A new report from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), released last week, has established that women still face legal and regulatory hurdles to fully participating in the economy.
The ‘Women, Business and the Law 2012: Removing Barriers to Economic Inclusion’ report found that, while 36 economies had reduced legal differences between men and women, 103 out of 141 economies studied still imposed legal differences on the basis of gender in at least one of the report’s key indicators.
The report also identified 41 law and regulatory reforms enacted between June 2009 and March 2011 that could enhance women’s economic opportunities.
Globally, women represent 49.6% of the population but only 40.8% of the workforce in the formal sector. Legal differences between men and women may explain this gap. The report showed that economies with greater legal differentiation between men and women had, on average, lower female participation in the formal labour force.
“Competitiveness and productivity have to do with the efficient allocation of resources, including human resources. The economy suffers when half of the world’s population is prevented from fully participating. It is certainly no surprise that the world’s most competitive economies are those where the opportunity gap between women and men is the narrowest,” said World Bank Group global indicators and analysis director Augusto Lopez-Claros.
The report measured issues such as a woman’s ability to sign a contract, travel abroad, manage property and interact with public authorities and the private sector. In all economies, married women faced more legal differentiations than unmarried women.
In 23 economies, married women cannot legally choose where to live, and in 29 they cannot be legally recognised as heads of households.