According to the recently published report on women, business and the law, only 14 countries in the world offer full legal protections to women. The list of these 14 nations does not include the United States.
The countries which offer full legal protection to women are – Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Strictly from a legal perspective, two more countries are included – Germany and the Netherlands.
This research provides the first comprehensive assessment of annual data gathered over more than five decades—from 1970 through 2022.
The key findings include the following –
- Today, nearly 2.4 billion working-age women live in economies that do not grant them the same rights as men.
- Globally, on average, women enjoy only 77 percent of the legal rights that men do; and nearly 2.4 billion women of working age around the world live in economies that do not grant them the same rights as men.
- In 2022, the global pace of reforms toward equal treatment of women under the law has slumped to a 20-year low.
- At the current pace of reform, it would take at least 50 years to approach legal gender equality everywhere.
- In 2022, only 34 gender-related legal reforms were recorded across 18 economies—the lowest number since 2001.
The United States has a score of 91.3%, because of its lag with implementing equal pay and parental leave pay.
