05.06.2024, 18:00 - 19:30

Women, Business and the Law 2024: Breaking Barriers to Achieve Gender Equality

Women worldwide face significantly more barriers to becoming entrepreneurs or employees compared to men. The latest Women, Business, and the Law report offers a comprehensive picture of the obstacles that women face in 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%. Women, Business and the Law is a World Bank Group project collecting data on the laws and policy mechanisms that measure the enabling environment for women’s economic opportunity. Women, Business and the Law 2024 introduces a new framework with three pillars – legal frameworks, supportive frameworks, and expert opinions – to measure the differences on access to economic opportunities between men and women in 190 economies. Adopting laws that strengthen women’s rights and opportunities is an essential first step toward inclusive, resilient, stronger societies. Equal treatment of women under the law is associated with more women entering and remaining in the labor force and rising to managerial positions. It generates higher wages for women and facilitates business ownership by women. 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. Even in high-income countries with high scores for treating women equally under the law, the implementation of these laws is lacking.

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