A press report issued by the World Bank, dated February 02, 2023 has revealed that the global pace of reforms toward equal treatment of women under the law has slumped to a 20-year low, impeding economic growth at a critical time for the global economy.

The World Bank’s Women, Business and Law Index soared by just half a point in 2022 to 77.1 percent, which reflects that women, on average, enjoy barely 77 percent as much legal right as men do. In many countries, a woman entering the workforce today could only gain the same rights as men do only when she retires, at the current pace of reform.

According to Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics,

“At a time when global economic growth is slowing, all countries need to mobilize their full productive capacity to confront the confluence of crises besetting them.

“Governments can’t afford to sideline as much as half of their population. Denying equal rights to women across much of the world is not just unfair to women; it is a barrier to countries’ ability to promote green, resilient, and inclusive development.”
Gill

Women, Business and the Law 2023 is the ninth in a series of annual studies that assesses 190 countries’ laws and regulations in eight areas related to women’s economic participation. These areas are mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions. The data from the assessment conducted, which is current through October 01, 2022 offers objective and measurable benchmarks for global progress toward legal gender equality.

Presently, just 14 countries, all high-income economies, have laws that give women the same rights as men. The assessment also reveals that nearly 2.4 billion women of working age still do not have the same rights as men worldwide.

Meanwhile, as per the release issued by the World Bank, closing the gender employment gap has the tendency of raising long-term GDP per capita by nearly 20% on average across countries. Estimate from studies conducted also shows that women starting and scaling new businesses at the same rate as men do, could yield global economic gains of $5-6 trillion.

wbl 2023 twitter card — World, Business and the Law 2023

“In 2022, only 34 gender-related legal reforms were recorded across 18 countries, the lowest number since 2001. Most reforms focused on increasing paid leave for parents and fathers, removing restrictions to women’s work, and mandating equal pay. It will take another 1,549 reforms to reach substantial legal gender equality everywhere in the areas measured by the report. At the current pace, the report, notes, it would take at least 50 years on average to reach that target.”
World Bank

The latest Women, Business and the Law report provides a comprehensive assessment of global progress towards gender equality in the law over the past 50 years, showing an improvement in the global average Women, Business and the Law score since the year, 1970, by about 2/3, rising to 77.1 from 45.8 points.

Legal gender equality globally witnesses strong gains

The first decade of this century saw strong gains towards legal gender equality. Between 2000 and 2009, over 600 reforms were introduced, with a peak of 73 annual reforms in 2002 and 2008. Since then, reform fatigue seems to have set in—particularly in areas that involve long-established norms, such as the rights of women to inherit and own property. However, new analysis of the data depicts that economies with historically larger legal gender gaps have been catching up, especially since 2000.

4008819 — Legal gender equality globally witnesses strong gains

Currently, the statistics show that equality of economic opportunity for women is highest in OECD high-income economies but important reforms have continued in developing economies with Sub-Saharan Africa making significant progress in 2022.

“The region accounted for over half of all reforms worldwide in 2022, with seven economies: Benin, the Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Malawi, Senegal, and Uganda, enacting 18 positive legal changes.”
World Bank

Despite the great achievements noted over the last five decades, World Bank thinks there is still more to be done in terms of meeting the global needs of women to ensure that good intentions are accompanied by tangible results – equal opportunity under the law for women.