3.1 Introduction

If this book were a Twitter thread, then this chapter on ‘Advances in Feminizing the WTO’ could simply read: ‘For the first time since its establishment, the WTO is put under the leadership of a woman.’ It might continue: ‘Starting in 2021, all three global institutions responsible for trade are led by women’ (ending with an appropriate emoji 🙋♀).

However, there is much more to be said about the advances (or lack thereof) in work on recognizing the complex linkages between trade and gender, and this deserves a book chapter. This chapter was drafted while the WTO members, the Secretariat, and many interested parties, were readying themselves for the WTO MC12 planned to be held from 30 November to 3 December 2021 in Geneva, Switzerland.Footnote ¹ Twenty-five years ago, during the 1st Ministerial Conference (MC1) held in Singapore, WTO members debated about, inter alia, the rationale for introducing (core) labour standards into the body of the multilateral rules governed by the (then) newly established WTO. While the Ministers dismissed such proposals,Footnote ² the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) report (1996), dedicated to concerns related to the agenda of MC1, included a discussion on the impacts of trade liberalization on women.Footnote ³ In fact, the recommendations were rather broader, encompassing: (a) further study to ensure that liberalization policies did not exacerbate existing gender inequalities; (b) systematic and periodic gender-impact assessments of liberalization policies at the sectoral, national, and international levels; (c) further study of existing gender inequalities on trade and investment policies; (d) enabling policymakers to raise these issues within the context of the WTO and other policy-making institutions; (e) setting up a committee within the WTO to examine all the issues from a gender perspective (and incorporating women’s voices on the setting up of WTO agendas); and (f) commitment of sufficient financing to a global gender equity fund).Footnote ⁴ It is thus only fitting that a quarter-century and eleven ministerial conferences later, the Ministers, once they meet, will have an opportunity to deliberate and finally adopt an ambitious and progressive WTO work programme on Trade for Women. The opportunity that was, after all, missed.

This chapter takes the recommendations by Mikic and Sharma on the steps towards feminizing the WTO and examines if any work associated with these recommendations has indeed occurred and in what form.Footnote ⁵ As a visual aid, the plan and summary of the chapter’s content is given in Table 3.1. The recommendations refer to five areas, each covered in one section of the chapter. Section 3.2 provides an update on the IWG’s work and the engagements of the WTO members contributing to that work (known as the Friends of Gender). Section 3.3, based on the limited information available,Footnote ⁶ gauges how much of the IWG’s work programme has permeated into overall WTO operations as well as into the members’ other approaches to trade liberalization. In other words, it assesses to what degree the ongoing negotiations of trade rules/structural discussions on joint statement initiatives (that is, investment facilitation, e-commerce, and MSMEs) have a gender lens. Section 3.4 offers information on the novel work of the Secretariat (as well as other organizations and partners, and in some cases members), improving the evidence and tools necessary to make informed decisions or to make better impact assessments. Section 3.5 comments briefly on the capacity-building work emerging in the Secretariat based on the announcement of a new strategy for the period from 2021 to 2026. Section 3.6 circles back to the role of women in leading trade and trade policy work through reviewing the advancement of women into leadership and decision-making positions in the WTO Secretariat and among the members’ representatives in the WTO. Section 3.7 concludes.

The first two columns of Table 3.1 were presented by Mikic and Sharma as the pre- and post-feminization reform states of the WTO. The first column – WTO 1.0 – reflects what has been described as a gender-blind trade system that existed when the Buenos Aires declaration was adopted, but not fit to tackle the contemporary challenges to trade, not least because of not providing for women in trade. The second column – WTO 2.0 – describes the attributes of the trade rules system after the ambitious Buenos Aires declaration and other developments. WTO 2.0 by no means indicates that no further advances concerning the feminization of the WTO should be needed or expected. Nevertheless, WTO 2.0 would already be an advanced environment in which women would benefit from trade and contribute to trade policymaking more than at present. The third column of Table 3.1 lists the actions already taken in preparation for MC12, such as drafted and pre-negotiated statements, declarations, and other documents, and the decisions that need to be taken at MC12 to move the work forward.

