Are you a woman in a hurry?
“A young woman entering the workforce today will retire before she will be able to gain the same rights as men”, warns the World Bank 2023 Report: Women, Business and the Law.
Women worldwide enjoy only 77% of the legal rights that men do. And it’s an index that is making painful progress: at the current rate it would take another 50 years to reach legal gender equality. Only 14 countries – all high-income economies – have equal laws for men and women.
Progress has come to a standstill, although some developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa have recently adopted meaningful reforms. Almost 2.4 billion women of working age do not enjoy the same rights as men.
Where is the bottleneck? In areas where the norms are long-established, such as the rights of women to inherit and own property.
Beyond the human and legal aspects, it is also an aberration from an economic standpoint: not allowing women to start new businesses at the same rate as men deprives the world of $ 5-6 trillion of economic gains. In the long term, equal participation in economic life would boost GDP per capita by an average of 20%. It’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?
To go further
“Pace of Reform Toward Equal Rights for Women Falls to 20-Year Low”
(World Bank press release, March 2, 2023).
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