Wendy McElroy has an interesting editorial on gender feminism and the World Bank’s creeping global tribute apparatus. Writes McElroy:

Two years ago, at the Beijing+5 U.N. Women 2000 Conference, European development agencies threatened to withhold funds from Nicaragua because Max Padilla, head of the Nicaraguan Ministry for the Family, insisted on defining gender by its common meaning of ‘male and female.’

The European agencies defined ‘gender’ as a social construct that included gays and the transgendered. Desperately poor and unable to risk losing foreign aid, Nicaragua fired Padilla.

This was not the first time world agencies had attempted to impose a politically correct gender agenda on a resisting nation, nor was it the last. Recent pronouncements by the World Bank — which lends over $17 billion annually to developing nations — suggest that the U.N.-aligned agency is currently engaged in gender blackmail: The World Bank has declared that ‘gender mainstreaming‘ (the demand for socio-economic and political equality between the genders), is key to ‘poverty reduction.’

According to a January announcement, it will dole out loans and investments to starving nations based on whether they ‘equalize opportunities’ for the genders.

The World Bank vaguely defines correct gender policies and how to implement them in a document entitled ‘Integrating Gender into the World Bank’s Work‘.

Hmm. Sounds fairly reasonable — until you remember that the World Bank is an overbloated bureaucracy riddled with internal corruption and sustained by a driving self-interest not answerable to democratic checks and balances, that is.

Or as McElroy writes:

[…] The World Bank has become the financier of a world government that withholds funds from desperate nations unless they parrot the correct party line. World government is government at its worst: unaccountable, arrogant, unwieldy, and corrupt.

Do you really want the World Bank defining global “gender equality”? Of course you don’t. Me neither.

Definitely worth the read.

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