Making Gender Known: Assembling Gender Expertise in International Organizations

Abstract

In recent decades, gender equality goals have been adopted widely in global policymaking, creating a demand for specialized knowledge and evidence to support the design and implementation of gender equality policies. Bridging feminist scholarship on gender expertise and practice-theoretical literature on knowledge production, this article examines a knowledge production initiative of the World Bank, the Gender Innovation Laboratories (GILs). While research has examined the position of gender experts and the content of gender expertise in global governance, it has overlooked how knowledge about gender is produced. In this paper, we use a practice-theoretical approach - assemblage thinking - to study the practical work mobilized in the GILs to produce, maintain, and disseminate knowledge about gender inequality. Drawing on interviews with lab researchers, documents, and online materials, and focusing on the epistemic practice of impact evaluations, our analysis demonstrates the work invested in assembling them, such as forging alignments with and securing support among stakeholders, activating repertoires of expertise, and translating results into material objects. These practices produce gender inequality as a governance object, which is amenable to technical policy interventions, which facilitates certain forms of action to address it. Yet, they simultaneously silence more political solutions to gender inequalities.