ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the Smart Economics approach, embedding it historically in international gender policies, outlining the contours of its propositions together with critiques, and highlighting the way it has been embraced by businesses. It argues that the approach is more than a World Bank gender mainstreaming strategy: instead, it is the ideological component of a hegemonic project to give neoliberalism a feminist face. The approach incorporates feminism into neoliberalism, coopting feminist ideas; but these ideas come to inflect neoliberalism, creating potential openings for feminist agendas. The demand for gender equality has seemed to stand in tension with the Bank’s single-minded focus on economic growth, a tension that the Bank could safely ignore as long as its gender equality policies mostly focused on improving women’s “human capital,” that is, education and health. Smart Economics and womenomics provide the ideological underpinnings of politico-economic project, which is driven by transnational social forces, including corporations and international intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations.
