Happy Saturday! This week, I have to continued to work with the Labor team on the data collection for the labor survey. More of the surveys are coming in now, so I’ve shifted my focus from only conducting data collection to also coding and analyzing the survey responses. I love data analysis, so this has been among my favorite parts of the internship.
Preliminary Insights from the Data
What I’ve learned are a few things. First, there seem to be clear regional differences in the existence of certain labor laws. For example, central American countries and some European countries too—in contrast with those in the middle east and north Africa or south Asian regions— seem to have significantly more equal gender-related labor laws. They also have more equal female judiciary representation than others.
Secondly, the concept of paternity leave is still very new in many parts of the world. This was interesting because while the majority of countries we analyzed have some form of maternity leave policy for mothers, this is not true for fathers. Perhaps this could be because most countries today—even those that are less patriarchal in nature— tend to value men more as the traditional breadwinners in the household (or at least, this is my theory).
Thirdly, very few laws seem to exist for women (or people, more broadly) with disabilities across economies. What surprised me most when analyzing some of surveys and speaking with legal experts was that the concept of disability, even physical disability, did not seem to exist in the law for some countries. This meant that people with disabilities seldom had access to legal protections in the workforce or in other areas as well.
Next Steps
Next week, I will be partially transitioning back to the Implementation team but I suspect that I might be asked to split my time across both the Labor and Implementation teams given the volume of work that exists on both! Let’s see.