It is obvious from Table 3.1, and more explicitly discussed by Mikic and Sharma, that the approach to the analysis of trade and gender issues in the context of the WTO needs to look at the organization from two perspectives: (1) as an international organization, and (2) as a set of various trade rules which form a so-called multilateral trading system. Trade and gender discussion related to the WTO as an international organization boils down to the following: (1) implementation of the mandates from the membership (i.e., Declaration on promoting women’s empowerment); (2) delivery of technical assistance/capacity building for its members to improve formulation and implementation of gender-responsive trade policies and market-opening instruments; (3) generation and delivery of data, tools, and analysis relevant for evidence-based policy-making of members; and (4) finally, improving the gender composition of staff in the organization so as to enable the promotion of women into leadership positions (as well as to support members in this regard) and to promote gender equality. Looking at Table 3.1, rows 1, 3, 4, and 5 include initiatives and actions addressing trade and gender issues from the perspective of the WTO as an organization. When looking at the WTO as a set of rules for trade policies, which, in turn, determine how these policies impact women,Footnote ⁷ the focus is on how the gender lens is used when negotiating multilateral and plurilateral trade rules (Table 3.1, row 2).

3.2 Let’s Make It Formal

It was almost three years after the 11th Ministerial Conference (MC11) in 2017 delivered the Buenos Aires Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment calling for greater inclusion of women in trade and trade policy-making that there was any action.Footnote ⁸ Initially supported by 118 members and observers, this number has risen to 127 as of September 2022, which still leaves about one-third of members and observers sitting on the fence, including India, South Africa, and the United States.

It took an initiative by Botswana and Iceland to put together an IWG on Trade and Gender, which was inaugurated in September 2020 in a virtual meeting as per the new pandemic norm.Footnote ⁹ After a meeting in late 2020, the first regular (and again virtual) meeting of the IWG was in February 2021 and it resulted in adoption of the Schedule of Activities in 2021 (January–July) and a Draft Work Plan, which was soon revised into the Final Work Plan.Footnote ¹⁰ The two initial co-chairs were joined by El Salvador in April 2021 and the IWG continued working with the Friends of Gender (comprising nineteen members and observers, four international organizations and the Secretariat) towards a strong delivery for the MC12. Throughout still pandemic-affected 2021, the IWG had six meetings by the end of October, with another scheduled for 24 November. The work of the group evolved around the four pillars stipulated in the Buenos Aires Declaration, and meetings were planned to feature members’ experiences (best practices) in promoting women’s economic empowerment, the most relevant recent research by the Secretariat and its partners, to discuss delivery of the Aid for Trade activities and efforts to clarify the meaning of the ‘gender lens’ and how it applies to the work of the WTO.Footnote ¹¹

After an active year, at the first anniversary meeting in September 2021, the IWG announced the draft MC12 outcome document containing recommendations for WTO members to continue work on increasing women’s participation in international trade. The intention of this document was to convince members to include ‘women’s economic empowerment issues into the regular work of WTO bodies, improve the impact of Aid for Trade on women by mainstreaming gender considerations into programmes and strategies, increase data collection, and coordinate research’.Footnote ¹² Unfortunately, due to the complex geopolitical situation resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this proposal never reached the MC12 Agenda. It was replaced with a rather unambitious ‘[s]tatement on inclusive trade and gender equality from the co-chairs of the Informal Working Group on Trade and Gender – Twelfth WTO Ministerial Conference’.Footnote ¹³ Instead of producing formalized work on Trade and Gender in the WTO and giving a boost to potential conversion from its current plurilateral mode to a multilateral one,Footnote ¹⁴ one paragraph almost at the end of the MC12 Outcome Document referred to, inter alia, work on trade and gender.

Nevertheless, members in the Friends of Gender and the co-chairs of the IWG ought to be commended for their initiative in turning the Buenos Aires Declaration that had lain dormant into an active work plan pre-MC12 as well as on the achievements in the aftermath of the MC12.

