“She can get property, but she can’t own property,” a Liberian man recently told a focus group organized by the World Bank Group. “If her brother gives her a cow, it is hers. But before she sells it to someone else, she must consult the man — a brother or husband — and the man must agree. Even the woman herself is your property.”
Sadly, such views and practices aren’t uncommon. Our recent “Gender at Work” report documents a host of constraints — from biased social norms to outright legal discrimination — holding back women’s economic potential.
Among the results? Globally, women's workforce participation has fallen over the past two decades, and those who work remain stuck in occupations that are less lucrative, and with worse prospects.
This denial of opportunity is bad for women and their families, and for economies writ large. It puts a brake on efforts to tackle poverty and — by definition — means that prosperity is not being fully shared.
Here’s the good news: Evidence is accumulating about the policies and interventions that can work to turn things around.
Where do we stand?
The data show that by virtually every measure, women are more economically excluded than men. Gains in women’s labor force participation worldwide over the past three decades have been small and slow, hovering around 55 percent, but as low as 21 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.
Globally, men are nearly twice as likely as women to have full-time employed positions — while in South Asia, they are more than three times as likely. These jobs are associated with higher levels of wellbeing and protection.
Gender gaps are pervasive across continents and sectors. Female farmers tend to farm smaller plots and grow less profitable crops. Female employees are more likely to work in temporary and part-time jobs, less likely to be promoted, and overrepresented in occupations and sectors with lower barriers to entry. This is also true in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economies, where — even in the same occupations — women earn 16 percent less than men, hold fewer senior positions and account for fewer entrepreneurs.
Evidence suggests that these gaps have little to do with innate differences in ability between women and men, and a lot to do with an unleveled playing field.
Closing these gaps could be a game-changer for global development.
Booz & Co. estimates that having as many women in the labor force as men could boost economic growth by 5 percent in the United States, 9 percent in Japan and 34 percent in Egypt. A Goldman Sachs study finds that narrowing the gender gap in employment could raise per-capita income in emerging markets by up to 14 percent by 2020.
One case in point is Latin America and the Caribbean, which is an interesting exception to the general pattern of stagnating participation rates. There, women’s labor force participation grew by more than one-third since 1990, due to increased schooling and falling fertility. Women’s increased income in the region accounts for about 30 percent of the impressive reductions in poverty over the last decade. Further, during the recent financial crisis, families with working women were much better protected against the downturn.
There are benefits for the business bottom line as well. A growing body of evidence shows gender-diverse entities outperforming others. One recent Gallup study in the United States, for example, found gender-diverse units reporting revenues up to 19 percent higher than less-diverse business units, which rose to 58 percent higher revenues if employees were both diverse — and committed to — their work.
What’s holding women back?
Social norms — shared beliefs about how women and men should behave — are a powerful determinant. They are powerful prescriptions that constrain women’s time and undervalue their potential. Housework, child-rearing and care for the elderly are typically considered a woman’s responsibility, while nearly four in 10 people globally — close to half in developing countries — agree that, when jobs are scarce, men deserve priority.
Social norms can limit the agency of women and girls — meaning the ability to make one’s own choices and act upon them. In many developing countries, women’s choices in essential areas of daily life — including their own movements and whether and when to go to school or work — are restricted by norms within the family, the community and the society.
Constraining women’s agency has implications for work. For example, less ability to move freely translates to smaller social networks. This means fewer job connections and sources of business support. A study in Zimbabwe, for example, found women far more reliant on nongovernmental organizations for credit to start enterprises, and more than one-third of women business owners in Vietnam reported a harder time networking because of their sex.
Often reflecting social norms — current or historical — legal discrimination is common. Our recent “Women, Business, and the Law” report found that, of 143 economies, 90 percent had at least one legal difference restricting women’s economic opportunities. These include barriers to women obtaining official identification cards, owning or using property, building credit, or getting a job. In 15 countries, women still require their husbands’ consent to work. In many economies, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, women face the cumulative effects of multiple legal constraints.
Many women lack access to land and financial capital, as well as to financial services, technology, training, information and social networks. A World Bank Group project, Global Findex, measures how people in 148 countries save, borrow, make payments and manage risk. It has highlighted alarming disparities. Only 47 percent of women globally, for example, have opened an account at a formal financial institution compared with 55 percent of men. The gap is greater in low- and middle-income countries. In Afghanistan, while only 15 percent of men have bank accounts, only 3 percent of women do. This adds problems for women’s work, including further limiting channels for formal credit, the ability to receive employer payments, and investing in education and business.
Finally, it is important to recognize that despite the gains in girls’ schooling around the world, disparities persist. In 16 countries — mainly in Africa — there are fewer than nine girls in school for every 10 boys. In Niger, for example, where only half of girls attend primary school, just one in 10 goes on to middle school, and — stunningly — only one in 50 goes on to high school.
What can we do?
The depth and persistence of the challenge highlights the need for bold, coordinated, multisectoral solutions. Overcoming inequality and empowering women at work means understanding local contexts and devising cross-cutting solutions to address deprivations and constraints. These will likely include:
1. Eliminating legal and formal barriers to women’s work. Reforms should focus on removing restrictions on women’s labor and employment, removing women’s unequal status — such as through family law head-of-household provisions, allowing and encouraging women’s ownership and joint-titling of land, promulgating equitable inheritance laws, applying non-discrimination principles to customary laws, and — most importantly — ensuring these laws are implemented and enforced.
2. Engaging the private sector. The private sector accounts for about three out of four jobs in countries such as Egypt, Finland and France, and nine out of 10 jobs in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Japan and South Africa. Multinational firms increased profitability in South Korea by aggressively recruiting women for local managerial positions. Yet just 2 percent of employers report having adopted strategies to recruit more women in the 42 countries for which relevant data exist.
3. Fostering female entrepreneurship. Women’s entrepreneurship can be advanced through a combination of increased access to capital, social networks and new markets, high-quality business skills and development training, and access to broader services that offset gender-specific constraints such as a lack of time for paid work. In Tanzania, a World Bank Group study found that 8 percent of women reported having participated in apprenticeship programs to support household entrepreneurs, compared with 16 percent of men.
4. Removing and offsetting constraints across the lifecycle. This is necessary to ensure broad, sustainable impact. Focusing only on working-age women starts too late and ends too early. Biases can begin very early in life — however subtle — starting trajectories of inequality that are increasingly difficult and costly to address over time.
During childhood and youth, policies can tackle inequalities through education and training, such as household incentives for girls to attend school. For women of productive age, actions to be considered include eliminating restrictions in labor and employment, allowing and encouraging women’s ownership and joint-titling of land, and enforcing equitable inheritance laws.
Other strategies include family-friendly leave and flexibility policies, affordable childcare and early child development programs, as well as infrastructure development to reduce burdens on women’s time for household and care work.
Equal access to assets and financial services are vital. Addressing constraints outside the formal sector is particularly important in low-income countries, since most people — and more so women — do not work for wages and salaries.
For older women, governments can support equitable old-age labor regulations combined with appropriate social protection. Retirement and pension ages for men and women should be equal and targeted programs can upgrade skills among older women willing and able to work, while pension policies can provide protection without discouraging women’s work.
Tackling poverty and boosting shared prosperity — the World Bank Group’s twin goals — are tall orders but within reach. There’s no magic bullet to get there, but unleashing women’s economic potential comes close.
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She Builds is a month-long conversation hosted by Devex in partnership with Chemonics, Creative Associates, JBS International as well as the Millennium Challenge Corp., United Nations Office for Project Services and U.K. Department for International Development.