On average, women in the surveyed economies can only enjoy 77 percent of the legal rights that men have, the institution writes in the report ‘Women, Business and the Law 2023’. At the current rate, it will take at least fifty years before women are legally equal to their male counterparts, the conclusion is.
The global pace of reform is at an all-time low, potentially hampering economic growth. “The fact that much of the world does not grant women the same rights as men is not only unfair to women, but it also hinders the ability of these countries to develop in a green, resilient and inclusive way,” said chief economist Indermit. Gill of the World Bank.
In its report, the World Bank studied the laws and regulations of 190 economies in eight different areas. Only in 14 of those 190 economies do women appear to have the same legal rights as men for the measured indicators. In addition to Belgium, this includes Germany, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
Incidentally, our country was the first economy to score 100 on the index in 2010 and is cited in the report as an example of how fast things can sometimes go. According to the researchers, in 1970 Belgium still had one of the lowest scores of all countries that now score 100, but since then our country has made a remarkable progress and the reforms that were supposed to lead to gender equality gained momentum in the late 1990s.
At the back of the list are the Palestinian territories, Yemen and Sudan.