Equal Opportunity, Equal Outcomes?
Understandably, the literature has often seen gender inequality as a human rights issue. Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights introduces the concept of equal protection under the law. When governments use the law to discriminate against women in some way, to create a legal environment that places her at a disadvantage with respect to men, they are clearly in violation of the letter and the spirit of the Declaration. However, gender inequality obviously has an economic dimension as well. The Women, Business and the Law project (WBL) at the World Bank has, over the years, built up an impressive database that identifies the restrictions faced by women embedded in the law (the Constitution, the Civil Code, family law and other legal instruments) in 173 countries. From this data we have learned, for instance, that the higher the number of such restrictions in a country, the lower the secondary school enrolment rate of girls relative to boys; the bigger the wage ga