According to the Business and the Law 2023 report recently published by the World Bank, only 14 countries in the world provide full legal protection for women. So which are these countries?
There are only 14 countries in the world which offer full legal protections to women, according to the report Women, Business and the Law 2023, recently published by the World Bank. Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Sweden as well as Germany and the Netherlands were the nations offering full equal rights for men and women, at least from a legal perspective.
Women, Business and the Law 2023 identifies barriers to women’s economic participation and encourages the reform of discriminatory laws. This year, the study also includes new research, a literature review, and analysis of 53 years of reforms for women’s rights. The indicators build evidence of the critical relationship between legal gender equality and women’s employment and entrepreneurship.
The newcomers: Germany and the Netherlands
Germany and the Netherlands were the newcomers among those rated at 100 points this year. Both countries equalized parental leave entitlements between the sexes. In the case of Germany, the law changes occurred before the past 12 months but the country received a revised score as part of this year’s report, hitting 100 percent equality for the first time.
99 places out of the 190 assessed countries and territories ranked at 80 percent or above, up from 98 in 2022 and 94 in 2021. Saudi Arabia, which came in last as recently as 2019, has improved its score following new laws implemented in the country and now ranks 136th at 71.3 percent. The last place in the 2023 ranking went to the West Bank and Gaza (26.3 percent), ahead of Yemen (26.9 percent), Sudan (29.4 percent) and Qatar (29.4 percent).
The United States ranked at 91.3 percent below countries like Peru and Albania. It lost points because of a lack of laws guaranteeing equal pay and equal pensions in addition to having notoriously bad laws around parental leave.
No progress in Turkey
In 2022, Turkey’s “Women, Business and the Law” score was 82.5, ranking Turkey above 80. Since no legal improvements were made this year, the score for equality between women and men remained at 82.5.
By examining the economic decisions that women make throughout their working lives, as well as the progress made toward gender equality over the last 53 years, Women, Business and the Law continues to make important contributions to research and policy discussions about the state of women’s economic empowerment