Hidden Versus Explicit Engagement with Gender Equality: Political Backlash, World Bank, and Gender Equality Policies

There is a growing global backlash against gender equality goals, understood as coordinated political, ideological, and policy efforts that resist or reverse advances in gender rights and inclusion. Within this context, this paper asks: How does this backlash shape the behaviour of global governance institutions? We examine the World Bank and its engagement with gender equality across its development finance portfolio. We construct a large corpus of World Bank documents—including working papers, gender strategies, and project reports—all enriched with project-level metadata on country, sector, and thematic focus. Leveraging a large language model (LLM) for text classification and pattern detection, we demonstrate three key findings. First, the Bank increasingly counterbalances its gender-related work with heightened references to family and social inclusion, mirroring the discursive priorities of conservative actors who favour family-oriented framings over gender equality. Second, we show that the Bank more frequently embeds gender equality within neutral or technocratic categories—such as education, health, labour markets, and financial inclusion—rather than articulating it explicitly as a human rights commitment. Third, our analysis reveals divergent trends across document types: project-level documents display declining emphasis on gender equality in contexts where local political actors oppose such agendas, whereas the Bank’s working papers show a strengthening focus on gender-related themes. Taken together, these findings portray an institution navigating a tension between its organisational identity—which formally endorses gender equality—and the growing political constraints imposed by global and domestic backlash. The analysis contributes to broader debates on the depoliticisation, strategic reframing, and resilience of gender equality within international financial institutions.