Women and Economic Growth

Around the world discriminatory citizenship and identification laws hinder women’s ability to fully participate in and contribute to economies. The majority of the estimated 2.4 billion people who lack a national identity card are women. This has profound implications for women, families, communities, and nations. Caren Grown and Hardin Lang join us for a timely discussion on how national identification and citizenship law reform can help advance women’s economic participation and grow economies, not only in developing nations, but also in the context of humanitarian crises. This meeting is generously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.   Transcript LEMMON: (In progress)—on so many of these issues from such different perspectives. And I’m really delighted to be here. I want to start by introducing myself. (Laughs.) So I am Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. I’m an adjunct senior fellow here at CFF. And I could not, actually, be happier to have the folks that we have here today. Many of whom—many of you know them already, but Hardin Lang of Refugees International and Caren Grown of the World Bank. And I want to start also by thanking Rosita Najmi, who is our amazing supporter, funder, and leader in thought, and partner in conversation, and also doing tremendous work at Gates, for those of you who aren’t following the reports that they’re putting out. As Hardin was just mentioning, there’s been just a tremendous amount of output just in the past few weeks about, you know, looking at the costs of keeping women out of work, and looking at the costs of not tapping into potential. Because the thing that always drives me, even in days where you feel like am I the only one who cares about this, is that suffocated potential is the enemy of global stability. And if you care about where the world is going and the stability and prosperity and security of where the world is headed, then you have to care about the contributions and the potential of half the population. And I am just back from northern Syria. Hardin is also just back from northern Syria. I’m working on a next book which is really about what ISIS has left in its wake, which in many ways is the most radical experiment in women’s equality and the absolute least-likely place in the world. And it really is—you know, so many of the discussions I just had in Raqqa 10 days ago were about women who said two things: One, ISIS pushed us too far, and we wanted to come back to work. You know, I interviewed a woman who had a store in Raqqa who was—she pointed to me, she said, you know, it was always my dream to have a shop, but women didn’t do that before. But ISIS pushed us too far, and then when we were in some other areas we saw women out and about and working and we thought, well, there’s no difference. They’re women. We’re women. Why, you know, we can come back and rebuild. And so I think that this goes to this whole discussion we really want to have today about how do we unlock the potential of people who are keen, able, and capable of contributing to their economies, to their communities, to their countries, and to their neighborhoods, right, and their families. And so many times I think we see these as niche issues in the world beyond this room, right? And the truth is that half the population is not a special interest group. It’s a source of untapped potential. And really I just—I offer that as framing remarks as we go forward to have a conversation that could not be either more urgent or more pressing in terms of what it means for where the world is headed. So with that, I want to start—because, you know, national ID can be this kind of abstract conversation, but it really comes down to: Do you have the papers that you need to contribute to your society? Do you have the identification? So, Caren, I know that you have at the Bank this—I want to get the name right—the Identity For Development, ID4D initiative, right? And why is having an identity card or having an ID important for women and their contributions to the economy? Why does this matter? GROWN: So I think that’s a great question. But if you allow me, I’m going to just start with something. Yesterday we released a study on the costs of gender equality to the wealth that countries can accumulate. So it’s a study that adds to the literature not just in terms of the cost to GDP but the cost to wealth. And wealth is composed of three things. It’s composed of natural capital, you know, our forests and our streams and our oceans. It’s composed of produced capital, which is plants and—plant and equipment and, you know, physical capital. And the largest form of wealth is human capital. So what we did in this study is we estimated the losses to human capital wealth caused by the gender inequalities in earnings and gender inequalities in labor force participation. So I just wanted, if I could, give you the headline number, which is that countries are losing about 160 trillion (dollars) in wealth because of the differences in lifetime earnings between men and women, which really comes down to about $23,620 for each person in the 141 countries that we estimated in the study. Now, the largest losses are in the OECD world, because that’s where the largest amount of human capital wealth is. But the losses are actually significant in countries like—in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia. So the study’s on our landing page and we hope that you’ll check it out and, you know, starting with the premise