More women, less corruption?

DOES increasing the numbers of women involved in the operations of Government and public sector organisations see a simultaneous drop in the levels of corruption in any nation’s public sector? The verdict is still out, according to data contained in the recently released Global Corruption Report 2004. In a section of the Report entitled “Gender and corruption in the public sector,” the hypothesis is advanced that “if men are inherently more corrupt than women, increasing women’s participation in public life would seem likely to reduce the incidence of corruption.” However, information unearthed by researchers Ranjana Mukherjee and Omer Gokcekus suggests that this statement is not as cut and dry as it seems to be.

This information was derived from a survey done of 4,000 public officials in 90 public sector organisations in Guyana, Argentina, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Moldova and Indonesia. The respondents were questioned about their institutional environment, including the severity of corruption and the probability of it being reported. Those responses were then used to calculate corruption indicators for each public organisation and the organisation’s corruption level was checked against the percentage of women it employs.

Mukkherjee and Gokcekus stated: “We found that a statistically significant relation exists between gender and corruption in public sector organisations. The level of corruption declines initially as the percentage of women in an organisation increases, but only if women continue to be in the minority. In other words, having too few or too many women is associated with an increase in the severity of corruption. Rather a balance between women and men appears to minimise corruption in an organisation.”

Their research showed that in the public sectors of Argentina, Bulgaria, Guyana and Indonesia, organisations “with lower-than-average numbers of women had higher levels of corruption than organisations with a higher-than-average proportion of women” while the reverse was true in the public sectors of Bolivia and Moldova. However when all 90 public sector organisations — from all six countries — were pooled, it was discovered that “organisations with lower representations of women had more corruption than organisations with higher representations of women.

The research also said that countries with low proportions of women in the workforce may benefit by increasing the proportion of women in public organisations but in nations were the reverse applies, “recruiting more women might increase corruption in public organisations” Mukherjee and Gokcekus added that “a possible explanation for this conclusion is that corruption levels may have more to do with group dynamics than with gender.” The current PNM Government of Prime Minister Patrick Manning arguably has the largest number of women holding Cabinet posts. Nine of the 28 ministerial portfolios are held by women.