3.3 Enforceable (or Any?) Provisions towards Women’s Economic Empowerment

Admittedly, not all WTO members are keen to see the use of a gender perspective when deciding on their trade policies. There is a rich literature on how trade and trade policies may impact women in their roles as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, or taxpayers, from both export and import (import competition) perspectives.Footnote ¹⁵ This literature explains the mechanisms through which trade impacts women’s welfare (well-being) and not only their economic prosperity. It is important that policymakers (including officials in the relevant ministries and parliamentarians) understand these mechanisms as they are most often responsible for providing the negotiating mandate to negotiators who then must follow it in multilateral or other levels of negotiation.Footnote ¹⁶ Not to be forgotten, trade reforms that countries undertake on their own (so-called unilateral policies) often have the strongest impact on economic actors, including women.

As we saw, the proposals and requests to consider a gender lens when setting either trade-restricting or trade-expanding policies date many years back. However, our focus here is to identify if there was any ‘leakage’ from the Buenos Aires Declaration and the establishment of the IWG with its work plan into the texts that members were considering for negotiation and adoption at the MC12. Even a few days before the new date of the MC12, only a limited number of documents were publicly available as most of the negotiating texts were still ‘open for negotiations’. As a default option, a conversation with experts and ‘insiders’ was used to inform (considering confidentiality) on the existing gaps. Furthermore, in December 2021, several documents were released enabling us to check whether or not they remain ‘gender-blind’.Footnote ¹⁷

Table 3.2 combines agenda items of the MC12 (including those that were expected but in the end were dropped for geopolitical reasons) with an assessment of to what extent a gender lens is present.

The content of Table 3.2 does not invoke optimism that the WTO members will be embracing the recommendations on including strong and enforceable women’s economic empowerment provisions in the WTO agreements any time in the near future. There is, of course, a continued risk that any new type of provisions able to impact trade flows might be abused as a new form of protectionism (e.g., green and environmental provisions, labour, health, and, indeed, gender). The danger of using these in a discriminatory fashion is much greater in the absence of any international rules to guide (and constrain as necessary) the behaviour of policymakers.

Furthermore, there is evidence that members have moved on with creative approaches to opening the markets to keep trade and investment going albeit outside the multilateral space. Some pursued these alternative rules (typically regional or bilateral, rarely unilateral), arguing that the multilateral route is not effective. Examples include so-called deep preferential trade agreements or sectoral agreements covering digital trade, known as digital economy partnership agreements (DEPAs).Footnote ¹⁸ Cynics would argue that it was because the non-most-favoured-nation (MFN) route allowed for more selective discrimination.Footnote ¹⁹ Notwithstanding, the same creativity should be used when it comes to promoting women’s economic empowerment through trade agreements. There were some very promising alternative arrangements and agreements that can work easily at the MFN level and can support modernization of the multilateral trade system. These include deep regional trade agreements with separate chapters (provisions) on driving women’s economic empowerment through trade. Examples include most of the recent bilateral FTAs of Canada but also the plurilateral GTAGA, signed initially by New Zealand, Chile, and Canada and now joined by Mexico.Footnote ²⁰ This is not a trade agreement, but a cooperation arrangement where countries can exchange lessons on both domestic policies and trade policies.Footnote ²¹ Readers interested in more details on this topic can refer to several other chapters in this volume which address trade and gender at the level of regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements in more detail than is possible in this chapter.Footnote ²²

3.4 Impact, Impact, Impact

An impact assessment has become an integral process of trade policy-making. No policy change – including trade-restricting/expanding policies at any level – should be passed to an implementation phase without prior scrutiny and ex ante impact assessment. Referencing the European Union’s mandatory ex ante or ex post impact assessment of proposed agreements of grant of preferences, Mikic and Sharma proposed that an ‘efficient strategy for the inclusion of a gender lens approach in trade agreements could be the inclusion of a mandatory impact assessment of proposed agreements wherein if an agreement does not contribute to women’s economic empowerment, it would not pass the “RTA transparency mechanism” review’.Footnote ²³ This will be a step ahead of what the Buenos Aires Declaration proposed in terms of collection and sharing of better quality data, which will be able to be mined for deeper insights into the impacts of trade on women as well as how women may impact trade.Footnote ²⁴