that, you know, boy, what a waste—$160 trillion. Imagine what we could do with that if we equalized labor force participation and earnings for women. So now coming—I just had to make a plug for that since— LEMMON: Of course. And that’s trillion with a T. GROWN: That’s trillion with a T. And when you—you know, it’s a huge number to kind of wrap your heads around. But when you put it on a per person basis for 141 countries and you say $23,000 per person, you know, it makes the number a little bit more manageable. But countries have millions of people. So when you think about it it’s not so—it’s no so big. OK. So Identification For Development. The Bank Group—and I’m really pleased that I’m joined by Vyjayanti Desai. She’s actually a guru, our test team leader in the World Bank Group, who leads our—it’s Identification For Development. We started this initiative back in 2014 to help—and we did it with the support—we have partners in this room. The Omidyar Network and, of course, the Gates Foundation. And we have other partners. And it’s been a pleasure to be part of this initiative. And I have to say, you know, people don’t—always say, Identification For Development. Why would gender be at the table thinking about this? Why is gender an issue for identity? Well, as I’ll speak to in a few minutes, it’s actually hugely foundational. But just a quick word on the initiative. The initiative started to help countries build inclusive, robust, and responsible identification systems, and that provide all people to have an official proof of identity. So we talk about foundational identity versus legal identity, foundational identity is just having something that says who you are. You’re—you know, you’re a—you were born, you have an identity. It’s a little bit different than legal identity. Legal identity involves citizenship. And they’re—but we’re about setting up systems so that every person has something that documents who they are. We had a seminar yesterday at the Bank on blockchain. And I have to say that I think blockchain has a lot of potential to help set up identification systems, but let’s park that going forward. So why does it matter for women? Well, and it matters for women and men both because it helps people open bank accounts. So if you want to save. If you’re a small business owner and you need to have an account at a financial institution, you need some form of identity with the financial institution. It’s important for being able to register to vote. So in terms of showing your identity card or your identification number or your thumbprint when you go to a poll. It’s really critical in being able to access the justice system to make claims, whether it’s in small claims court of whether it’s in family court. It’s critical to register businesses and land. And it’s probably, for the countries that we work in, really essential in terms of being able to access services—for instance, welfare services, like conditional cash transfer. Proof of identity is needed for women, particularly—and we’ll come to this I hope in the discussion—on financial services, because financial services are really a game changer for women. And I don’t know if you follow another new data—another new report that we put out, it’s called the Findex Report, and we know that on average women in developing countries are 9 percent less likely than men to be access—to have access to financial services, to have a bank account, to have a mobile phone account, transaction accounts. And this is really, really critical. And the fact—the thing that’s so startling to me is this 9-percentage point gap has not budged since 2011. And one of the things in the areas where it has closed, in the countries where it has closed, in a country like India, identification programs like Aadhaar in India, has been really foundational in helping women access financial services. LEMMON: I think the survey—I actually visited some of the folks in India—some women in India who were getting ID for the first time as part of this work. And it was really funny because I was asking them—you know, it’s biometric, right, which is a whole other CFR—other parts of CFR discussing that. But what was fascinating was they had to provide, you know, for their bank account access—and they were open—and bank accounts were opened for them, right. They had to provide thumbprint to get access to their bank account. And so I asked them in this training that this private sector bank was giving them about financial services: Do you prefer an ATM card or your thumbprint? And all the hands went up, but they went up like this. And I said, but why? And so the translator said, you know, why do you prefer your thumbprint to an ATM card? And I thought it was going to be because you, like me, can’t lose it. And they said, no, it’s because our husbands can’t take. (Laughter.) And, you know, and they said, you know, our husbands can’t take it, so we get access to our money. Now, what happens after it comes in the house is another story, but nobody else can go in—money cannot be gotten without them. So it’s a whole fascinating intersection of this conversation. Hardin, I wanted to get to ask you a question about access to employment for a population we’ve been talking a lot about, the refugees and the displaced. And how do you think about access to employment? Because in many ways it’s hardest to access when it’s most urgently needed for women, right, when families are displaced, and income is out the door. Men who have been working are no longer able to provide an