2017OECD GLOBAL ANTI-CORRUPTION & INTEGRITY FORUM

Abstract: The year 2001 saw the beginning of the controversy linking gender and corruption pushed to the forefront of anti-corruption policy debate: David Dollar, Raymond Fisman, and Roberta Gatti published “Are women really the ‘fairer’ sex? Corruption and women in government” and Anand Swamy, Stephen Knack, Young Lee, and Omar Azfar published “Gender and Corruption.” Both papers established a statistically significant positive correlation between women and corruption levels; the authors validated utilising women as an anti-corruption tool based on their ‘scientificallyproven’ incorruptibility.
This toolkit was created in response to this controversy; it seeks to switch the focus from the question of what women can do to reduce corruption to developing a deeper analysis of how corruption, gender and other dimensions intersect in order to create meaningful and effective policy measures. This toolkit builds upon a white paper “Mapping Controversies: Gender and Corruption,” which used a science, technologies, and society approach. It draws on the findings and research of the white paper: literature and desk research of over 200 scientific and academic publications and interviews with seven experts in the fields of gender studies and corruption.