify how these contradictory effects have taken place. Speaker: Elisabeth M Prügl, WAPPP Fellow, 2014-2015; Professor of International Relations; Director, Program for Gender and Global Change, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

Closing the Gender Gap: Progress and Policies to Achieve Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship with Monika Queisser

How can we work toward greater gender equality and women’s empowerment in OECD countries and emerging economies around the world? The OECD’s answer is focusing on the 3 “E”s: education, employment and entrepreneurship. Recent public policy initiatives such as the OECD Gender Recommendation and gender work by the G20 forum emphasize the importance of increasing female labor force participation to achieve strong and balanced growth. OECD’s Head of Social Policy Division, Monika Queisser reviews these recommendations and other initiatives in the OECD countries, and disseminates new findings that aim to achieve better representation of women in public sector leadership. Speaker: Monika Queisser, Head of Social Policy Division, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD

Risk in the background: How Men and Women Respond with Alexandra van Geen

Men and women respond differently to risk. Women are more risk averse than men, which has a significant impact on how they make decisions. Exploring this topic, Alexandra van Geen runs a series of experiments to evaluate under what conditions women and men are more or less willing to take risks. Specifically, she examines whether women and men are more likely to take risks when the financial reward is higher; if they are sensitive to the presence of other risks in the decision environment; or whether winning in the past makes them more likely to take risk in the future. She finds stark gender differences, including that men greatly increase risk taking after winning a lottery, while women do not. Investigating how, when and why men and women respond differently in risky environments can help close the gender gap in risk taking.

Rebel Queens and Black Diamonds: Gender Politics in African Armed Groups with Zoe Marks

While there has been an impressive groundswell of attention to sexual and gender-based violence in conflict research and in international advocacy, there has been little systematic analysis of how organizational power structures and local contexts inform the nature and dynamics of such violence. WAPPP Fellow, Zoe Marks, examines the intersecting dynamics of power and gender in armed groups in Africa by using her extensive research conducted on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. Her study analyzes how context and power affect the dynamics of sexual and gender-based violence by looking at when and how women obtain power in armed groups and what their power tells us about the politics of violence. Speaker: Zoe Marks, WAPPP Fellow, 2014; Chancellor's Fellow, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

Women, Business and the Law: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality with Sarah Iqbal

Men and women throughout the world want to provide for their families and ensure their children have a good start in life. Often, the chance to start a business or get a job is the surest way to accomplish this goal. But how can we be sure that women have the same opportunities as men to fulfill their economic potential? The World Bank Group's Women, Business and the Law project presents a unique dataset examining how the law can help or impede women from working and earning an income and what can be done to improve women's economic rights.