New Initiative Focuses on Opportunities for Women
Doing Business has launched a two-year initiative to identify legal and regulatory barriers facing businesswomen in 178 countries, and to advocate change.Doing Business will form partnership with governments and women’s groups. The primary objectives will be to:
- Identify laws and regulations that discriminate against women.
- Investigate which reforms on business regulations have the highest impact on opportunities for women. This research will utilize data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys website, which has employment data on women and data on women entrepreneurs.
- Prepare case studies of women entrepreneurs to describe the reasons for their success and obstacles they faced.
Payoffs from reform can be large. Higher rankings on the ease of doing business are associated with more growth, more jobs and a smaller share of the economy in the informal sector. The benefits are especially large for women. Countries with higher scores on the ease of doing business have larger shares of women in the ranks of both entrepreneurs and workers (see chart).
