The latest Women, Business, and the Law report offers a comprehensive picture of the obstacles that women facein entering the global workforce and contributing to greater prosperity—for themselves, their families, and their communities. It expands the scope of its analysis,adding two indicators that can be critical in opening up or restricting women’s options: safety from violence and access to childcare services.When those measures are included, women on average enjoy just 64% of the legal protections that men do—far fewer than the previous estimate of 77%.
The gender gapis even wider in practice. For the first time, Women, Business and the Law assesses the gap between legal reforms and actual outcomes for women in 190 economies.The analysis reveals a shocking implementation gap. Although laws on the books imply that women enjoy roughly two-thirds the rights of men, countries on average have established less than 40% of the systems needed for full implementation.For example, 98 economies have enacted legislation mandating equal pay for women for work of equal value. Yet only 35 economies—fewer than one out of every five—have adopted pay-transparency measures or enforcement mechanisms to address the pay gap.
Effective implementation of equal-opportunity laws depends on an adequate supporting framework, including strong enforcement mechanisms, a system for tracking gender-related pay disparities, and the availability of healthcare services for women who survive violence.
“Women have the power to turbocharge the sputtering global economy,” said Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. “Yet, all over the world, discriminatory laws and practices prevent women from working or starting businesses on an equal footing with men. Closing this gap could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20% – essentially doubling the global growth rate over the next decade—but reforms have slowed to a crawl.WBL 2024 identifies what governments can doto accelerate progress toward gender equality in business and the law.”
The implementation gap highlights how much hard work lies ahead even for countries that have been instituting equal-opportunity laws.Togo, for example, has been a standout among Sub-Saharan economies, enacting laws that give women roughly 77% of the rights available to men—more than any other country in the continent.Yet Togo, so far, has established only 27% of systems necessary for full implementation. This rate is average for Sub-Saharan economies.
In 2023, governments were assertive in advancing three categories of legal equal-opportunity reforms—pay, parental rights, and workplace protections. Still, nearly all countries performed poorly in the two categories being tracked for the first time—access to childcare and women’s safety.
The weakness is greatest in women’s safety—where the global average score is just 36, meaning women enjoy barely a third of the needed legal protections against domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriage and femicide. Although 151 economies have laws in place prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, just 39 have laws prohibiting it in public spaces. This often prevents women from using public transportation to get to work.
Most countries also score poorly for childcare laws. Women spend an average of 2.4 more hours a day on unpaid care work than men—much of it on the care of children. Expanding access to childcare tends to increase women’s participation in the labor force by about 1percentage point initially—and the effect more than doubles within five years. Today, only 78 economies—fewer than half—provide some financial or tax support for parents with young children. Only 62 economies—fewer than a third—have quality standards governing childcare services, without which women might think twice about going to work while they have children in their care.
Source: World Bank
