This paper discusses when and why the World Bank attaches gender-related conditions to its projects in low- and middle-income countries. We start with the puzzle that more gender-equal countries receive more of those conditions and ask why this is the case. We argue that in countries where there is a greater labor force participation of women, women accumulate greater social and human capital. This firstly leads to a greater need for regulation and reducing inequities in the labor market and elsewhere such as access to finance, pensions, and gender mainstreaming in the private and the public sector. Secondly, this creates greater bottom-up demand for gender equality resulting in conditions for greater girls’ access to education, representation in civil service, and measures against gender violence. We also find that the World Bank is more likely to explicitly label its conditions with the theme ‘gender’ when countries are parties to international covenants protecting women and children’s rights. This communicates an interesting pattern in conditionality. The World Bank does not necessarily assign more gender-related conditions in those countries. Rather, it, in non-party countries, labels its gender-related conditions under different theme headings such as labor market policy or financial inclusion. We contribute to the literature by discussing a specific branch of World Bank’s conditionality, with a novel data set on gender-related conditions, and by uncovering a previously undiscussed aspect of international organization conditionality, i.e., ‘conditionality without naming it’.
