Women’s Economic Participation and the Impact of Regulatory Barriers
Many countries seek to improve women’s economic participation with the introduction of targeted laws and regulations. The impact of these reforms appears significant, although the supporting evidence is stronger in some areas than others. This insi...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/140781634540887017/Women-s-Economic-Participation-and-the-Impact-of-Regulatory-Barriers http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36511 |
| Summary: | Many countries seek to improve
women’s economic participation with the introduction of
targeted laws and regulations. The impact of these reforms
appears significant, although the supporting evidence is
stronger in some areas than others. This insight paper
considers the impact of legal discrimination and the absence
of protective legislation on women’s economic outcomes,
namely employment and earnings. It also explores the various
pathways or channels through which laws and regulations
affect those outcomes. An understanding of those mechanisms
is important to the effective design and implementation of
gender equal and gender sensitive laws and policies. A
survey of the literature uncovered five key pathways that
individually and in combination can help structure and
improve the understanding of how legal reform impacts
women’s employment and earnings. The available literature
offered more causal evidence in some reform areas, namely
property rights, retirement, and divorce laws, than in
others. Empirical evidence from the remaining areas
(childcare leave policies, occupational segregation, legal
capacity within marriage) still establishes significant and
strong associations, especially in the first area, between
the studied legal reforms and women’s economic outcomes.
Findings reported in the area of legal protections from
violence and discrimination remain limited and inconclusive.
There is a significant gap in the literature in terms of
studies covering certain reforms in developing countries
which undermines the generalizability of the findings. The
paper concludes that although legal reform is not enough to
bring about change, it is a critical first step in
initiating social change and promoting women’s economic
participation and women’s employment in the formal sector. |
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