The World Bank published this week a report titled “Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform” in which it shed light on the repercussions of legal gender discrimination on the choices made by women in terms of career and entrepreneurship. For this purpose, the World Bank built an index based on data collected from 187 countries around the globe covering the past decade, with the index embedding 35 data points that help shape women’s economic decisions during various phases of their lives including marriage and motherhood. These data points comprise, for instance, elements such as a woman’s freedom to travel and ability to open a bank account, sign contracts, or register a business, as well as the existence of laws that ban gender discrimination by employers when hiring or the layoff of pregnant working women. The 35 data points are later grouped under eight major categories, namely: “Going Places”, “Starting a Job”, “Getting Paid”, “Getting Married”, “Having Children”, “Running a Business”, “Managing Assets”, and “Getting a Pension”. According to the report, the best index score is 100, which can be translated by equal legal rights for both genders in a particular country. In this vein, six countries have registered a score of 100 in the 2019 Women, Business and Law index, namely Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Latvia. Nevertheless, the average global index score stood at 74.71, signifying that women generally benefit from three-quarters of the legal rights enjoyed by men across the covered data points. This score has, however, sizably improved when compared to the 70.06 global average score registered a decade ago, reflecting about 274 reforms introduced by 131 countries to their legal frameworks since then to enhance gender equality.

As far as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is concerned, the latter registered a meager score of 47.37 in the 2019 Women, Business and Law index, implying that women in the region do not even benefit from half of the legal rights of their male counterparts. In fact, the report unveiled that an average country in the MENA region fails to grant women equal opportunities to men in about 17 of the 35 aforementioned data points, compared to only 9 data points on a global basis where women are victim of gender discrimination.

Locally, the World Bank assigned Lebanon a score of 58.75 in the 2019 Women, Business and Law index, the highest in the MENA region yet trailing far behind the global average. Comoros, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Tonga, and Tunisia were assigned the same index score of 58.75. Delving further into the index’s constituents, Lebanon registered a full score of 100 in the “Going Places” category, mirroring equal gender rights in the country when it comes to a woman’s ability to choose her living location, to travel outside of her home or country, and to apply for a passport. In parallel, Lebanon registered a score of 75 in each of the “Running a Business” and “Getting a Pension” categories, 60 in the “Getting Married” category, and 50 in each of the “Starting a Job” and “Getting Paid” categories. Conversely, Lebanon’s worst performance was in the areas of “Managing Assets” and “Having Children”, with respective scores of 40 and 20. On a more positive note, however, Lebanon was mentioned among the four MENA countries that have introduced domestic violence laws during the past ten years (along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Algeria).