New World Bank Report: Women, Business and the Law 2026
The report highlights persistent global gaps in women’s economic rights and enforcement, revealing that legal reforms alone are not enough to ensure equal opportunities in practice.
Summary
The newly released Women, Business and the Law 2026: Benchmarking Laws for Jobs and Inclusive Growth report provides a comprehensive global assessment of how laws and policies shape women’s economic participation across 190 economies.
The findings reveal that, on average, women enjoy less than two-thirds of the legal rights available to men. Strikingly, no economy has yet achieved full legal equality. While legal frameworks have improved over time, a significant gap remains between laws on paper and their actual implementation.
The report introduces a more comprehensive methodology, assessing not only legal frameworks but also supportive systems and the perceived enforcement of laws. While economies score an average of 67 out of 100 for legal frameworks, this drops to 47 for supportive systems and 53 for enforcement, highlighting systemic weaknesses in translating rights into reality.
Key barriers continue to limit women’s full participation in economic life. These include insufficient protection against violence, lack of access to affordable childcare, and limited opportunities for entrepreneurship, particularly due to unequal access to finance. In many countries, institutional systems such as courts and regulatory bodies remain under-resourced, further weakening enforcement.
At the same time, the report emphasizes the economic importance of gender equality. Increasing women’s participation in the workforce can significantly boost productivity, innovation, and long-term growth. In some regions, closing gender gaps could increase GDP by up to 20 percent.
Despite ongoing challenges, progress is visible. Between 2023 and 2025, 68 economies enacted reforms to improve women’s economic opportunities, including measures on equal pay, parental leave, and workplace protections. However, progress remains uneven and too slow to fully unlock the potential of half the global population.
The report concludes with a clear call to action: governments must go beyond reforming discriminatory laws and invest in institutions, policies, and enforcement to ensure that legal equality translates into real opportunities for women. With 1.2 billion young people set to enter the global workforce over the next decade, half of them female, the urgency to act has never been greater.
Read the full report here.