Gender bias as a form of corruption in recourse seeking behavior: lessons from a 31-country cross-national analysis in the Africa region

The role of corruption in subverting gender equality has been extensively examined. Although scholars have largely concluded that corruption negatively impacts women, the specific structural mechanisms that sustain corruption need further examination. The constraints on the economic and political participation of women have two dimensions, the denial of access to resources and institutional recourse. By theorizing corruption as institutionalized gender bias within formal political and economic systems, this chapter analyzes the complex relationships among intersectional structural biases and their direct material impacts. The study uses a mixed methods approach which combines gender inequality and corruption indices with interview data from Nigeria to examine how perceptions of corruption impact decisions to contact officials to address issues they encounter. The chapter concludes that there is an analytical distinction between institutions with embedded gender bias against women seeking goods and services and women seeking remedies from the state, and that limitations in access to resources can be used to empirically count instances of corruption as gender bias.