A country’s laws set the tone for how it treats its people and how its people treat each other. When its laws are unfair, when they discriminate on the basis of sex or gender, unequal treatment and violence against women and girls are legitimized and become or uphold entrenched social norms.
Legal equality is the first step towards gender equality, yet almost every country in the world still has laws that discriminate on the basis of sex and/or gender, with the typical economy granting women just 75% of the rights that are enjoyed by men.
Not a single country has yet achieved the goal of fully eliminating sex discriminatory laws set in 1995.
In 2023, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) report evaluated women’s working lives across 8 sectors and found that 14 countries in the world had achieved legal equality between women and men.
The latest 2024 WBL report evaluated additional indicators on childcare and safety (violence) to conclude that not a single country had achieved full legal equality. The report assessed economic opportunities for women in 190 countries in ten areas (Safety, Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, Childcare, and Pensions) and found that today, 37 countries grant women less than half of the legal rights of men – to the detriment of half a billion women.
Today, women enjoy less than two-thirds of the legal rights that men do according to the law, and the gender equality gap is even wider in practice due to a serious lack of implementation of good laws.
At the current rate, the UN estimates it will take nearly 300 years to eliminate discriminatory laws worldwide.
Discriminatory laws appear in many forms. Some are obvious; others are hidden in legal procedures, exceptions, or omissions.
85% of UN member states around the world have constitutions that explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and/or gender. A lack of constitutional equality contravenes one of the most fundamental international human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination, which all States have an obligation and duty to respect, protect, and fulfill, including through formal protection in their constitutions.
When women and girls are barred from enjoying full equality in the family, this prevents them from participating in other areas of community and national life, including the professional sphere, politics, and education, and also poses a risk to their physical and mental health, as well as their safety.
As well as the impact on the individual, discrimination in family law impacts countries’, and the world’s, prosperity.
Regulation of the digital world is inconsistent and ineffective. Those who are most profoundly affected by this are the people, groups, and communities with the least power and privilege.
In 2023, Equality Now partnered with Women Leading in AI to launch the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi).
