She Works Hard for the Money, So You Better Treat Her Right (1): A Reflection on the Global Launch of the World Bank Group's Women, Business, & the Law 2026 Flagship Report & the Economic Case for Gender Parity
By: Thando Ntlabati
On the 24th of February 2026, the World Bank Group launched the eleventh edition of its Women, Business and Law (WBL) global study findings, where it assessed the enabling environment for women’s economic opportunity across 190 economies. [The report can be found here, and the full video of the launch can be found here.]
The central finding is that laws on paper struggle to translate to practicable reforms and improved economic outcomes for women globally. The data shows how, even where gender-equal laws exist, women often lack the institutional support needed to exercise their rights under those laws. Poor implementation practices, weakly constructed laws, and fragmented or under-resourced administrative systems pose significant barriers to the meaningful implementation of legal protections, costing countries up to 15-20% of potential economic output. (2)
The report then spotlights critical intervention sites for translating the identified gaps to legally, socially, and economically responsive frameworks, introducing methodological innovations such as the WBL 2.0 index to measure how barriers rooted in human capital gaps, social norms, and legal constraints (3) all limit women’s economic participation and in turn, how addressing these barriers can boost productivity, job creation, and inclusive growth. The webinar discussion highlighted how the WBL Report serves as a diagnostic tool to guide reforms that expand women’s access to entrepreneurial and labour markets and strengthen economic practices.
How Does the Index Work?
The WBL 2.0 Index assesses the above facts against three pillars, namely, Legal Frameworks (de juris rights), Supportive Frameworks (policies and institutions), and Enforcement Perceptions (expert views on how laws function in praxis). Each pillar is assessed across 10 broad categories, each with 4 sub-categories, totaling around 120 rights by which women’s economic position is measured. Country scores are then calculated through an average of these rights out of 100. The first pillar, legal frameworks, measures the degree of equality of rights and explicit restrictions as they relate to women’s work and entrepreneurship. The second, supportive frameworks, examines policies/ programs, institutions, mechanisms for access to justice, and data systems that support the implementation of laws. The third pillar, enforcement perceptions, draws on expert views of how well public authorities enforce each of the laws and rights measured under legal frameworks. For each of the three pillars, 10 key areas are measured, namely, Safety, Mobility, Work, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension (4). Each of these areas is assessed across four sub-indices, which provide data on each topic. This data draws on a far-reaching global network of respondents and is collected through specialized survey questionnaires, which are sent to over 20,000 vetted experts across 190 economies. All submissions are validated against codified laws, official government sources, and standardized protocols to ensure accuracy, comparability, and transparency.
In its awareness of the diverse contexts from which it collects this data, the WBL Report is reflexive in nature, adopting partial scoring for selected indicators to better reflect nuances in legal and policy environments, acknowledge gradual progress, and add new indices to capture emerging policy priorities. Because enforcement perceptions rely on expert judgments that may vary across cultural or professional backgrounds or on account of personal interpretations, WBL 2026 introduces ‘anchoring vignettes’ [context-specific hypothetical questions] to increase the comparability of these perceptions (5). The goal of the vignettes is to harmonize answers from diverse backgrounds, making the enforcement perceptions data more suitable for cross-economy insights.
Where Do Countries Score Currently?
The Report finds that most economies score highest on factors of mobility [freedom to leave the marital home, choose where to live, capacity for domestic and international travel], pay [equal remuneration for labour] and marriage [divorce rights, recognition as heads of household and spousal independence] but lowest on safety [protection from violence against women, including child marriage, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and femicide], entrepreneurship [access to credit/capital and corporate board representation] and childcare [financial support and childcare services] (6).
The global average on the WBL Index sits at 67 out of 100. The score on the supportive frameworks [Pillar 2] index is 47, meaning that fewer than half of the policies, institutions, and mechanisms for access to justice that are needed to help women exercise their rights are in place. Perceptions of uneven enforcement of legal rights [Pillar 3] further compound gaps in implementation, with the global average score being 53 (7). This data suggests that women enjoy only two-thirds of the economic rights typically afforded to men.
What Can We Take from the Data/Discussion?
During the Launch Event discussions, guest speakers elaborated on the three identified critical weak spots that consistently block women’s economic progress. On safety as a foundation, Norman Loayza, Director of the Global Indicators Group, argued that "true equality begins with safety." The report substantiates this, showing that barely one-third of the laws needed to protect women from violence are in place globally. Furthermore, expert perceptions of safety enforcement are the lowest of all topics, reaching only 20% of full potential. On the Crisis of Childcare, Paschal Donohoe, Managing Director of the World Bank Group, highlighted childcare as a major institutional gap, stating that in low-income economies, only 1% of the necessary supportive frameworks for childcare exist. Without affordable, quality childcare, mothers face "impossible trade-offs," often stepping out of the workforce entirely. Finally, On Entrepreneurial Obstacles, Lina Maria Useche Kempf, co-founder of Aliança Empreendedora, emphasized that women need money, more specifically capital, in order to thrive.
