Yaneek Page | IWD 2024: The opportunities are still not equal for women

Equal opportunities for women remain an elusive goal, more distant than anticipated at this stage of development, and fraught with obstacles that appear formidable to overcome.

In a startling announcement on March 4, 2024, the World Bank disclosed unexpected revelations from its latest report Women, Business and Law 2024.

Timed just ahead of International Women’s Day 2024, the press release shed light on a perturbing reality: “No country, not even the wealthiest, provides equal opportunity for women,” it said.

And, unfortunately, the data shows that the gender gap is wider, in practice, in 190 economies. Emphasising the legal disparities driving a widening of the gender gap, the bank noted that when the legal differences involving violence and childcare are considered, women enjoy fewer than two-thirds of the rights and protections offered to men. This marks a dramatic shift from prior reports, where the World Bank had optimistically indicated steady progress towards gender equality, proposing that women’s rights were fast approaching parity at nearly 80 per cent of the rights and privileges enjoyed by men.

Women’s entrepreneurship was a major sore point in the report. Globally, only 44 per cent of the legal provisions that support women starting and growing businesses are in place. These provisions would include:

1. Gender-equality laws that mandate equal treatment and opportunities for women in the business sphere, including access to finance and employment opportunities;

2. Anti-discrimination laws, particularly a robust legal framework that prohibits discrimination based on gender in hiring, promotion access to resources, and so on, which is linked with fostering a more inclusive environment for women entrepreneurs;

3. Maternity and paternity leave that promote incentives for men to take paternity leave and attain greater gender equity in caregiving responsibilities while encouraging stronger work life balance;

4. Access to finance initiatives that specifically address the gender gaps in credit loans and financial services;

5. Procurement policies that prioritise contracting with women-owned businesses and will provide them with access to lucrative government contracts and opportunities for growth and expansion;

6. Greater protections in intellectual property rights particularly safeguarding women entrepreneurs’ innovations in the creative industries, among others;

7. Enactment and enforcement of labour laws and fair labour practices, including protections against harassment and discrimination to create conducive environments for women’s participation and doing business generally;

8. Legal provisions that ensure equal access to education and vocational training for women, which will equip them with non-traditional skills and knowledge to succeed in diverse areas of enterprise.

The report called out the enduring challenge of unequal influence and power, noting that across the world, women hold just one out of every five corporate board positions, and less than 20 per cent of economies mandate gender-sensitive criteria for public procurement processes, which in the most practical sense, means that women are largely excluded from nearly US$10 trillion a year in economic opportunity.

Limited access to financial opportunity, particularly wealth creation, continues to be a global Achilles heel.

It is important to emphasise this pivotal excerpt from the World Bank’s latest report, which points to the essential areas of vulnerability affecting all nations. These insights are of particular significance for Jamaica as they stress the ongoing challenges that our country faces in these key metrics of human and national advancement:

Nearly all economies performed poorly in the two indicators being tracked for the first time:

safety and childcare.

• The weakness is greatest in women’s safety. The global average score is just 36 out of 100, meaning women enjoy barely a third of the legal protections they need from domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriage, and femicide. Although 151 economies have laws in place prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, just 39 have laws prohibiting it in public spaces. Women do, then, face perils in using public transportation to travel to work. Overall, 139 economies lack adequate legislation prohibiting child marriage, which typically quashes a girl’s future educational and economic opportunities.

• Most economies also score poorly on laws pertaining to childcare. Women spend, on average, 2.4 hours a day more on unpaid care work than men — much of it involving children. Expanding access to childcare tends to increase women’s participation in the labor force by about 1 percentage point initially, with the effect doubling within five years. Only 62 economies — fewer than a third — have established quality standards governing childcare services. As a result, in 128 economies, women may think twice about going to work while they have children in their care.

There is no sugar-coating the reality that if women continue to carry the burden of doing the lion’s share of unpaid work around the globe, there cannot be equal access to opportunity and gender parity. Indeed, this column recently highlighted the Inter-American Development Bank’s warning that the burden of our ageing population falls squarely on the women.

The question now is, how do we move forward to change the tide? The first step has to be keeping women safe, I’m creating an environment where they can flourish contributing to the development of the social and economic fabric of the country, unmolested.

We should also consider implementing some of the World Bank’s recommendations, particularly: accelerating efforts to reform laws and enact public policies that empower women to work and start a business, enact laws and implement policies that ensure access to childcare, expand maternity and paternity leave provisions; provide financial support for parents with young children, and establish quality standards for childcare services. Implement legally binding quotas for women on corporate boards, and mandate gender-sensitive criteria for public procurement processes; ensuring equal retirement benefits for women, accounting for periods of work absences related to childcare.

For Jamaica, we urgently need to establish frameworks that support the effective implementation of laws that ensure that men contribute equally to the financial cost of raising their children.

One love!

Yaneek Page is the programme lead for Market Entry USA, and a certified trainer in entrepreneurship.yaneek.page@gmail.com