Regulations and Laws Affecting Women’s Economic Opportunities: A Worldwide Approach

This research aims to analyze the regulations and laws that promote economic opportunities for women at an international level, predict their impact on income levels, and estimate when legal gender equality will be achieved across different regions. The countries are compared over time, based on their income levels and regional locations, considering regulatory indicators on mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions. The methodological strategy was based on machine learning methods. The results indicate a positive trend in the average scores of all regulatory indicators, revealing significant differences across groups of countries and suggesting more egalitarian regulatory frameworks for developed countries, as well as more imbalanced and less progressive frameworks for underdeveloped and developing countries. The regulatory axes that better predict a country’s income level were parenthood, analyzing laws affecting women’s work after having children; assets, which consider gender differences in ownership and inheritance; and marriage, related to the legal constraints on women affected by marriage and divorce. However, the paternity axis is the last to be achieved.