Women, Business and the Law: Creating Economic Opportunity for Women

Women, Business and the Law 2012 presents indicators based on laws and regulations affecting women's prospects as entrepreneurs and employees. It can inform research and policy discussions on how to improve women's economic opportunities and outcomes.
For men and women throughout the developing world, the chance to start and run a business or get a good job is the
surest hope for a way out of poverty. Creating the kind of environment in which this hope can flourish requires effort
in a broad range of areas, from security and infrastructure to education and health. It also requires good business
regulation, suited to the purpose, streamlined and accessible, so that the opportunity to build a business or have
a good job is dependent not on connections, wealth or power, but on an individual’s initiative and ability.
Measuring how regulations and institutions differentiate between women and men in ways that may affect women’s
incentives or capacity to work or to set up and run a business provides a basis for improving regulation. Women,
Business and the Law objectively measures such legal differentiations on the basis of gender in 141 economies
around the world, covering six areas: accessing institutions, using property, getting a job, providing incentives to
work, building credit, and going to court. Within these six areas, we examined 21 legal differentiations for unmarried
women and 24 legal differentiations for married women for a total of 45 gender differences, covering aspects such
as being able to get a job, sign a contract, register a business, open a bank account, own property, work at night or
in all industries, and retire at the same age as men. This is a simplified measure of legal differentiation that does
not capture the full extent of the gender gap, nor does it indicate the relative importance of each aspect covered,
but does provide a basic understanding of the prevalence of gender based legal differences in each economy.
Globally, women represent 49.6% of the total population, but only 40.8% of the total workforce in the formal sector.
Differences in the way men and women are treated under the law may, in part, explain this gap. In fact, the Women,
Business and the Law data show that economies with higher levels of legal differentiation between men and women
have, on average, lower female formal labor force participation— both in absolute terms and relative to men—and
lower levels of women’s entrepreneurship.

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