Trickle-down gender at the International Monetary Fund: the contradictions of “femina economica” in global capitalist governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What forms do gender equity arguments take in major international institutions? What broader struggles do these reflect? What contradictions does gender mainstreaming reproduce and what feminist possibilities does it open up? This contribution describes, critiques, and tentatively explains the recent understudied “gender turn” in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the Fund, a major international financial institution. The IMF's concern with gender is late compared to other multilateral institutions, like the United Nations and the World Bank. Nonetheless, since 2013, the IMF has published more than 2,900 documents, videos, and podcasts specifically about women, alerting the public to gender equity matters through a dedicated “Gender and IMF” homepage and through Twitter, via the hashtags #Women4Growth and #IMFGender. In so doing, the IMF draws on existing, economistic “women's empowerment” initiatives by major finance and corporate enterprises, in newly opened policy space following the 2008–09 crisis, under unprecedented feminist leadership at the highest level of the Fund. The IMF's attentiveness to gender, pursued alongside market-led economic efficiency aims, produces a new actor, “femina economica.” This elastic figure is symptomatic of tensions within the organization and of broader contradictions in the current, uncertain moment of the capitalist world political economy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".