Add Women and Stir? The Myths About the Gendered Dimension of Anti-Corruption

Many anti-corruption strategies emphasize a change in governmental structures, often toward a ‘lean government’, yet one more recent alternative instead focuses on the gender diversity of those in power. These types of anti-corruption policy proposals hinge upon the ‘women are less corrupt’ paradigm, prescribing the employment of more women in sensitive, highly corrupt sectors such as policing. Such a strategy rests on two interconnected ideas. The first one is that women will themselves engage less in corruption when they reach positions of power and numerous behavioral experiments present empirical evidence in favor of such effects. The understanding here is that women inherently behave more ethically and “honest” than men and therefore their recruitment into positions of power could result in a decrease in corruption. The second hope is that women’s presence will also help clean up the corruption around them. In a recent study, Transparency International found that women in business, politics and in other key contexts were less likely to engage in corruption. The correlation between the proportion of women in parliament and national levels of corruption is well documented. In our paper we aim to explore major narratives of the gender-mainstreaming strategies of international organizations such as United Nations and Transparency International involved in anti- corruption employing a critical discourse analysis of their reports and policy papers. Here we not only identify and criticize the strategy of women as “political cleaners” but also discuss the non-monetary forms of corruption that highly impact women, which deserve some long-overdue attention. This non- monetary dimension of corruption is particularly exemplified in two instances namely sexual extortion and sexual harassment in the workplace. There have already been a few attempts to accommodate sexual extortion into the corruption definition. After exploring and contextualizing current debates on gender and corruption research, the goal of this paper is to explain and address the myths and narratives about the gendered dimension of corruption, as well as identify possible new avenues of research. One particular aspect we aim to illuminate is whether the gender-mainstreaming strategies at the international level discursively reach the local level or whether they remain only at the headquarter level.