'Tapping Female Resources': The Gender Equality as Smart Economics Agenda through Human Capital Theory

Girls and women currently occupy highly visible roles in global development: enthusiasm about girl-powering development, the gender equality dividend, and the Girl Effect animate development policy agendas. Girls and women, these narratives assert, are more productive, responsible, and sustainable economic agents for future growth in the context of global financial crisis and therefore their empowerment is economically prudent. How is this discourse translated into policy, and what are its political implications? In this paper, I introduce a feminist critique of human capital, drawing on Foucault’s engagement with human capital from the Birth of Biopolitics lectures. I argue that engagement with human capital demonstrates the gendered underpinnings of the neoliberal subject and explains the multiplication of biopolitical interventions in Gender and Development that aim to produce new entrepreneurial female subjects. Empirically, the paper draws on the World Bank’s Gender Equality as Smart Economics agenda and the emergent partnerships between the Bank and corporations. I demonstrate that women and girls have been re-imagined as dormant human capital which can be activated through a panoply of interventions to produce resilience and growth. In the broader context of feminist debates about the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism, I argue for a Foucauldian account of neoliberalism that side-steps questions about co-optation and places emphasis on a broader range of governing technologies that work through gender.