Women now have only three-quarters of the legal rights that males have. It was less than half in 1970. Our latest endeavor to document how laws have changed from 1970 yielded the Women, Business, and the Law 2020 report. This unique dataset has already aided groundbreaking research, demonstrating that a country's success on the Women, Business and the Law index is linked to more women in the labor force, a reduced salary gap between men and women, and more investments in health and education.
An examination of 1,518 reforms spanning 50 years and 190 economies reveals some intriguing findings. To begin with, tremendous progress has been accomplished globally. Second, change has progressed at different rates in different parts of the country. The OECD high-income and Sub-Saharan Africa areas have made the most progress in terms of reform volume and average WBL index score improvement.
The third noteworthy result is that progress has been uneven throughout the eight legal domains studied by Women, Business, and the Law. The majority of reforms were in the areas of worker protections and regulations affecting working parents. Despite the improvements made, there is still more to be done.
Over the years, the feminist movement has made significant progress. Despite the fact that women have had the right to vote for more than a century, the sad reality is that we still have a long way to go. Despite the fact that the definition of feminism is unarguable—an effort to ensure that every woman and every individual has rights equal to those of a cis white man, regardless of race, religion, gender identification, sexual preference, or anything else—"feminism" continues to be a contentious term.
Women still do not have the same rights as males under the United States Constitution. The United States is not only the only developed country that has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, but it is also the only developed country that has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
