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

Iqbal, Sarah ; Islam, Asif ; Ramalho, Rita ; Sakhonchik, Alena

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: gender inequality;    legal institutions;    women entrepreneurs;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7803
RP-ID  :  WPS7803

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Several economies have laws that treatwomen differently from men. This study explores the degreeof such legal gender disparities across 167 economies aroundthe world. This is achieved by constructing a simple measureof legal gender disparities to evaluate how countriesperform. The average number of overall legal genderdisparities across 167 economies is 17, ranging from aminimum of 2 to a maximum of 44. The maximum possible legalgender disparities is 71. The measure is found to becorrelated with other measures of gender inequality,implying the measure does capture gender inequality whilealso differing from preexisting measures of genderinequality. A high degree of legal gender disparities isfound to be negatively associated with a wide range ofoutcomes, including years of education of women relative tomen, labor force participation rates of women relative tomen, proportion of women top managers, proportion of womenin parliament, percentage of women that borrowed from afinancial institution relative to men, and child mortalityrates. Subcategories within the legal disparities measurehelp to uncover specific types of legal disparities across economies.