The World Bank published this week a report titled “Women, Business and the Law 2024” 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 (WBL 1.0) based on data collected from 190 countries around the globe, 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: “Mobility”, “Workplace”, “Pay”, “Marriage”, “Parenthood”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Assets”, and “Pension”. This year, the World Bank added additional factors to the scoring criteria (labelled under WBL 2.0) in an endeavor to capture a more holistic point of view on the impacts of laws and their implementation on women’s choices. In details, the WBL 2.0 encompasses 3 sub-categories, namely legal frameworks (which adds two categories namely “safety” and “childcare” to the aforementioned eight categories), supportive frameworks (which gauges public policy instruments) and experts' opinion (which compiles experts’ opinions on women’s rights). According to the report, the best index score is 100, which implies equal legal rights for both genders in a particular country. In this vein, and while fourteen countries (namely Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden) have registered a score of 100 in the 2024 Women, Business and Law 1.0 Legal Frameworks index, none has done so in the WBL 2.0 index. In addition, the average global legal frameworks index score stood at 64.2, signifying that women generally benefit from around 64.2% of the legal rights enjoyed by men across the covered data points. Globally, Italy came in first in the WBL 2.0 Legal Frameworks Index with a score of 95.0 (97.5 score in the WBL 1.0 index), followed by New Zealand and Portugal with a score of 92.5.

As far as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is concerned, the latter registered a meager score of 38.6 in the 2024 WBL Legal Frameworks index 2.0, implying that women in the region benefit from around 38.6% of the legal rights of their male counterparts. The UAE topped the MENA region (ranking 112^th globally) in the 2024 WBL 2.0 Legal Frameworks Index with a score of 62.5 (scoring 82.5 in the 1.0 legal frameworks index, 24.2 in the supportive frameworks index and 81.9 in the experts opinion criteria), followed by Saudi Arabia (50.0, global rank of 151) and Bahrain (45.0, global rank of 157). Locally, the World Bank assigned Lebanon a score of 40.0 in the 2024 WBL 2.0 legal frameworks index, the seventh highest in the MENA region and ranking 170^th globally, trailing far behind the global average of 64.2. Lebanon also scored 58.8 in the WBL 1.0 legal frameworks index, 17.5 in the supportive frameworks index and 53.8 in terms of the experts’ opinion criteria. The report commented that Lebanon did not achieve a perfect score of 100.0 in any of the aforementioned criteria, while pointing out that its worst performance was in the safety criteria, as the country still lacks legislation on domestic violence.