Bangladesh sees no progress in closing gender gap: WB

Bangladesh's efforts to close the gender gap and create equal economic opportunities for women appear to be stagnating.

The World Bank's report "Women, Business and the Law 2024" reveals that the country maintained the same score once again, highlighting a lack of progress in this critical area.

Released on Monday, the report is the 10th in a series of annual studies measuring the laws that affect women's economic opportunity in 190 economies, showing Bangladesh scored 49.4 out of 100, unchanged from its score last year.

This score is based on the Women, Business and the Law 1.0 (WBL 1.0) index, which takes into account eight indicators structured around women's interactions with the law as they move through their lives and careers such as mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets and pension.

"When it comes to laws affecting women's decisions to work, laws affecting women's pay, constraints related to marriage, laws affecting women's work after having children, constraints on women starting and running a business, gender differences in property and inheritance, and laws affecting the size of a woman's pension, Bangladesh could consider reforms to improve legal equality for women", read the report.

"For example, one of the lowest scores for Bangladesh is on the indicator measuring laws affecting women's work after having children (the WBL2024 Parenthood indicator). To improve on the Parenthood indicator, Bangladesh may wish to consider making the government administer 100% of maternity leave benefits, making paid leave available to fathers, making paid parental leave available, and prohibiting the dismissal of pregnant workers."

The bank mentioned, "No reforms were observed during the past year (October 2nd, 2022 – October 1st, 2023)."

Meanwhile, when it comes to constraints on freedom of movement, Bangladesh gets a perfect score on the Mobility indicator (100).

However, the overall score for Bangladesh (49.4) is lower than the South Asia regional average (63.7) and also the global average score (77.9).

Bangladesh scored among the bottom 15 economies globally while the second-lowest in South Asia, only after Afghanistan (31.9).

Nepal (80.6) scored the best in the region followed by Bhutan (75), India (74.4), and the Maldives (73.8).

Meanwhile, Afghanistan scored the lowest at 31.9, followed by Bangladesh and Pakistan (58.8).

Implementation gap between laws

In addition to the WBL 1.0 index, this year's edition presents a new approach to measure the implementation gap between laws — de jure — and how they function in practice — de facto, which is the Women, Business and the Law 2.0 (WBL 2.0) index.

The new WBL 2.0 is a three-tiered approach, which focuses on legal frameworks, supportive frameworks, and expert opinions on the status of women's rights and adds two new indicators: safety from violence and access to childcare services.

Based on the new approach, Bangladesh got a legal framework index score of 32.5 out of 100, lower than the global average (64.2) and the South Asia regional average (45.9).

In terms of supportive frameworks, the country scored 35.0 out of 100, lower than the global average (39.5), but higher than the South Asia regional average (31.1).

Meanwhile, the WBL 2.0 expert opinions score for Bangladesh (26.3) is lower than the global average (65.7) and lower than the South Asia regional average (43.5).