Different Ways of ‘Seeing’ Gender Inside International Organisations: The OECD and ECLAC

As gender equality became a global, albeit contested, norm, international organisations (IOs) in both the Global North and the Global South proclaimed their support, especially for women’s ‘empowerment’ through paid employment. Given women’s continued responsibilities for unpaid domestic work, however, this raised the question of how to deal with the resulting work-family tensions. This paper examines the way the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an IO rooted in the North, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based in an important region of the South, have attempted to grapple with these questions. It addresses two key questions: through which kind of unit does each IO ‘see’ the issue and how does this affect its understanding of what needs to be done? More specifically, I compare two ways the OECD has seen the issue, first through Working Party 6, where femocrats from the member countries played the key role, and then through the eyes of the bureaucrats in its Social Policy Division. I then turn to how ECLAC has come to see the issue, focusing on its Gender Affairs Division, which is staffed by femocrats with strong links to feminist researchers across the region. This comparison sheds light on the way the vantage point through which an organisation views work-family tensions influences how it envisions addressing these tensions.