Women’s rights have experienced a slow yet steady improvement over the past few decades. According to the CIRI dataset, the most comprehensive human rights dataset available to date, women’s political rights have gradually improved from the worldwide average score of 1.45 in 1981, to 1.62 in 1990, 1.86 in 2000, and 2.01 in 2010.¹ This is on a 0 to 3 point scale, with 0 indicating that women’s political rights are not guaranteed in law and 3 indicating that women’s political rights are guaranteed in law and well enforced in practice. Thus, as of 2010, women’s political rights with the global mean score of 2 are on average guaranteed in law but still moderately prohibited in practice. A similar pattern exists for women’s economic rights – which account for a diverse set of measures including equal pay for equal work, equality in hiring and promotion, right to dangerous jobs including police and military, and freedom from sexual harassment in the workplace – as women’s economic rights have experienced a steady progression, albeit at a much slower pace. The worldwide average score for women’s economic rights in 1981 was 1.19 and it had only improved to 1.42 in 2010.

While the global average scores for women’s political and economic rights have been on a steady rise, there is also a considerable variation in both the level and the pace of improvement. In 1981, out of 132 countries where women’s political rights data is available, 15 countries scored 0, 46 countries scored 1, 68 scored 2, and only 3 scored 3. The topography of women’s political rights looks much different in 2011, when out of 191 countries only 21 scored 1, an overwhelming majority of 140 countries scored 2, and a sizable number of countries, 30, scored 3. As one can expect, some countries experienced a larger improvement than others. Among South American countries, for instance, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina experienced at least two points improvement in women’s political rights between 1981 and 2011, while Brazil, Panama, and Guatemala experienced little progress during the same time period. Similarly, among Asia-Pacific countries, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Thailand have made steady progress towards better women’s political rights, while Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, and Pakistan have experienced little progress and even occasional regress. So why have some countries witnessed a larger improvement in women’s rights in the past three decades while others have stagnated?

In this paper, we focus on the positive economic incentives that foreign countries proffer and specifically explore how official development assistance (ODA or foreign aid) might affect women’s rights in aid recipient countries. Building on recent scholarship on the spread of gender quotas and improvement of women’s rights, we argue that ODA should exert a positive effect on women’s rights. We identify ODA as a bilateral mechanism through which an emerging global norm of gender equality diffuses from donors to aid-receiving developing countries. On average, major aid donor countries maintain higher scores of women’s rights and their aid agencies often openly declare that improving women’s rights in recipient countries is a major goal of their aid programs and projects. We reason that bilateral aid allows major donors with a strong preference of spreading the norm of gender equality to effectively translate their preference into actual policy changes in recipient countries. Bilateral foreign aid does so via three different mechanisms: first, through technical assistance that fosters know-how transfers from donors to recipients; second, through practices of explicit aid conditionality since donors can use policy reforms as a condition for bilateral foreign aid, and thus directly influence a recipient government’s domestic policies toward women’s rights; and third, through collaborative projects between donors’ and recipients’ governmental and nongovernmental agencies that allow for exchanges of local and global norms, which in turn can empower advocates of women’s rights in both donor and recipient countries. These projects also can be specifically tailored to achieve a certain normative policy objective such as improving women’s status. Thus, we expect that ODA in general should have a positive effect on women’s rights improvement in aid receiving countries.

More innovatively, we argue that the effect of ODA on women’s rights improvement is dependent on the level of women’s rights in a donor country’s home: when a donor has better women’s rights at home, the effect of ODA from the country should be more positive than aid from a country with worse women’s rights. This is because the causal mechanisms we specify above should apply especially when a donor country maintains better women’s rights: those countries with better women’s rights will prioritize improving women’s rights in recipient countries as a goal of foreign aid and better utilize the above mechanisms by devising and promoting effective policy measures, scheming better monitoring of implementation, and encouraging collaborative projects.

We systematically evaluate our theoretical argument using statistical analysis. Focusing on women’s political rights that have experienced most progress and are often emphasized by Western donors, we report that foreign aid in general has a positive effect on improving women’s rights, and foreign aid in particular from the Nordic countries and France, the countries with the best women’s rights among major donors, has a more positive effect on the improvement of women’s rights in recipient countries than aid from other major donors, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we briefly review extant research on women’s rights and foreign aid. In Section III, we detail our theoretical argument. In section IV, we run ordered logit models and discuss the results. Section V concludes with our discussion of the policy implications from our findings.