income. And yet, there are so many barriers to women working. And how do you think about that? LANG: I mean, it’s—what you’re saying is absolutely true. I mean, the thing you have to think about is, you know, I think most people around the room are pretty familiar with the traditional obstacles that stand in the way of women’s access to workplace in this country and a number of other countries. If you take all of those conditions or all those obstacles and you put them into a situation where you’re part of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who have crossed a border, usually after immediately sort of physical trauma or threat of some form, I mean, all of those issues obtain but, you know, in a much higher degree—almost on steroids. And with that, you’re dealing with, like, levels of violence and instability that complicate access to some of the most essential needs that you have. But let me sort of back up and make a couple of framing remarks about how the international community has started to rethink how it approaches issues of employment for refugees, because this has become a much bigger issue in the whole set of conversations over the last three to four years in this space, mostly because—for a couple of different reasons. First, sort of like the advent of the global refugee crisis, just the sheer number of people who have been displaced. You know, we’re looking at 66 million at this stage. We have 22 million having crossed borders as refugees, leaving, you know, 44 million internally displaced. These numbers are higher—we haven’t seen anything like this since World War II. I think most people are familiar with that part of it. You take that, and then you factor into the timeframe. This is no longer a matter of people going into refuge for a year, a year and a half, 18 months. It’s matter of 10 years to 17 years in many cases, depending on how you count it. So it’s a protracted crisis. And then you take that and combine it with the fact that the amount of money that’s required to respond to these kind of emergencies—that just there’s general sort of global donor fatigue setting in, in trying to manage it. All of those are a point—you end up in a gap of services that’s quite significant. And part of the issue has been the way in which basically international assistance is done—humanitarian assistance has been provided over the last, you know, 30-40 years, that people who are in protracted crises find themselves basically receiving humanitarian assistance in a model based around a camp or living right outside of a camp, over, and over, and over again. When, in actuality, what they want is access to a job and a chance for their kids go to go to school. Like, these are the things that make them—give them a sense of dignity and give them a sense of autonomy, right, that they’re not just dependent. And so probably starting—like, the first real examples we have of this are going back to 2016, where particularly around the Syrian portion of the global refugee crisis you’ve had donors and host countries experimenting with new models. And so they tend to be called compacts. We have one in Jordan. We have one in Lebanon. There’s one in Ethiopia. There’s some version of it in Turkey, but less so. And the basic deal is donors are going to give, you know, money, access to concessional finance, and then potentially, in the case of the EU, access to their markets for goods that are produced in those host countries. And in trade, the host country, like Jordan, will give Syrian refugees access to their labor market. And the idea is that part of what they’re producing is then actually going to be sold a country like—I mean, in the EU. And so it turns out to be a win-win. So the idea in theory is that both the local population, the Jordanians benefit from some of this, but also the Syrian refugees have access to new jobs. The devil, of course, in the detail on this. And all these things are still in beta mode. It’s early days. But it’s not clear that they’re really providing access to livelihoods. In some cases they’re providing access to some jobs but not really livelihoods. And more importantly, it’s far from clear that it’s working for women. And we can sort of go through some of the statistics as we get into the specifics. But the people who are entering the labor market, the refugees who are entering the labor market formally in many of these situations, the vast majority of them are men and out of balance from what you would see in the countries that they fled from. LEMMON: Well, and I want to connect these two because it’s even harder and even more urgent in that kind of a context. And then we can back out to talk about it more broadly. But I do want to talk about this context of refugees and displacement. You know, why is it that it’s so hard? And why is it so important for ID in refugee situations? GROWN: Yeah. This is something that’s really important that we’ve started to work on. So a lack of official identification makes refugees much more vulnerable to exploitation during their displacement. And it makes it much more difficult for them to obtain refugee status and protection, and to participate in economic life in terms of getting a job, registering a business, being able to earn a living. A lack of ID prevents refugees from documenting life events, such as registering a birth, for instance, or divorce, or a marriage in the host country, and that makes it much more difficult then to establish the identity of children. So you have a group of children who