Around the world, gender discrimination creates and perpetuates inequalities in access to education, jobs, income, property, and other areas. At the national level, the first step to addressing these issues is adopting a legal and policy framework that supports equality, including by prohibiting all forms of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
To begin to analyze different countries’ approaches, the WORLD Policy Analysis Center has several types of data available. We examine explicit protections of equal rights and prohibitions of discrimination based on gender, the extent to which gender inequality is embedded in laws, and policies that, while not explicitly gendered, have different impacts on people of different genders—for example, girls are disproportionately disadvantaged in access to education when tuition is charged.
For a more complete view of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in adopting evidence-based solutions to close economic gender gaps, you can download a free version of our book, Equality within Our Lifetimes: How Laws and Policies Can Close—or Widen—Gender Gaps in Economies Worldwide. Alongside policy data from 193 countries, the book presents rigorous research evidence, case law examples, and case studies of making change.