Studies of women’s rights advancement have largely focused on women’s political rights, especially on specific measures such as women’s right to vote, right to join political parties, and right to be represented in national legislative and executive political offices. Existing studies examine both domestic factors and international influence as determining factors of women’s enfranchisement and worldwide diffusion of gender quotas, although the balance seems to favor international influence.

Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan (1997) show that women’s suffrage was acquired through domestic social movements before 1930, but since 1930, international factors have played a more prominent role in spreading women’s suffrage. They also emphasize national independence as a window of opportunity for advocates of women’s suffrage. Moving from the right to vote to the right to be represented in the national political arena, Krook (2006) advances the argument that gender quotas are most effectively diffused by transnational sharing of international norms through international imposition, transnational emulation, international tipping, and international blockage. Regional advocacy networks and INGOs can mobilize and advocate more specific kinds of women’s rights and the United Nations or other international or regional organizations provide a forum for such advocacy (Joachim, 2003; Adams & Kang, 2007). Tripp and Kang (2008) show that countries with gender quotas have higher rates of female legislative representation than those without such quotas. They show that neither democracy nor religion has anything to do with increased female representation, but rather that the level of economic development does. Focusing on international incentives, Bush (2011) explores specific mechanisms through which the global diffusion of quotas for women occurs. She posits that the diffusion can occur through democracy-promoting peace operations by the United Nations, international election monitoring, and bilateral foreign aid.

Focusing more broadly on women’s political, economic, and social rights using the CIRI dataset, scholars have examined the nexuses between globalization and women’s rights on the one hand and between international interventions and women’s rights on the other. Richards and Gelleny (2007) find that economic globalization is linked to improvement of women’s status, although the relationship varies by types of women’s status and by era. Neumayer and De Soysa (2011) explore specific measures of economic globalization, trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and their links to women’s rights, and argue that not only total volume of trade and FDI but also with whom one country trades or from whom it sources its finance affects women’s status. They find that countries who have trade partners with better women’s standing are likely to experience improvement of women’s rights but that the relationship is much weaker for FDI. Investigating the link between foreign policies and women’s rights, Drury and Peksen (2014) show that imposed economic sanctions have a negative impact especially on women’s well-being in sanctioned countries because of their vulnerable social status. Peksen (2012) suggests that the negative effect of foreign security policies can be mitigated by IOs. He shows that while unilateral American military interventions have negative consequences on women’s rights in intervened countries, multilateral interventions operated through IOs have positive effects on women’s rights.

We hope to contribute to the recent development of scholarly inquiries on the relationship between various external factors and women’s rights improvement. Here we focus on the influence of ODA on women’s rights improvement, and thus a brief survey of foreign aid literature is in order. As the foreign aid literature is vast and diverse, we try to focus only on studies from which our theoretical argument is motivated.

Foreign aid is disbursed for many different reasons. A seminal study by Alesina and Dollar (2000) shows that bilateral foreign aid is not only disbursed for economic development, but also for political and strategic reasons. Many European countries, for instance, disburse more foreign aid to former colonies, whereas the United States prefers to give aid to its allies, especially in the Middle East, including Egypt and Israel. Bermeo (2010) chimes in with a similar note, showing that donor countries tend to disburse more aid to those with more sound domestic institutions and strategic ties. Focusing on donor characteristics, Lu and Breuning (2014) demonstrate that better women’s political representation in national offices is associated with a donor state’s increased generosity.

Foreign aid, in part because it is disbursed for many different reasons, affects not only economic growth (Collier, 2006; Bearce & Tirone, 2010), but also state capacity (Goldsmith, 2001), quality of governance (Brautigam & Knack, 2004), and democratization (Dunning, 2004; Wright 2009; Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, 2010; Nielsen & Nielson, 2010; Bermeo, 2011) to name just a few.