As with some other instances where data availability takes the blame for lack of transparency or weak analytical work, most often an absence of solid gender-impact assessment of trade policy changes is explained by lack of data. As a member-driven institution, the WTO also falls into this mould of waiting for the members to supply data (which potentially might produce results not working in the interest of these members). The only solution is for the Secretariat to dedicate some of its own (very capable) human resources and in partnership with other international institutions, think tanks, and other actors and produce data and analysis necessary for gender-responsive policy-making. The first nudge for the Secretariat to move in this direction came with the Global Financial Crisis and calls for better monitoring of the use of discriminatory trade policies to which the Secretariat responded by producing six-monthly monitoring reports for G20 countries, responsible for the lavish share of global trade.Footnote ²⁵ The COVID-19 pandemic was another strong impetus for the Secretariat to ‘get out there’, collect data, and provide members with evidence on how the pandemic impacted their trade (and more) as well as how the organization of global trade might have been impacting the members’ capacity to respond to the pandemic. The Secretariat has responded to this challenge, and many members have been better informed and their decisions positively affected by the information and research available to all at the dedicated pages on ‘COVID-19’ and ‘Trade’.Footnote ²⁶

Similarly, the Secretariat made progress in terms of collection of data and production of research, helping better policy-making. First, it produced a new Trade Cost Index, which provides more insights into determinants of trade costs and their burden with respect to different income groups and most importantly women and men separately.Footnote ²⁷ This new methodology allows trade costs to be tracked for eighteen years for over forty countries.Footnote ²⁸ Figure 3.1, reproduced from the Secretariat’s note,Footnote ²⁹ shows that women have been burdened with higher trade costs throughout the observation period.

Figure 3.1 Global export cost index by gender.

Source: WTO, ‘WTO Trade Cost Index: Evolution, Incidence and Determinants, Background Note’ (24 March 2021) 5, figure 16.

As indicated in Table 3.1, the Secretariat announced that it will provide another novel database collating all gender-responsive trade policies implemented by WTO members. This database is sourced by information from members’ trade policy reports and independent research produced by the Secretariat and other agencies. It also includes the gender provisions contained in various trade agreements that members have concluded.Footnote ³⁰

In 2021, the WTO launched the WTO Gender Research Hub to enhance collaboration and exchange among researchers and analysts working on the linkages between trade and gender. The Hub will also serve as a platform for dialogue between researchers and the IWG. The main participants in the Hub are the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the UNCTAD, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank Group (WBG), the ITC, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), three holders of the WTO Chairs Programme (Chile, Mexico, and South Africa), and individual academics.Footnote ³¹

3.5 First, Teach a Woman …

The WTO has been providing trade-related technical assistance (TRTA) to its members (and other stakeholders) since its establishment – expanding it from what was available during the era of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Increasingly, the focus of the assistance has moved from negotiation to implementation, building capacity for trade policy-making and transparency. In support of Trade for Women, TRTA will also need revamping. According to the Secretariat’s note on the new training strategy for 2021–2026,Footnote ³² the programme will combine tools to support WTO members, providing them access to concrete solutions for integrating gender into trade policies and for implementation of trade rules with a gender lens. It comprises a multi-pronged approach offering a regular course on trade and gender; training for the delegates in Geneva; online training; and national-level activities upon request.

In addition to the training on trade and gender linkages, which aims for gender-balanced participation, there is a need to enhance the capacity of women as negotiators, policymakers, policy influencers, and traders. As already noted by Mikic and Sharma, additional efforts should be made to close the knowledge gap for women working in trade.Footnote ³³ As was exposed through the pandemic, lack of digital literacy for business (not to mention access to digital infrastructure) has undermined the capacity of millions of women to cope with the pandemic-initiated crisis and caused further social and economic inequalities.Footnote ³⁴ At the same time, the unpreparedness of national regulations to absorb the move to digital trade, online payments, and digitalization in general, made the situation in many developing countries hit by the triple crises of 2020 even worse. A crisis such as the world has been experiencing since January 2020 proves how important it is to have access to physical and natural capital to address external and internal shocks, but also, most importantly, to human capital. If we neglect improving the skills and knowledge of (about) half of human potential, we risk not being able to respond to these challenges. We are talking about 50 per cent of the population on average being women, so we must have at least such a ratio when we create human capital, in trade and in all other fields.

