Most countries have passed laws promoting equal treatment for women. It appeared as though legal protections and rights were bridging the gender gap. But there has been a shocking revelation in the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Index released on 2 March 2023. According to the report “the global pace of improvement towards equal treatment of women under the law has hit a 20-year low,” which “indicates on average that women enjoy barely 77% of the legal rights enjoyed by men” , “said the research. The study says reforms in many countries are moving so slowly that a woman starting a job today would retire before she had the same rights as men.
Gender Equality Act: Where does India stand?
India’s laws have made little progress in addressing potential gender inequalities in the last year, with women in the country having only 74.4% of the rights that men have on various aspects of their freedom at work, according to a recent World Bank assessment . Globally, women have 77.1% more legal rights than men, a slight increase from the 2021 numbers. India got the same grade as no new reforms were implemented.
About 53% of countries, including India, do not have laws prohibiting gender discrimination in credit access. Nonetheless, India has shown significant growth overall, rising from 63.75 index points in 2000 to 74.4 points in 2022. In 2000, the total score was 60.0.
Gender Equal Law: World Bank Report
The report released on Thursday said that while gender laws have come a long way, the pace of new reforms to address gender inequality globally is set to hit a 20-year low in 2022. The report, titled “Women, Business and the Law,” evaluates laws and regulations affecting women’s economic participation in 190 economies based on eight indicators: mobility, workplace, wages, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions. It identifies and advocates for reform of discriminatory laws.
The annual study says that although nearly 2.4 billion women of working age (aged 18 to 64) live in countries that do not give them the same rights as men, more than 90 million women worldwide have worked in the past ten years. has achieved legal equality. ,
The World Bank’s assessment of 190 countries resulted in 34 gender-related reforms or law changes being implemented in 18 of those countries, slightly improving the worldwide average score. According to the report, this was the lowest number since 2001. The analysis states that if things remain as they are, it will take at least 50 years to achieve legal gender equality everywhere.
Most of the new regulations focused on implementing equal pay and legislating more paid leave for fathers and parents. India’s overall score of 74.4 is better than the average for all lower-middle-income economies but lower than the world average.