Democratization in particular has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Most recent studies tend to avoid sweeping generalizations on the relationship between aid and democratization; rather they often propose conditions under which the relationship is positive. Dunning (2004), for instance, argues that the effect of foreign aid on democratization is positive when a donor’s strategic interest does not interfere and empirically demonstrates that after the Cold War, the effect of foreign aid on democratization has been positive with a decreased strategic interest of the Western donor s.²Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2010) argue that democratization is less likely when a leader with a smaller coalition receives free resources such as foreign aid. Wright (2009) similarly argues that a dictator’s propensity to allow democratization is contingent on his or her coalition size: when his or her coalition size is large enough to make him or her likely to stay in power even after transition, he or she is more likely to allow democratization especially when being incentivized with foreign aid. More recent studies warn of considering strategic selection of recipient countries when evaluating the effects of foreign aid. For instance, Nielsen and Nielson (2010) demonstrate that democracy aid tends to flow to countries that are most likely to make a democratic transition in the first place; thus, after accounting for the selection of recipients, democracy aid is largely ineffective in promoting democracy in recipient countries. Bermeo (2010) is more optimistic about the effect of foreign aid on democratization. What distinguishes her study from other research on the linkage between foreign aid and democratization is that she differentiates between aid from democratic donors and aid from nondemocratic donors and argues that democratic donors use aid to encourage democratic transition. This is a novel approach: donor characteristics play a role; consequently, she shows that the source of aid does indeed matter in that aid from democratic donors has a more positive effect on democratic transition.

While the above literature demonstrates that several factors can influence the level of women’s rights in developing countries, we advance an alternative argument to explain this phenomenon: women’s rights improvement is influenced by bilateral foreign aid. We further contend, building on Bermeo (2010), that women’s rights improvement depends on women’s rights status in the donors from whom the foreign aid originates.

International norms diffuse through many different mechanisms. For instance, norms diffuse through socialization in international organizations (Risse & Sikkink, 1999; Johnston, 2001; Greenhill, 2010). Alternatively, international norms can diffuse through bilateral interactions. Recent studies on diffusion of labor and women’s rights demonstrate that the rights of a country are influenced by its trading partners (Greenhill, Mosley, & Prakash, 2009; Neumayer & De Soysa, 2011). Similarly, it is also surveyed above that the spread of gender quotas and democracy can occur through bilateral foreign aid (Bermeo, 2010; Bush, 2011).

We propose that an emerging and maturing norm of gender equality can be diffused through ODA, similar to the mechanism in play to spread the more specific gender quotas. We posit this based on two propositions: 1) donor countries who already accept the norm of gender equality will attempt to push for a similar progress in recipient countries; and 2) aid can be an effective “conveyor belt” to transfer donor intent to recipients’ policy changes.

With the more accepted norm of gender equality in donor countries, donor countries are more willing to push for women’s rights improvement in aid recipient countries. As we demonstrate below, most of the major aid donors maintain a relatively higher level of women’s political, economic, and social rights, with a probable exception of Japan, and these countries try to export the norm to other countries. Among the top aid donors we include in our analysis, all but Japan list promoting gender equality in political, economic, and social affairs as a key goal for their aid in their international development/aid agencies’ mission statements.

Table 1 displays the historic averages of women’s political and economic rights in major donor countries. As one can see, they are generally much higher than the global averages. The historic global averages of women’s political and economic rights fall around 1.7 for political rights and 1.3 for economic rights. With the exception of Japan, the UK, and the US, all major donors score higher than 2 for political rights and with the exception of Japan, all donor countries surveyed above score higher than 2 for women’s economic rights.

The major donors do not shy away from actively promoting women’s rights overseas. Table 2 summarizes the support of the top donor countries’ aid agencies for women’s political, economic and social rights. This information was obtained from the “mission statements” and “areas of work” sections of the different aid agencies’ websites. The data was coded positively if there was a clear mention of support for women’s rights or a current project for women’s rights; if this was absent, the data was coded negatively.

With the exception of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), all international development agencies of major donors actively advocate support for women’s political, economic, and social rights. The US, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland actively promote all aspects of women’s rights. The UK, Norway, and France do so for all but women’s political rights. In comparison, JICA’s main mission statement does not contain specific objectives regarding women’s rights. We suspect that this lack of emphasis on women’s rights by JICA is not a coincidence. Historical averages of Japanese women’s political and economic rights are 1.97 and 1.13 respectively, far worse than any other major donors included in the analysis; thus Japan tends not to focus overtly on the improvement of women’s rights overseas. A recent study by Brysk and Mehta (2014) confirms our proposition. They find that “more sexually equal countries are more likely to support … international measures to combat gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and more and higher quality development assistance (p.1).’’