really are at very, very high risk, particularly in terms of being stateless. One of the things that we’ve learned in countries like Lebanon and Jordan is that rates of child marriage increase among refugee populations when they don’t have access to economic opportunities. So legal identification is really important for girls to be able to prove their age, and if there are minimum age of marriage laws, to be able to have legal recourse. A recent statistic from UNICEF shows—suggests that the number of registered marriages in Syria involving girls 15 to 17, between the years of 2003 and 2011, was 13 percent. And with the eruption of conflict and the influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan, the percentage of registered Syrian marriages involving girls 15 to 17 grew from 12 percent in 2011 to 25 percent in 2013, and 36 percent in 2018. Now, we can talk a lot about early marriage. I’ve done a lot of work. I was just talking to Gayle about this, about the costs of early marriage—not only the monetary costs, but the health costs, the development costs, the stunted potential, as you call it, is really, really critical. So in a country like Jordan, the minimum age of marriage is actually 18. So if girls have identity, they actually could do something—they would have legal recourse in that context. And the bank is starting to do a little bit more on this. We’ve just actually—and we don’t only work in countries like Lebanon and Jordan, but we’re working on contexts, for instance, in Nigeria, in eastern—northeastern Nigeria, which has the huge flux of—has influx of refugees and a lot of internally displaced. But one of the things that we’re doing with Nigeria—we’ve done a lot of work on identification systems. Nigeria currently has 16 different agencies that collect separate IDs. So there’s a lot of efficiency to be brought into that system. And as we’re working with the Nigerian government to set up a national identity program, the Nigerian government is actually prioritizing early registration in the displaced persons camps, and so—and targeting females in particular. So there’s things that can be done. LEMMON: Why is that? Because, you know, why do they see early—targeting populations in camps and early registration as a priority? GROWN: Because I think that they recognize the host of development issues that are really, really critical for them. And also, in terms of the stabilizing some of the issues in these countries, in this particular area, it’s really important in terms of the ways that they’re responding to the conflict, and the issues—the threats from extremism and other things. You know, it’s really important when you think about, you know, that there’s mass kidnappings and mass rapes. How many of you know—I’m sure other people in this room know more than me—how many of you know how many girls have been kidnapped by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria? Does anybody know the number? Do you, Hardin? And it’s much more than Chibok. Five thousand, which was of the last count. Not all of these girls have legal identity. So tracking them is really, really important, and rehabilitating them. LEMMON: I want to sort of press on—come back to and talk about barriers to getting IDs in a moment, but I really think it’s important to stress this, is that it’s not that we talk about identity for identity’s stake. Identity’s at the center of the whole discussion around access to education, access to economic opportunity, access to physical security so that people know who you are if, God forbid, you go missing. And access to opportunities for development. So, for example, cash transfer programs or things like that, right? All of this is much harder, if not impossible, if you don’t have either a card or a fingerprint, or something—if you are not registered. And so I think sometimes people think, national ID, why does that matter? It’s at the very center of everything positive that can happen from there. And, you know, you can’t count what you don’t see. GROWN: That’s exactly right. LEMMON: Hardin, can you talk to me a little bit about the Jordan compact? Because, you know, I have to admit, I feel like this—we don’t really understand what it actually means. Or, I’ll plead guilty, I read about it and I was like, wait, what is this? You know, the first few times I read about, because it feels like in some ways policy-speak, and I don’t know what it actually means in terms of people’s lives. What does it mean to a mom in Jordan who is trying to figure out what to do next? LANG: It turns out, not a lot right now. (Laughter.) In that particular case. But I just wanted to very quickly comment on some of the points that Caren made. LEMMON: Please, absolutely. LANG: So the access to finance and the child marriages issue. If you sort of survey—well, there are a couple of surveys that have been done of Syrian women refugees in Jordan in the larger camps, and then also in two of the major urban areas where there are population centers. And the two things that come back consistently in terms of barriers to entering the workforce are, one, access to finance and then, two, the early child marriages piece that people are being forced into. And then once that happens, it’s very, very difficult for them to break out of that and to get access to a labor market. And just very quickly, on Nigeria, this is really interesting. We had a team that just came back from Borno and Bama. And they were looking at this question of sort of women living in the IDP camps, right, which