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...

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Main Authors:	Iqbal, Sarah, Islam, Asif, Ramalho, Rita, Sakhonchik, Alena
Format:	Working Paper
Language:	English en_US
Published:	World Bank, Washington, DC 2016
Subjects:	gender inequality legal institutions women entrepreneurs
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

id	okr-10986-25048
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-250482021-04-23T14:04:28Z Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World Iqbal, Sarah Islam, Asif Ramalho, Rita Sakhonchik, Alena gender inequality legal institutions women entrepreneurs 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. 2016-09-12T22:16:46Z 2016-09-12T22:16:46Z 2016-08 Working Paper http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/08/26722425/unequal-before-law-measuring-legal-gender-disparities-across-world http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25048 English en_US Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7803 CC BY 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/ World Bank World Bank, Washington, DC Publications & Research Publications & Research :: Policy Research Working Paper
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	English en_US
topic	gender inequality legal institutions women entrepreneurs
spellingShingle	gender inequality legal institutions women entrepreneurs Iqbal, Sarah Islam, Asif Ramalho, Rita Sakhonchik, Alena Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
relation	Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7803
description	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.
format	Working Paper
author	Iqbal, Sarah Islam, Asif Ramalho, Rita Sakhonchik, Alena
author_facet	Iqbal, Sarah Islam, Asif Ramalho, Rita Sakhonchik, Alena
author_sort	Iqbal, Sarah
title	Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
title_short	Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
title_full	Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
title_fullStr	Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
title_full_unstemmed	Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World
title_sort	unequal before the law : measuring legal gender disparities across the world
publisher	World Bank, Washington, DC
publishDate	2016
url	http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/08/26722425/unequal-before-law-measuring-legal-gender-disparities-across-world http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25048
_version_	1764458232784355328

Unequal before the Law : Measuring Legal Gender Disparities across the World

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