No country in the world affords women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, according to a new report from the World Bank, which found the global gender gap was far wider than previously thought.
Closing the gap could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20%, said the report.
For the first time, the bank investigated the impact of childcare and safety policies on women’s participation in the labour market in 190 countries. It found that when these two factors were taken into account, women on average enjoyed just 64% of the legal protections men do, down from the previous estimate of 77%.
Report author Tea Trumbic said childcare and safety issues particularly affected women’s ability to work. Violence could physically prevent them from going to work, and childcare costs could make it prohibitive.
The 10th edition of the women, business and the law report, published on Monday, also for the first time assessed the gap between laws and the policies put in place to implement them. It found countries had, on average, established less than 40% of the systems needed for full implementation.
While 95 countries enacted laws on equal pay, only 35 had measures in place to ensure the pay gap was addressed. Globally, women earned just 77 cents of each dollar earned by a man.
Many sub-Saharan African countries had seen rapid progress in the reform of laws in recent years, said the study, but had the largest gap between legislation and implementation.
Togo had the highest number of laws in sub-Saharan Africa, giving women 77% of the legal rights of men, but had structures in place to implement just a quarter of them.
“We’ve seen a consistent reform effort from several African countries … this year the report really highlights Togo and Sierra Leone that had really big shifts in the last three to four years,” said Trumbic. “But the supportive frameworks are largely lacking. So that’s why the implementation gap is even larger in countries that reformed recently because they’ve raised the standard in their laws, but they don’t have the supportive mechanisms to implement them.”
Addressing the childcare gap would immediately lead to a 1% increase in women’s participation in the labour force. The report said less than half the countries had financial support or tax relief for parents of young children and less than a third had quality standards in place for childcare that could assure parents of their children’s safety.
In 81 countries, a woman’s pension benefits do not account for periods of work absences related to childcare.
The report said that while 151 countries had laws against sexual harassment in the workplace, only 40 had laws that covered abuse in public areas or on public transport, meaning women were not protected on their way to work.
“All over the world, discriminatory laws and practices prevent women from working or starting businesses on an equal footing with men,” said Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank Group. “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.”