In the early hours of Friday 15 December 2023, the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption, at its tenth session in Atlanta, USA, passed UNCAC Resolution 10/10: ‘Addressing the societal impacts of corruption.’ Its generic-sounding title does not do justice to the watershed moment that it represents: it has been 20 years since the UNCAC was adopted by the UN General Assembly, and this was the first ever CoSP resolution centred on gender and corruption.

As thousands of government representatives, scholars, and activists gathered at the vast Georgia World Congress Centre, the mood was difficult to decipher. After all, the global community has had limited success in combating corruption. We do not have many examples of what actually works to address corruption in its myriad forms, and few countries have managed to improve their standing in the much-publicised Corruption Perceptions Index.

Despite this, those of us working on gender and corruption had come to Atlanta with barely disguised excitement. We gathered in lounges and in the corridors to whisper our hopes: that the resolution would dramatically change the field of anti-corruption. Our sense of gratitude towards Ghana, the country that tabled the resolution, was as deep as our apprehension that the ongoing backlash against gender equality would thwart it and we would leave Atlanta despondent.

The long road to UNCAC-CoSP Resolution 10/10

It is not as if the importance of addressing the gender dimensions of corruption had never been recognised before at the UN level. It was emphasised by the United Nations General Assembly Special Session against corruption (UNGASS) in 2021, which called on Member States to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment by integrating them into legislation, policies, research, projects, and programmes. In the same year, the ninth UNCAC-CoSP also affirmed States Parties’ commitment to understanding the connections between gender and corruption and urged States to mainstream gender considerations in accordance with domestic law (Resolutions 9/1 and 9/2). The importance of gender-sensitive approaches has also been recognised by other bodies such as the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, by the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) and the G20.

UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies have also expressed concern about the impact of corruption on women and other vulnerable groups. In 2021, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, together with the Committees on Enforced Disappearance, Rights of the Child, Prevention of Torture, Migrant Workers and Rights of Persons with Disabilities, passed a joint statement. It included a declaration that ‘Corruption in all its forms disproportionately affects women and undermines their empowerment, leadership and agency on an equal footing with men in political, economic, social and other spheres of public life,’ and urged States to combat corruption as a part of fulfilling their human rights obligations.

It is also important to recognise that the UN has a long history of recognising and promoting women’s rights, which has formed the basis for continuing efforts to mainstream gender equality at the international and national level. The founding document, the 1945 UN Charter, declares: ‘We the peoples… reaffirm faith… in the equal rights of men and women.’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reasserts this commitment, as do the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW; 1979) was the first international treaty dedicated to women’s rights. The list of commitments and declarations goes on, with milestones such as the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action which foregrounded gender mainstreaming as a vehicle for achieving gender equality, all culminating in the 2016 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal 5 of which is dedicated to gender equality.

Figure 1. The UN’s path to recognising gender in anti-corruption

However, the exhortations and commitments over the years have yielded mixed results on gender equality and women’s rights. While several countries and regions have made progress in closing the gender gap on issues such as women’s access to education and women’s participation in decision-making, the overall picture remains bleak. The latest Global Gender Gap Report (2023) confirms that no country has yet achieved full gender parity. Its sobering conclusion is that at current rates, it will take 131 years to reach full parity.

Gender neutrality is gender blindness

One of the reasons why progress towards achieving full gender parity is so slow is that gender mainstreaming as a strategy to advance gender equality has not properly ‘caught on’. For many years, the goal for policymakers and lawmakers – if they even had a goal related to gender – was to create gender-neutral legislation. Yet, women’s rights scholars and activists have persistently pointed out that gender neutrality is in fact, gender blindness. The tendency to pursue gender-neutral laws and policies explains why the UNCAC, adopted in 2003, was utterly gender blind, in total disregard of previous commitments made by the UN in the CEDAW, the 1995 Beijing Declaration, and the Millennium Development Goals.

Sexual corruption highlights corruption’s unequal effects

As time has passed, it has become increasingly evident that experiences and effects of corruption are gendered, that is, they exhibit gender-differentiated patterns. The phenomenon of sexual corruption illustrates this perfectly. Defined as the ‘abuse of entrusted authority to obtain sexual favours,’ it was, until 2019, not covered by corruption surveys or indices. If we don’t even ask about gendered experiences of corruption, we can’t begin to understand or tackle the issue: it is a ‘black box’, an ‘unknown unknown’. And sexual corruption is still not explicitly recognised as a form of corruption in many countries’ anti-corruption laws.

For instance, the Global Corruption Barometer Data for Africa shows that men pay bribes at higher rates than women: 32% of men who had accessed a basic service in the previous year had paid a bribe, compared to 25% of women. But in that same year, a report from Transparency International Zimbabwe found that 45% of women had experienced sexual corruption. This only became known because the survey included specific questions on sexual favours; had the questions focused on monetary bribery alone, the results might have presented a different picture. This shows how applying a gender lens presents a more complete picture of reality that can lead to more appropriate and effective policy measures.

Figure 2. Payment of monetary bribes in Africa

But, when you ask about non-monetary bribes (eg those too poor to pay; sextorion; etc), the scale of women’s victimisation starts to become visible:

Figure 3. Payment of non-monetary bribes

‘The time was right to do what was right’

The famous words uttered by the leading icon of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr., were the fitting conference motto chosen by the host government, the United States of America.

An international instrument aimed at addressing the gender dimensions of corruption may have been long overdue, but in some ways we could say that it came at just the right time. Not only do we now have a growing understanding of the gendered nature and effects of corruption, but also several studies showing that increasing the number of women in decision-making positions can reduce corruption. Even though the causal mechanisms are not fully understood, and it remains a controversial policy proposal, the evidence is quite compelling and this could be the closest thing we have to a ‘silver bullet’.