Methodology

Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations that affect women’s ability to earn an income, either by starting and running their own businesses or by getting jobs. When it comes to women’s rights, different economies reflect different cultural norms and values in their legislation. This report does not seek to judge or rank countries, but to provide objective data to inform dialogue and research women’s economic rights.

Covering 142 economies, Women, Business and the Law provides easily comparable data across the following six areas:

• Accessing institutions  — explores women’s legal ability to interact with public authorities and the private sector in the same way as men; 
• Using property  — analyzes women’s ability to access and use property based on their ability to own, manage, control and inherit it; 
• Getting a job  — assesses restrictions on women’s work, such as prohibitions on working at night or in certain industries. This indicator also covers laws on work-related maternity and paternity benefits, retirement ages, sexual harassment and equal pay for equal work; 
• Providing incentives to work  — examines personal income tax credits and deductions available to women relative to men, and the provision of childcare and education services; 
• Building credit  — identifies minimum loan thresholds in private credit bureaus and public credit registries, and tracks bureaus and registries that collect information from microfinance institutions; 
• Going to court  — considers the ease and affordability of accessing justice by examining small claims courts, as well as a woman’s ability to testify in court and initiate court proceedings.

In five of the six topics, there were changes in methodology, both in the number of questions covered and in the way previously existing questions were analyzed; the principal methodological changes are footnoted throughout the text and summarized at the end of this chapter.

The report builds on the experience of the Doing Business project in developing objective indicators of impediments to entrepreneurship and employment for women. Doing Business analyzes regulations that apply to a business throughout its life cycle, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes and resolving insolvency across 183 economies. As in the Doing Business project, Women, Business and the Law strongly emphasizes written law.

At the inception of the Women, Business and the Law project, the Gender Law Library was created to provide a public repository of laws and regulations affecting women’s economic opportunities. The set of six indicators was created by examining the information in the library to see which laws most affect women’s business rights. Legislation across the legal spectrum was found to affect women’s economic potential, either directly or indirectly. The indicators capture laws that directly differentiate between men and women, as well as laws that indirectly have a greater impact on women, given the likelihood that they are secondary income earners, microfinance clients and small business owners.

To condense such a large volume of disparate information, broadly based legal questions were posed to local legal experts to determine in what areas women and men have the same or different rights. In addition to survey data from local legal experts, the WBL project also consulted constitutions, gender equality laws, marriage and family codes, personal status codes, labor laws, passport procedures, citizenship rules, inheritance statutes, codes of civil procedures, education acts, tax regulations and social security codes to determine the sources of gender differentiation in the law. Responses from Doing Business 2012 surveys on getting credit, enforcing contracts, and employing workers were also used. The data from the surveys were checked for accuracy by referencing primary legal sources, resulting in revision or expansion of the information collected.

The Women, Business and the Law methodology offers several advantages:

• It is transparent and uses factual information derived directly from laws and regulations;
• Because standard assumptions are used when collecting data for the six areas covered, comparisons are valid across economies;
• The data identify both potential obstacles to women in business and legislative sources that can be changed as a result of this new information.

The report’s focus on written legislation does not disregard the often large gap between laws on the books and actual practices, recognizing that women do not always have access to the equality they are entitled to by law; however, data on formal legal differentiation represent a first step to identifying potential challenges for women in the six areas studied.

There were several changes of methodology between Women, Business and the Law 2010 and Women, Business and the Law 2012. For that reason, the data presented on the website were recomputed to match the new methodology. In five of the six topics there were methodology changes. These five topics are: accessing institutions; using property; getting a job; providing incentives to work; and going to court. These changes are explained in details in the Data Notes section of the report.

The report team welcomes feedback on the methodology and construction of this set of indicators and looks forward to improving both its coverage and scope. Feedback and contributions to the Gender Law Library are also appreciated. All the data and their sources, as well as the questionnaires used to collect the data are publicly available on this website.