This book examines the legal, administrative, and regulatory barriers that are preventing women in Kenya from contributing fully to the Kenyan economy. Building on the 2004 FIAS Improving the Commercial Legal Framework and Removing Administrative and Regulatory Barriers to Investment report, this study looks at the bureaucratic barriers facing women in Kenya through a gender lens.

Men and women both play significant, though different, economic roles in Uganda (both contribute around 50% of GDP and women are 39% of business owners). Gender inequality in access to and control of productive assets and resources acts as a brake to women's economic participation and limits economic growth. Labor and time constraints differentially affect women's and men's capacity to engage in business activity, with significant consequences for agricultural productivity in the context of strategic exports. It is therefore important for Uganda to unleash the full productive potential of fema.

This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.

Vanuatu is a traditionally male dominated and largely patriarchal society. Women have extremely low representation in parliament and in other decision making bodies. Despite this, women are increasingly involved in private sector development and in the market economy. Available statistics suggest that women own nearly 30 percent of all businesses and approximately 20 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises. Yet, government support for women's economic empowerment and women in business has been limited, and reforms are needed to the general legal framework to ensure gender equality. This volume considers barriers to women doing business in Vanuatu using the World Bank Group's Doing Business indicators as a framework. By analyzing the gender dimensions of the cost of doing business, it considers how to take forward reforms to benefit both women and men. The authors argue that designing and implementing these measures makes good economic sense and will ultimately benefit all businesses in Vanuatu - those run by women as well as men.

Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have led the way for modern family and gender policy. This report shows that improvements in gender equality have contributed considerably to their economic growth.

We study whether higher gender equality facilitates economic growth by enabling better allocation of a valuable resource: female labor. By allocating female labor to its more productive use, we hypothesize that reducing gender inequality should disproportionately benefit industries with typically higher female share in their employment relative to other industries. Specifically, we exploit within-country variation across industries to test whether those that typically employ more women grow relatively faster in countries with ex-ante lower gender inequality. The test allows us to identify the causal effect of gender inequality on industry growth in value-added and labor productivity. Our findings show that gender inequality affects real economic outcomes.

Presents 27 articles dating from 1923 to 1994 on gender differences, female labour supply, male-female wage differences and on the historical significance of women's work.