Hello again! It’s been two weeks now since I started working with the World Bank’s WBL team. Most of my focus over these past few weeks has been to read up on the WBL’s research methodology and more, specifically, on the work that the Implementation team—which I will be supporting directly— aims to drive forward. I haven’t conducted a ton of research yet, but I am getting a good sense of what I will be doing over the summer.
The Implementation Team
I talked briefly about the Implementation team’s work, but I thought it might be worth elaborating on the team’s mandate and key goals. For context, the WBL team aims to measure the legal differences on access to economic opportunities between men and women in 190 economies. Historically, the WBL team has focused most of their efforts on understanding which laws exist within the eight areas measured by the WBL index— Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. Recently, however, the team has realized that it is not always enough for a law to exist. The law must also be enforced. In fact, the lack of enforcement of laws is one of the main barriers to the full enjoyment of women’s rights. For this reason, the WBL launched the Implementation sub-team to conduct research and collect data on implementation gaps and best practices in the enforcement of law. They will specifically look at the efficacy of existing implementation regulations, guidelines, and plans, budgetary allocations, and enforcement bodies. Through this work, the team hopes to better determine whether countries’ have an implementation environment for laws that is conducive to women’s employment and entrepreneurship.
My Role
I will be supporting the team with two key tasks. First, I will be helping develop a survey to gauge the opinions of existing Women, Business and the Law local experts on the effectiveness of the laws in achieving their stated goals within their respective countries. Second, I will also be supporting the team with documenting female representation on constitutional courts across the world. The goal here is to better understand which countries or regions tend to have greater female representation in their judiciaries and which best practices have enabled them achieve this balance.
That’s it for now! I’m very much looking forward to updating the blog as I start digging deeper into these two workstreams next week!