Towards Gender Equality Newsletter Issue #3: Laws and Gender Equality

It is quite stunning to reflect on how just under 80 years ago – and on the eve of independence from British colonial rule in India – the status of women in my home country was remarkably different. Only six percent of women were literate, the average woman was married at age 15, and 2,000 women died for every 100,000 live births. A lot has changed since then. 

To start with, women and men obtained equal voting rights as India started democratic self-governance in 1947. There have been hard-won legal rights, and measurable changes in the economic and social well-being of women since then, in India and the rest of the world. And yet, certain fundamental legal reforms towards gender equality remain politically out of reach. The burgeoning literature on the “mutual interaction of economic and legal changes” (Doepke et al, 2012; Tertilt et al, 2024) showcases the ways in which economic development and legal gender equality interact and evolve. In this issue of our newsletter, we highlight a number of emerging insights on this theme for research and policy consideration. 

Hyland, Djankov & Goldberg [Journal Article]

This paper by EGC Affiliate Professor Penny Goldberg with co-authors Marie Hyland and Simeon Djankov sheds light on legal inequality between women and men with respect to economic opportunity, and how these inequalities have evolved over the past half century. The authors use the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law database to illustrate inequalities between genders on pay, treatment of parenthood, and a range of other variables. In the paper, the authors establish the following stylized facts.

In 2019 the global average Women, Business and the Law (WBL) population-weighted score was 74.4 out of 100 points (75.2 out of 100 using population-unweighted country scores), indicating that women are accorded about three quarters the number of rights as men. There is also significant variation by region in legal gender equality, as illustrated by Figure 1.

There are significant differences in the WBL score between the eight indicators covered. Figure 2 shows that for population-weighted WBL scores, women are most disadvantaged on equal pay laws. Conversely, mobility laws show the lowest level of gender inequality.

As Figure 3 shows, whilst unweighted global WBL score has increased almost 30 percentage points from 46.4 to 75.2 in the five decades leading up to 2019, different regions have progressed at different paces.

Figure 4 illustrates progress on each of the indicators both when reforms are unweighted (panel A) and weighted by population (panel B). The Workplace indicator improved the most, yet the pay indicator still lags behind, despite starting from a relatively low base.

Results from OLS regressions show that the WBL index correlates with real economic outcomes. An increase of one point in the WBL index correlates with a 4.1 percent rise in female labor force participation and a 6.7 percent decrease in the gender wage gap.

In this episode of Voices in Development, Farzana Afridi, a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, and Kanika Mahajan, Associate Professor of Economics at Ashoka University in Sonepat, India, discuss their research collaborations on women and work, the benefits and risks of digital platforms for women in India, and how researchers can influence policy.

In it, she examines the impact of a gender quota that enforced gender parity in candidates and representatives for the election of Chile’s constitutional election. To do this, she randomizes the rollout of a voter information campaign. She finds that voters responded by switching their vote to the gender favored by the quota requirement and reduced their votes for low-competency men. Overall, her findings support the use of electoral mandates that, when well-designed, can increase the average legislator's competence and the extent to which policy-making processes reflect voter preferences.

Antonia is also collaborating with Ceren Baysan, Carlos Molina, and Gamze Zeki on a paper assessing voter preferences for progressive gender equality policies in Turkey. Working with two political parties, they randomize at the neighborhood level two types of door-to-door campaign promises: one on issues related to women (female labor participation and domestic violence) and one on a party-chosen theme. By comparing vote shares among neighborhoods exposed to those two campaigns to a control group that is not exposed to any door-to-door campaign, they assess the return on gender equality campaigning.

See Antonia’s website for more information.

"I choose to focus on female representation because I believe democracies have limited power to represent their citizens' perspectives unless they broaden their representation, including more women in positions of power. Women are underrepresented in politics worldwide, and governments are actively seeking measures to improve their representation. As a researcher, I believe that studying these issues would help us design better public policies and enhance the lives of women, particularly in developing countries." 

- Antonia Paredes-Haz