the government is now in this process of saying, look, it’s safe enough for some of you to go home now, and it’s not clear those conditions are—actually have been established. And one of the stats that came up that was really interesting is that a number of women that we surveyed said that they had a much harder time getting out of the IDP camps than the men did. There were a certain number of passes that were granted every day for people to leave the IDP camps to go out and basically engage in livelihood activities. And women were not getting access to the same degree or rate that men were. And when they sort of probed and interviewed the security officials involved in this, they said: Look, it’s basically like if it’s a guy in the camp we kind of assume they fled Boko Haram. If it’s a woman, maybe she’s a wife or maybe when she’s leaving she’s bringing sustenance to—so, none of that makes any sense, right? But it’s, like, this is the way—it has impacted just—I mean, the contours of the conflict have led to a moment where women have a much harder time accessing whatever, like, scant livelihoods they can around those camps, simply because of these misplaced security concerns. On the Jordan compact, I guess the easiest way to describe it would be in 2016 in the conference in London the EU and some other donors agreed with Jordan that they would give Jordan 1.7 billion (dollars) over three or four years, if memory serves. Maybe a little bit longer. And in terms of grants to build infrastructure and then also access to finance at concessional terms. And then access to goods coming into the EU—particular types of goods. And in trade, Jordan would give Syrian refugees 200,000 work permits. And the idea being that the businesses that they would move into, these sectors, some of those would be sectors into which goods would be exported into the EU. And that’s how that sort of feedback loop was supposed to work. Now, of the 200—the way the 200,000 work permits were originally conceived of, a good chunk of them were for agriculture. A good chunk of them were for construction. These are—tend to be, at least in Jordan—have been male-dominated industries. It’s not clear that they play directly to some—they play into some stereotypes and comparative advantages of different gendered populations. But in addition, the part that was supposed to be very clever was there was a section—there was some special economic zones in Jordan that have been kind of moribund for a while. And the idea was that they were going to jumpstart sort of textile businesses in these economic zones and export those textiles to the EU. And they were going to employ Syrian women and Jordanian women—because that tended to be a majority female workforce in the sector—to do this. Now, a couple things. So, first off, the big sectors that are designed for—like, agriculture and construction, not easily accessible in some cases for women. The second part was that Syria had had a textile industry, right? But that textile industry has been based in Aleppo, in the northern part of the country. And so most of the women who had experience in this had fled to Turkey. And the actual—the women who were in Jordan, most of them had come from Daraa, from a sort of a religiously sort of—from a conservative section of Syria and had a much harder time overcoming barriers—cultural barriers about leaving and going to a textile factory to work. So in general, it wasn’t sort of set up with any real attempt or reflection of how you would provide women refugees access to the labor market. And if you actually look at the numbers—so, of the 200,000 work permits, there’s about 90,000—88-90,000 that have been issued. Only about 40,000 of those are actually being used, which is interesting. And of the total 90,000 under 4,000 have gone to women. So the vehicle that was set up to get women access to the formal economy—or, to get refugees access to the formal economy just simply isn’t working for women. GROWN: Maybe I can actually add onto that, because we have a refugee window now as part of our IDA18 capital replenishment. And part of this is to give support to countries like Jordan and Lebanon. One of the things that we did in both countries is recognizing exactly the barriers that Hardin outlined. Is we actually had to work with the national governments, particularly in both countries, to change other laws and regulations. So the first thing that we did, actually, when we’ve given a loan to Lebanon and to Jordan—we have large loans in both countries—was to actually start to work on home-based business exclusions because this is an opportunity. If women face barriers to working in factory employment, but there’s prohibitions on being able to operate a business from the home, we’ve had to work with them. And in both countries, we did get exceptions for the refugee population to be able—to be able to work in areas, whether it’s textile or in services, which is particularly important, but to operate businesses from their home. So it’s a—quite a complicated chain. And there’s many things that we need to think about, because, you know, the barriers are often hidden. And who—I mean, nobody thought that the home-based—you know, this is in a completely different part of the law. But it’s something that is really critical for women’s self-employment and enterprise development. LEMMON: So I’m going to ask Caren one more question, and then we’ll go to the—to the conversation. So Caren, we’ve been talking about this, you’ve been talking about this, Hardin’s