International Organizations and Gender Equality: Why and How are Norms Adopted?

Gender equality is one of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, for which all UN member states made pledges of achieving significant improvement in the next 15 years. This move has increased the momentum of adopting gender equality as a norm among international organizations. Even organizations with limited economic mandate such as IMF have taken steps towards including gender inequality in its reform agenda. What motivates international organizations to adopt certain norms, not just as mere signals of legitimacy but also as reference points for future policy advice? How do they debate internally over norm adoption and how exactly do they proceed with norm promotion? If diffusion is the key determinant of norm adoption, what is the inner working structure of this mechanism? This paper focuses on these questions by choosing gender equality as its central focus in order to test both well-established and new hypotheses. Even though issue salience and interconnections between international organizations play important roles, I argue that norm adoption is also determined by internal dynamics of these organizations. More specifically, preferences and interests of international bureaucrats may affect their individual attitudes towards norms, and ultimately aggregate position of their organizations. To illustrate this point, I compare gender ratios of several international organizations including UN, World Bank, ILO, and IMF over a period of 20 years. I find that decision-making departments with higher ratios of female staff play a crucial role in putting gender equality into that organization’s policy agenda. This, however, is a dynamic process challenged by other, more traditionally defined departments, and therefore is a gradual change. I explore the validity of my findings in the context of IMF's adoption of gender equality as a norm.