Country: Global
Themes: Strengthening the Business Enabling Environment, Expanding Access to Competitive Contestable Markets, Promoting Technology adoption to raise productivity
Cross Cutting Themes: Gender, Digital
Anticipated Impact Areas: Quality Jobs, Private Investment
The Challange
There is not much data on how Business and Law impact Women’s participation in the economy across various sectors. A C-JET grant was designed to Support the Women, Business and Law (WBL) team to expand its research on the implementation of laws and opinions that can shed light on their effectiveness in practice. The grant also supported the development of new knowledge products to increase the impact of WBL data and analysis.
The Mission
C-JET contributed to the new survey for Women, Business and the Law 2023 and 2024. The data show new countries adopting reforms on equality in business operations and supply chains (e.g., equal employment, equal pay, access to credit and assets, starting and running a business).In FY23, 34 gender related legal reforms were recorded across 18 countries and more than half of the names were in African Countries. As a result of the project’s outcome, Cyprus, Malaysia, Oman, Rwanda, Sierra Leon, and the Slovak Republic mandated or increased paid paternity leave. Togo amended its law to prohibit the dismissal of pregnant women. Azerbaijan, Jordan, Malaysia, Oman, Sierra Leone, and Uzbekistan removed restrictions on women’s work. Sierra Leone and Uzbekistan added provisions mandating equal remuneration for work. Rwanda and Togo prohibited gender-based discrimination in financial services
A knowledge product, Women, Business and the Law 2.0 introduces a new framework for measuring the enabling environment for women’s economic opportunities. For the first time, it goes beyond the measurement of laws—de jure— and examines the existence of frameworks supporting implementation of the law and gauging experts’ opinions on the outcome of the law for women de facto. Following the structure-process-outcome model, Women, Business and the Law 2.0 measures three pillars: legal rights (structure), supportive frameworks (process), and experts’ opinions on the law in practice (outcome). In addition, Women, Business and the Law 2024 introduces two new indicators: Safety, measuring laws and policy instruments addressing violence against women, and Childcare, measuring laws and policies on the availability, affordability, and quality of childcare services. Women, Business and the Law’ s approach helps align different areas of law with the economic decisions that women make at various stages of their careers.