3.6 No More Glass Ceilings for Women in Trade?

There is a rich body of literature on the establishment of the international organization to govern trade, from the drafting of the 1948 Havana Charter to the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement and more which are not the subject matter of this chapter. However, very often – if not always – when Secretariat staff talk about the WTO, they categorize it as ‘the member-driven organization’, implying the existence of (possibly significant) limitations on the independent work of the Secretariat (this has been more recently and intensively discussed in the context of the role of WTO in the pandemic).Footnote ³⁵ While these constraints impact appointments at the highest level of management (as documented by the appointment of the current Director-General), the author of this chapter holds that these constraints do not apply to the recruitment of divisional directors and other staff in the Secretariat.Footnote ³⁶

In the absence of newer gender-differentiated statistics for the whole Secretariat, the comments here pertain to management level only. Naturally, one must start with the historic appointment of Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the first woman Director-General. She then proceeded to make history by appointing two women as Deputy Director-Generals (or 50 per cent) which is a clear break with the past. The improvements with respect to women’s share in the management positions within the Secretariat do not stop here. At present, six out of seventeen divisional directors are women (35.3 per cent).Footnote ³⁷ That is almost double the share Mikic and Sharma reported (18 per cent).Footnote ³⁸

When it comes to the gender composition of the members’ representatives in the WTO, these numbers also show an improvement, although small.Footnote ³⁹ At present, no woman chairs the Council or the Committees. However, 33.3 per cent of chairs of the bodies reporting to the General Council are women; similarly, 33.3 per cent of chairs in the Trade Negotiating Committee are women, 35.7 per cent in the council on Goods, and 50 per cent in the Council on Plurilaterals. Only the Council on Services has no woman engaged as a chair. These chairs come from the forty women ambassadors (24.4 per cent) from the members’ group and four from the WTO observers (16 per cent), which is still a significant underrepresentation of women in the most important global trade governance body.

With the ceiling seemingly being removed, the sky should be the limit. A plethora of initiatives bringing together women working in the area of trade and trade policy-making shows that there is both demand and supply for such self-organized and -driven communities aiming to strengthen women’s role as influencers in the public and private sectors. Women hold an enormous amount of knowledge and skills relevant for making trade contribute to sustainable development and thus women should be actively encouraged to play their role in the trade community.

3.7 Conclusion

We have come a long way since it was acceptable to claim that trade as an economic activity and trade policy as part of economic coordination is gender neutral. It is indisputable that trade policies can (and should) be used to advance the economic and social well-being of women. Women have been, and increasingly will be, directly involved in making critical and path-changing decisions at national, regional, and global levels on how trade could be used to promote sustainable development.

Based on the performance of women in decision-making and leadership positions during the last two years of the pandemic, we should be actively placing women into jobs and roles with responsibilities for tackling current and emerging crises. Not only that, but we should also look more decisively to removing obstacles that prevent women from employing their full potential and contributing to generate prosperity and more just, responsible societies.

In this chapter, we attempted to find out about the progress of the feminization of the WTO, which is our shorthand for the implementation of the Buenos Aires Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment. While 127 WTO members and observers had joined in this Declaration, apparently showing an overwhelming interest in supporting women’s economic empowerment, it still did not convert into a more ambitious self-standing MC12 multilateral declaration. Furthermore, following our review of how much of this support was translated into changes of trade rules to promote women’s economic empowerment and engagement of women in trade, we were not impressed. Among all of the members’ work on new rules or directions for the WTO’s reform, only one (joint initiative on Services Domestic Regulation) includes a reference to gender-responsible trade policy. Despite evidence of the great importance of fisheries, agriculture, and MSMEs for women, the members missed the opportunity to build in adequate promoting provisions. While one must appreciate the existence of some progress (‘WTO is not gender blind anymore’Footnote ⁴⁰), there is no time for complacency. If there is any chance for the disproportionate burden that women have been carrying throughout the pandemic (as in so many other crises) to be shifted and rebalanced, trade policy must become more gender responsible. The time has come to accept that work on women’s equality in trade is the core of the trade agenda.