No Progress in Pakistan’s Gender Equality in 2023: World Bank

Pakistan’s women, business and the law score has remained unchanged at 58.8 in 2023, according to the latest World bank report.

Women, Business and the Law measures global progress toward gender equality in the law, and is released annually by the World Bank.

Moreover, an ‘expert opinions index’, which can serve as a proxy for measuring multifaceted and unobservable aspects of women’s rights in practice, was the lowest in Pakistan among 190 economies examined, with a score of just 20.

Expert opinions data provide subjective evaluations based on the experiences and knowledge of experts.

The Bank in its report titled “Women, Business and the Law 2024” noted that the global gender gap for women’s economic opportunities is significantly wider than previously thought.

Although countries across the world have made substantial progress in enacting laws to provide equal opportunity for women, half of humanity, 3.9 billion women worldwide, face legal barriers affecting their economic participation.

The report finds that women have about two-thirds of the rights of men and that nowhere in the world do women have the same legal rights as men in all of the indicators measured.

The global average Women, Business and the Law legal frameworks score is 64.2 out of 100, indicating a significant gap in gender equality under the law.

Remarkably, none of the 190 economies examined achieved legal gender parity in the areas measured and thus no economy received a score of 100.