Given the establishment of the majority of aid donors’ intention to support the improvement of women’s rights in recipient countries, bilateral foreign aid can be an effective tool for norm diffusion, because aid is not just free or cheap money for recipients. Collier (2006), comparing oil resources and foreign aid, suggests reasons why foreign aid can be more effective in achieving policy changes in a country. Among his four reasons, three are more pertinent here. First, foreign aid often comes in the form of technical assistance as opposed to or in addition to financial assistance to governments. Donors for instance often provide technical assistance to promote institutional reforms, to train bureaucrats, and to assist economic reforms, and thus have a more direct effect on policy outcomes in recipient countries. Second, donors often condition their aid on certain policy reforms, thus providing more incentives for the recipient government to make donor-desired policy changes. Leaving aside democratic accountability of such foreign pressure, this conditional incentive structure allows more effective policy changes in recipient countries, especially when policy changes are internationally accepted, less politically controversial, and less onerous from a recipient country’s perspective. While there are few studies conducted on how effective such conditionality actually is, at least Eichler and Glassman (2008) show that conditionality in performance-based lending is effective in health sector aid. And third, foreign aid often involves collaboration between governmental and non-governmental agencies from both donor and recipient countries for a particular project. These collaborations on donor-funded projects can diffuse due process and encourage the exchange of knowledge – technical knowledge and global norms from a donor to a recipient and local knowledge and norms from a recipient to a donor. It might also carry a positive externality of empowering and transforming civil society in both donor and recipient countries, which can strengthen voices of women’s rights advocates and catalyze more effective project planning and implementation.

Once aid arrives in a recipient country, we posit that indirect and direct mechanisms can make an improvement in women’s rights. First, donor foreign aid can indirectly improve the level of women’s rights by improving infrastructure, social services, and organizations that grant women better access into the economic and political sectors. Aid also can empower civil society and local NGOs in recipient countries that target women’s rights specifically or indirectly through economic development, healthcare, education, and other social services that have an impact on women. Donor-recipient collaborative projects not only empower NGOs in recipient countries but also those in donor countries by endowing more local norms and knowledge necessary to have more effective input on aid projects. In turn, NGOs and civil society in donor countries can have a larger voice, allowing them to channel their demands through their aid agencies in the future. Secondly, donor countries can directly condition foreign aid packages, mandating a specific increase in the level of women’s rights in return for financial compensation. These direct policy conditions can make more immediate and decisive policy changes that will benefit women’s rights in recipient countries.

It is also conceivable that aid might indirectly improve women’s rights in recipient countries via economic development. While the net effect of foreign aid on economic development is still largely debated in empirical studies of effectiveness of foreign aid, it is possible that aid, under certain circumstances, can allow better economic development. This development then can help those who are previously marginalized, most notably women. Thus, aid can also indirectly contribute to the improvement of women’s rights.

In a nutshell, foreign aid, or at least some portion of it, is purposed to promote women’s rights in recipient countries. We show that donors with better women’s rights at home often state explicitly that they want to push for the betterment of women’s rights in recipient countries. We also argue that foreign aid can be an effective tool to realize such a donor’s intentions, as its flows are accompanied by technical assistance, policy conditionality, and collaboration opportunities between governmental and non-governmental agencies in both donor and recipient countries. Based on our argument, we propose the following hypothesis: Women’s Rights Improving Aid Hypothesis: The more foreign aid a country receives, the more likely the country is to improve its women’s rights.

In addition to the Women’s Rights Improving Aid Hypothesis, we further contend that foreign aid from donors with better women’s rights has more positive effects on promoting women’s rights in recipient countries. The causal mechanisms laid out above imply a role for the donor in shaping foreign aid packages. Building on studies that emphasize donors or investment and trade partners’ characteristics on human rights consequences (Greenhill, Mosley, & Prakash, 2009; Bermeo, 2011; Neumayer & De Soysa, 2011), we contend that the effect of foreign aid is dependent on donor characteristics. This aligns with recent literature on gender equality policies in foreign aid: Lu & Breuning (2014) demonstrate that women’s representation in the parliament and cabinet is positively associated with a donor state’s generosity.

