The global gender gap for women in the workplace is far wider than previously thought, a groundbreaking new World Bank Group (WB) report shows.
When legal differences involving violence and childcare are taken into account, women enjoy less than two-thirds the rights of men. No country provides equal opportunity for women, not even the wealthiest economies.
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. The gender gap is even wider in practice. For the first time, Women, Business and the Law assess the gap between legal reforms and actualoutcomes for women in 190 economies. The analysis reveals a shocking implementation 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 do to 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. 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.
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.
Women also face significant obstacles in other areas. In the area of entrepreneurship, for example, just one in every five economies mandates gender-sensitive criteria for public procurement processes, meaning women are largely cut out of a $10-trillion-a-year economic opportunity.
In the area of pay, women earn just 77 cents for every USd 1 paid to men. The rights gap extends all the way to retirement. In 62 economies, the ages at which men and women can retire are not the same.
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