A new report by the global development finance institution, the World Bank, has decried the widening gender gap between men and women in the workplace, noting that globally on the average women get 77 cents for every dollar paid to men for work of the same value.
The report, entitled “Women, Business and the Law 2024 (WBL 2024),” employed 10 parameters that include Safety, Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension.
“Although economies have made notable progress over the decades in enacting equal opportunity laws for women, today women enjoy less than two-thirds of the legal rights available to men—not three-quarters as previously estimated. The lower number reflects the major deficiencies revealed once two new indicators were tracked for the first time this year—Safety and Childcare. “Deficiencies in these areas discourage women from entering the global workforce. When these additional indicators are taken into consideration, no country provides equal opportunity for women,” the World Bank stated.
The latest edition of the report, which is the tenth in its series, covered 190 economies across the globe, adding that most economies established less than two-fifths of the system that is required for full implementation.
“For example, 98 of the 190 economies assessed have enacted legislation mandating equal pay for women for work of equal value. Yet only 35—fewer than one in five—have adopted pay transparency measures or enforcement mechanisms to address the pay gap,” the global finance institution noted.
By regions, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed the least gender gap as out of a scale of 100, the region recorded 84.9 scores on the legal frameworks scores. It was followed by Europe and Central Asia with a score of 77 points.
Latin America and the Caribbean scored 69.1 points while East Asia and Pacific scored 57.8 points.
The worst rated regions are sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa with 57.4 points, 45.9 points and 38.6 points, respectively.
On the 10 indicators employed, the highest rated parameter was mobility with a score of 84.7 points. Marriage received 79.2 points; assets, 78.8 points; pension, 74.5 points; pay, 71.6 points; parenthood, 65.4 points; workplace 60 points, and childcare, 47.6 points. Entrepreneurship received 44.2 points while safety got 36.3 points.
“Women have the power to turbocharge the sputtering global economy. 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 percent – 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,” Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, said.
The World Bank noted further that with safety receiving roughly 36 points, it implies that women enjoy just a third of the needed legal protections against domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriage and femicide. The global development finance institution added that although 151 economies have laws in place prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, only 39 countries have laws prohibiting it in public spaces.
On childcare laws, most countries were rated poorly. This is because women spend an average of 2.4 more hours a day on unpaid care work than men.
To address this, the World Bank said access to childcare should be made more robust as expanding access to childcare tends to increase women’s participation in the labour force by about 1 percentage point initially, even as this is likely to double in five years.
“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,” the bank said.
