Women and Public Policy Program Seminar Series

Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity with Jeni Klugman

The constraints facing women and girls worldwide range from epidemic levels of gender-based violence to biased laws and norms that prevent them from owning property, working, and making decisions about their own lives. The World Bank’s new book, “Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity,” documents major gender gaps and reviews promising policies and interventions. Underlining that women's agency–their ability to make decisions and act on them independently–has concrete as well as intrinsic value, WAPPP Fellow Jeni Klugman highlights new interventions from around the world that are used to empower women and girls, in conjunction with United Nations post-2015 global development agenda.

Gender and Ethnicity in Parliamentary Representation with Liza Mügge

How does race and gender intersect in a European context and play out in parliamentary representation? While under-representation of both women and ethnic minorities has received considerable attention, European research traditionally has treated women and ethnic minorities as internally homogeneous and conceptually separate groups. Inspired by research on political representation in the U.S., Liza Mügge investigates parliamentary inclusion and exclusion based on the interactions of gender and ethnicity in the Netherlands. By conducting interviews with ethnic minority members of parliaments and analyzing national policy agendas, Mügge examines how institutional and contextual factors, such as backlash against multiculturalism and feminism, affect political representation in the Netherlands. Speaker: Liza Mügge, WAPPP Fellow, 2014-2015; Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam

Paying the Price for Sugar and Spice: How Girls and Women are Kept out of Mathematics and Science with Jo Boaler

In STEM subjects at school girls achieve at the same levels as boys, or higher, but their participation in these important subjects declines as soon as they are able to make choices between subjects. Jo Boaler examines the reasons that girls and women don’t choose to take these subjects by highlighting the inequities in the education system. Boaler finds that a girl's mindset, combined with inequitable teaching of mathematics and science in schools, can affect their decisions to pursue STEM subjects. Speaker: Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education, Stanford University; Co-Founder of Youcubed

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.

Are Two Heads Always Better Than One? Stereotyping of Minority Duos in Work Groups with Denise Lewin Loyd

Is two better than one (or three)? In this seminar, Loyd explores the dynamics of groups with minority duos (such as two women in a group of men). Though many believe that it is worse to be the “only one” in a group, this work finds that men evaluate women more stereotypically when they are in a duo than when there are one or three in a group. In fact, women in duos are rated as contributing less leadership and having fewer skills. In three experimental studies, Loyd looks at how being part of a minority duo can present significant challenges for women.

The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense: Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality in Organizations with Robin Ely

Why has women’s professional advancement stalled? A widely accepted explanation is that women’s family obligations conflict with long hours of jobs, hampering their advancement into senior organizational positions. The commonly championed solution has been policies offering flexible work arrangements designed to mitigate such conflict. Yet research shows that men, too, experience work-family conflict. Moreover, work-family policies do little to help women or men’s workplace advancement, and in fact, often hurt them. In this presentation, Ely draws from her in depth case study of a global professional service firm to ask why the belief that work-family conflict lies at the heart of women’s stalled advancement persists. She explores how this popular narrative self-perpetuates despite evidence to the contrary, and how organizations use this narrative as an explanation for women's blocked mobility partly because it diverts attention from the broader problem of a long-hours work culture among professionals. Speaker: Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Harvard Business School