|A decade ago the World Bank began a study to measure whether countries afforded men and women equal rights. Not the U.S.of A.|
The goal was to “develop a better understanding of how women’s employment and entrepreneurship are affected by legal discrimination.” It highlighted “how women must navigate discriminatory laws and regulations at every point in their careers, limiting their equality of opportunity.” The study did not measure social and cultural factors, or how effectively laws were enforced. In Year One, the bank found that no country guaranteed a woman the same rights as a man.Fast forward 10 years. “Women, Business and the Law 2019” is the bank’s report on the progress countries have made to guarantee legal and economic equality between the sexes. Only six—Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Sweden—scored 100 percent. France saw the biggest improvement for implementing a domestic violence law, providing criminal penalties for workplace sexual harassment and introducing paid parental leave.
The USA is flagrantly violating women’s equal pay laws even in 2019.
Countries in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa averaged a score of 47.37. Saudi Arabia’s overall score of 25.63 was the worst in the world, while Sudan, the UAE, Syria, Qatar and Iran all scored below 35.Top scorers were the UK (97.5), Germany (91.88), and Australia (96.88). The US scored 83.75, placing it outside the global top 50. Overall, the global average was 74.71, which was 4.5 percentage points higher than 10 years ago. Still, the score means that in the average nation, women receive just three-quarters of the legal rights that men do. At that rate of progress, women won’t achieve full equality in the areas studied by the World Bank until 2073, which does real economic disservice to the world’s bottom line. A 2015 report from the McKinsey Global Institute showed that closing the workforce gender gap could add $28 trillion to the global GDP — nearly the size of the US and Chinese
Data from : SALA, Statistical Abstract of latin America and U.S., Vol. 32, 2018