Happy Friday! It’s been an eventful week of twists and turns.
A few things happened this week. First, I had the chance to delve deeper into the expert opinions survey that I mentioned briefly in my previous post. And second—here’s the twist—I also found out that for the next month, I will temporarily be moving to a different sub-team within WBL—the Labor Survey team. Below are details on both.
The Expert Opinions Survey
I briefly talked about this last week, but this week I supported the WBL’s Implementation team to design a survey that will measure legal experts’ opinion on the state of implementation of gender laws within their respective countries. The objective, for us, in conducting this survey is to gain a more accurate picture of the level to which laws are, or are not, implemented in practice. The Implementation team hopes to use the data from the survey to measure the uptake of the legal rights and discriminatory provisions measured by each of the eight indicators included in the index.
This week, I worked with another intern to develop a set of ‘perception’ questions for the survey. To do this, we conducted in-depth secondary research to identify other widely available, cross-country expert opinion and perception-based surveys. In this process, we identified a few key surveys: (a) the Africa Integrity Indicators; (b) the World Justice Project Civil and Commercial Law Questionnaire; (c) the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey; (d) the v-Dem Report; (e) the World Government Survey; and (f) the World Values Survey. We analyzed each survey for question type, structure, and overall design. Then, we pulled elements of each survey into the design of our own survey, which now includes 35 questions (approx. 4 perceptions questions per indicator). We have shared a draft of the survey with our topic team lead for review. I’m sure it will be a work in progress.
The Labor Survey Team
Yesterday, I also found out that I will be temporarily transitioning to the Labor Survey team within WBL. I will be with them for about one month before transitioning back to the Implementation team to continue working on the Expert Opinions survey and judicial representation.
The Labor team analyzes labor law across 190 economies, specifically to better understand laws which affect women’s decisions to enter, stay in, or leave the workforce. I’m not sure what my specific role with the team will be, but I suspect it might be with data collection and research. I have an initial conversation scheduled with the topic team lead early next week. Excited to learn more about this new work and be exposed to another integral component of WBL.