Tea Trumbic, Manager of the WBL project, illustrated the value of interventions that respond to these issues through the story of Claudine, a farmer in Rwanda. While Rwanda granted women equal inheritance rights in 1999, it was not until a 2007 land registration program, which mandated the names of both spouses on title deeds, that Claudine could actually use her land as collateral for a loan to invest in her agri-business. The report finds that while the ability to start a business is nearly universal, 91 economies still lack laws prohibiting gender-based discrimination in access to credit, severely limiting women’s ability to grow and scale business ventures. These sentiments underscored the core of the live discussion and WBL Report findings, aptly concluding that "the blueprint is not the house." Where legal equality may exist on paper or is being progressively realized, it requires institutional roads and safe travel, through effective enforcement mechanisms, to be meaningful.
Looking at Reform Momentum and the Bright Side
Despite these barriers, the event celebrated "reform momentum", applauding the adoption of 113 reforms in safety, entrepreneurship, and parenthood across 68 countries between 2023 and 2025. Reform momentum has been both broad and deep, with a number of economies undertaking various legal reforms that strengthen women’s rights and expand their economic opportunities (8). The report findings demonstrate the possibility of legal progress across diverse legal traditions, introducing reform strategies, which include national action plans such as:
- The Rural Land Policy of Niger (2023), which puts a priority on women’s access to land through joint titling, plot allocations for female heads of household, and community sensitization regarding women’s property rights;
- Monitoring agencies like New Zealand’s Centre for Family Violence Prevention;
- Egypt's Labor Law No. 14 (2025), which removed restrictions on women’s work at night and in jobs deemed hazardous, mandated equal remuneration for work of equal value, introduced flexible work arrangements, and expanded parental leave;
- The Federal Republic of Somalia's Labor Code (2025) lifted long-standing restrictions on women’s employment in mining, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, water, and transportation;
- Oman's Social Protection Law and accompanying labour regulations advanced equal opportunity and workplace inclusion; and
- Chile’s Gender Equality in Transport Policy 2023–2026 addressed discrimination and gender-based violence in the nation’s transport systems.
Further interventions like gender-responsive procurement (Ecuador, Ghana, Uzbekistan) and mandatory board quotas (Jordan, Brazil, and EU states) are similarly identified as powerful tools to integrate women into leadership and supply chains (9). During the launch event, Ghana's Deputy Chief of Staff, Hon. Nana Oye Bampoe Addo, detailed various reform ventures being undertaken by Ghana including gender-responsive national procurement practices and financial reforms such as the Women’s Development Bank and 'BizBox' programme, supported by the World Bank Group and Mastercard Foundation, which aims to focus on strengthening the position of women in agri-business by 2027. Additionally, Jordan's Minister of Social Development, Ms. Wafa Saed Bani Mustafa, shared that Jordan has made progress in the last five years through reforms such as mandating equal pay, introducing paternity leave, increasing industrial participation for women by increasing female participation in historically underrepresented fields, and instituting a 20% quota on corporate board composition.
Conclusion
The value of the 2026 edition of the WBL Report lies in its methodological evolution, moving beyond laws on the books to measure the implementation gap between formal rights and real-world outcomes. The data and discussions above go beyond plain identification of the factors and mechanisms affecting (and potentially alleviating) women's economic participation, to embolden a call to a political will to treat gender equality as a primary economic imperative. As part of this call to a political will, many speakers brought a personal dimension to the data, emphasizing the need for intervention models that are intersectional in their responses to implementation difficulties and pathways forward. While the economic case is undeniable, the journey must be rooted in an equality of opportunity predicated on deliberate project design, creative financing, and context-considered reforms. The report further notes women’s leadership as a key driver of economic growth, stating that political participation accelerates the adoption of laws that expand labour participation and entrepreneurship, demonstrating that gender equality in decision-making of this nature benefits economies and societies as a whole (10).
The WBL Index acts as a crucial diagnostic tool for understanding the complex links among law, policy, and labour market outcomes. It allows policymakers to determine where progress stalls and, in making these “broken links” visible, helps countries target reforms and resources where they can have the greatest impact on women’s economic participation.
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1-She Works Hard for the Money (1983) song by Donna Summer.
2-World Bank. (2026). Women, Business and the Law 2026 Report | World Bank. [online] Available at: https://wbl.worldbank.org/en/publications/flagship-report.
3-Women, Business and the Law 2026 Report, page 2.
4-See Annex 2A, page 80.
5-Women, Business and the Law Report 2026, page 32.
6-See Report at page xxviii, Figure ES.5. See further, page 24 and Annex 3B at page 106.
7-See Report at page xxxii, Annex ES.A.
8-See Report at page 84.
9-See Report at pages 89 -92.
10-See Report at page 2.