How a World Bank Index Measures the Impact of Gender Disparities on the Global Economy

The legal gender gap is wider than we previously thought: The latest Women, Business and the Law report has found that women have only two thirds of the legal rights of men. 

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That was the message conveyed by Tea Trumbic, manager at the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project. She was joined by analysts (and SIPA alumnae) Nayantara Vohra MPA ’21 and Alexis Cheney MIA ’22. The team visited SIPA on March 27 for a presentation and Q&A on global gender inequality sponsored by the Institute of Global Politics, the Economic and Political Development concentration, and the Gender and Public Policy specialization, where they presented the findings of the 10th annual WBL report. 

The index — which has been cited by Nobel Prize-winning economists, research institutions, and international organizations such as the United Nations — quantifies the explicit and implicit systemic inequalities faced by women. When the report was first issued in 2010, it investigated 128 economies examining legislation that affirms gender equality in different sectors of government. But it has since evolved into a far more comprehensive metric of inequality spanning 190 economies that takes into account a whole array of legal and supportive frameworks as well as expert opinions.

Considering this refined approach, the 2024 report found that “none of the 190 countries examined has achieved legal gender parity.” Even more jarring is the discovery that women enjoy, across the board, two-thirds the legal rights of men, which is less than previous estimates. Among the least equitable metrics, the WBL report found that child care, entrepreneurship, and safety account for some of the most critical gaps in legislation barring nearly four billion women worldwide from participating in the economy in the same way that is afforded to men, according to Vohra, an analyst for WBL. 

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The implications of the 2024 report are far-reaching, says Vohra, both economically and socially. Based on the data collected, only 62 economies have established quality standards governing child care services, she added. For this reason and others, women in 128 economies “may think twice about going to work while they have children in their care.”

As more women stay home to take care of children, their economic participation is heavily restricted — which results in a quantifiable impact on the global economy, Cheney said. In contrast, “equal treatment of women under the law is associated with larger numbers of women entering and remaining in the labor force and rising to managerial positions [along with] higher wages for women [and] more women owned business,” she added. 

Closing the gender gap in economic participation in OECD countries would “add $7 trillion dollars to the global economy,” according to the WBL report. 

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The WBL report findings are used by World Bank operational projects to advise governments and policymakers across the globe on how to implement legislation to close the gender gap. For example, the World Bank advised Sierra Leone on an economic resurgence program following the country’s post-COVID recession, which included an in-depth diagnosis of legal constraints to women’s economic empowerment and inputs on the draft laws and amendments based on WBL data. As a result of the program, Sierra Leone’s WBL score increased over 20 points from 2023 to 2024 — namely, from 72.5 to 92.5 out of 100. Cheney said this jump to the top quintile from the middle of the fourth quintile demonstrated the actionable impact of WBL’s mission.

This year’s report also found that “18 economies in all regions but South Asia made progress toward legal gender equality by enacting 47 reforms, with Jordan, Togo, Uzbekistan, and Malaysia seeing increases in 10 to 20 percent from the previous year,” according to Vohra. 

Providing a critical lens through which governments can see their own gender inequities, the WBL reports have positively impacted legislation and legal frameworks surrounding women’s economic participation. 

The index has also been used to advance scholarship across the globe on the gender gap. Since publishing its first report, over 300 academic papers have cited the WBL index, including a SIPA Capstone project from this year. The team has documented over 630 positive reforms between 2010 and 2023 across the globe, Cheney told the students. 

Though the index serves as a bleak reminder of the prevalence of economic inequality women face across the globe, it also serves as a yardstick for progress. By using the data to implement solutions as well as to learn from neighboring countries, local communities and governments can be better able to enact reforms to help close the gender gap.

Watch the complete event: