Gender and Accountability

Abstract

Some developing countries have seen very high numbers of women in national and local government since the 1990s, in some cases in numbers that outstrip those of women in office in the industrialized world. Indeed, so great is the range of experimentation in some young democracies with constitutional and other measures to enhance women’s political participation that these efforts merit study for the lessons they offer to more established democracies. A major preoccupation in the South as in the North is with whether and under what conditions women in representative politics transit from a ‘descriptive’ presence in office to offering a more ‘substantive’ representation of women’s interests as a gender. A disappointing observation almost everywhere has been that women in power — even feminists in power — have not easily been able to translate their numerical presence into a feminist impact on policy-making. Not only are many women in public office not necessarily representative of women’s interests, but even if they are, there are profound institutional obstacles to translating a feminist political ‘voice’ into gender justice in public sector actions. This chapter suggests that this outcome obliges us to scrutinize institutionalized gender biases in accountability systems. Accountability systems are one of the key components of an effective relationship between political ‘voice’ and a satisfactory public sector response.