Women’s rights have been a growing international norm over the past several decades, similar to that of democratic governance in the post-Cold War period. Many developed countries (of whom many are also major aid donors) have adopted the promotion of women’s rights within their own borders as documented above. However, the extent of women’s rights being protected domestically differs between countries, with some donors immersing themselves more wholeheartedly in the domestic promotion of women’s rights than others. As women’s rights have gained internal and international legitimacy, many of these more developed countries wish to spread this norm to other countries.

Given that Bashevkin (2014) finds that women decision-makers were more likely to express pro-feminist rhetoric, it is plausible to argue that countries that have more wholeheartedly adopted women’s rights at home will be more vocal in their attempt to promote women’s rights abroad. While this can be accomplished through political rhetoric and the exchange of ideas at international conferences, the major way such countries are able to concretely promote women’s rights abroad is through their development aid agencies, because of the mechanisms listed above where foreign aid directly and indirectly affects women’s rights. It is thus reasonable to assume that the aid agencies of countries with higher domestic demand for women’s rights will be both vocal in their promotion of women’s rights abroad, as well as more effective, in that there will be an increase in the levels of women’s rights in recipients. This argument is applicable despite whether foreign aid itself promotes women’s rights directly, or if donors are rewarding countries that take steps towards improving women’s rights. Both of these scenarios reflect a case where donors use limited aid resources to promote women’s rights.

This is in contrast to donor countries that do not have as high of levels of women’s rights domestically. Such countries place less emphasis on the promotion of women’s rights. Because it is not a domestic necessity, these countries will not spend the resources to promote this norm abroad. Consequently, we do not expect to see their aid agencies promote women’s rights nor for the levels of women’s rights in their recipients to increase as much as from donors with higher levels of women’s rights. A donor country will, however, be susceptible to criticisms of applying double standards or being hypocritical when it has mediocre women’s rights itself yet promotes women’s rights abroad.

This leads us to our hypothesis that donor characteristics do matter in determining recipient outcomes: Better Women’s Rights Home to Better Rights Abroad Hypothesis: Foreign aid from donor countries with more equal women’s rights will have a stronger positive effect on the level of recipient’s women’s rights than aid from countries with less equal women’s rights.

Now we turn to statistical analysis to evaluate our hypotheses. To test the relationships between foreign aid and improvement of women’s rights in general and between origins of foreign aid and improvement of women’s rights in particular, we run a series of statistical models and report the results.

This paper supports the hypotheses that ODA can improve women’s rights, and that donor characteristics matter in determining recipient outcomes. There are a number of contributions that this paper makes to existing studies of women’s rights and aid. Most importantly, the present study shows that ODA not only affects specific measures for women’s political rights, such as gender quotas, but also affects a broader set of women’s rights. In addition, the paper disaggregates aid by donor countries and demonstrates that aid from donors with better women’s rights at home exerts a more positive effect on a recipient country’s women’s rights than aid from countries with mediocre women’s rights at home. The study also provides groundwork for future research. For instance, a future research can explore how actual women’s political representation in a donor country or the partisanship of a government might affect aid’s effects on women’s rights improvement of a recipient country.

Normative implications of the research are twofold. On the one hand, women’s rights advocates who believe in the universality of such rights would observe that women’s rights can be successfully diffused through foreign aid and would encourage donor governments to continue to push for such goals. On the other hand, those who are more sensitive to specific cultural and religious circumstances and who emphasize unique cultural contexts within which one evaluates what women are entitled to, would contend that foreign aid is yet another attempt by Western countries to impose its values on aid dependent countries.

Whichever one’s normative take on the conclusion is, there are several policy implications from the research. Most obviously, the current study suggests that in order to make your aid more effective abroad, donor countries need to improve their own women’s rights first. This in particular seems to be applicable to the United States and the United Kingdom, who still maintain only average women’s political rights yet actively promote women’s rights overseas, at least in their rhetoric. Such attempts, however well intended, will not likely work to actually improve women’s rights in recipient countries.