Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
Several economies have laws that treat women differently from men. This study explores the degree of such legal gender disparities across 167 economies around the world. This is achieved by constructing a simple measure of legal gender disparities...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/08/26722425/unequal-before-law-measuring-legal-gender-disparities-across-world http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25048 |
| Summary: | Several economies have laws that treat
women differently from men. This study explores the degree
of such legal gender disparities across 167 economies around
the world. This is achieved by constructing a simple measure
of legal gender disparities to evaluate how countries
perform. The average number of overall legal gender
disparities across 167 economies is 17, ranging from a
minimum of 2 to a maximum of 44. The maximum possible legal
gender disparities is 71. The measure is found to be
correlated with other measures of gender inequality,
implying the measure does capture gender inequality while
also differing from preexisting measures of gender
inequality. A high degree of legal gender disparities is
found to be negatively associated with a wide range of
outcomes, including years of education of women relative to
men, labor force participation rates of women relative to
men, proportion of women top managers, proportion of women
in parliament, percentage of women that borrowed from a
financial institution relative to men, and child mortality
rates. Subcategories within the legal disparities measure
help to uncover specific types of legal disparities across economies. |
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