been talking about the centrality of ID and displacement and economic opportunity. Why is it still so hard in so many places, well outside the refugee context, right, to get ID to women, or to have women—to get the opportunity for having national ID to women? GROWN: Let me just give you some basic facts, because I think it’s really important to set the context. We have a database. It’s called the ID4D global data set that we’ve been putting together. And when we constructed this data set, we wanted to ensure that we could sex-disaggregate the information in it. So according to the most recent analysis of the data, 1 billion people around the globe face challenges in proving who they are—1 billion. That’s a lot. Eighty-one percent of those live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Forty-seven percent of those are below the national identity age of their country. So this highlights particularly the need to stand up civil and vital registration systems—birth and—particularly registering births. Our ID4D team partnered with our Findex that I mentioned earlier, the financial inclusion data set, to gather for the very first time nationally representative survey data from 99 countries on foundational ID coverage, the use of the ID, and the barriers to access. So the preliminary analysis of the lowest income countries show that women, and then just generally the bottom 40 percent, are most effected by lack of ID. So what is it? Some of it has to do with legal and regulatory issues. For example, in Afghanistan, Benin and Pakistan, these are all countries that have—I’m going to get another set of statistics—all countries that have gender gaps of over 15 percentage points in financial inclusion. A married woman cannot apply for a national ID in the same way as a married man. And so our latest Women Business and the Law reports show us that there are differences between unmarried women and unmarried men in being able to get a passport in three economies, between married women and married men in getting a passport 37 economies. Total of 54 legal differences between men and women in just the laws. So the laws are really important. I think a second issue has to do with the lack—the distance, and the lack of infrastructure and services. And here, this is where I—with all of its caveats, I think that technology like blockchain is going to be really, really important. A third issue I think is literacy, whether it’s legal literacy or basic literacy and knowledge—knowledge of what identity can give to women, and rights, issues that I think are really, really important. And then I think that sometimes there’s other cultural barriers at work. You know, in economies where women need husbands’ permission to travel or to access services, that is also a problem. But I’ll just say, it’s not inescapable. I was in Pakistan two years ago, three years ago. And we were in the process of—Pakistan has one of the largest and most impressive social protection programs. It’s called the BISP, the Benazir Income Support Programme. And one of the conditions for actually being able to access a cash transfer or benefits through the BISP is having an identity. And I was asking my colleagues about those areas which are fraught with conflict or where there’s instability. How do they actually get to households to be able to register women? Or what about households where women were secluded, how did they do it? And my colleagues were—which are—who are local, came back with some really clever approaches. They said, well, in these households, what we did is we restored to religious reasons. We went to the head of the household, often a man. And we said: Do you want your wife to be able to do her duty under the Koran, and do you want her to be able to make the pilgrimage at some point, to make the Hajj. And the men said, absolutely. And they said, well, to be able to do that, your wife actually needs a passport. And in order to have a passport, she has to have her picture taken. And in order to have that, she’s going to need an identification card. And often, men were very responsive to those arguments, because it was part of fulfilling a religious function. And so the correlation between identification and access to service—this was a very interesting story. And I’m really interested in talking to my colleagues, and Vyjayanti may have some stories as well about the different techniques that are really needed to get into very hard to reach—whether it’s distance or culture—hard to reach places, so that we ensure that women are really brought into these national systems. LEMMON: We have much terrain to cover, but I would love to open it to questions. And as we do, I—it’s interesting. I did some interviews with a program in India called Apni Beti Apni Dha, which was Our Daughters, our Wealth. And this program in its earliest phase had basically offered parents whose daughters reached 18 unwed a savings bond, which—but they had to have registered their daughter from the day of birth to be in the pipeline to receive this. And so I went and did the first set of interviews with ICRW, who some of you might know, when the first round of—group of girls were turning 18. And it was absolutely fascinating, because, you know, all of these girls were registered. Now, there was a lot of other change happening on the ground in India at the time, right? So it was hard to say that it was because of this. But parents would say, well, as long as she was home and we weren’t marrying here, we let her to go to school. And then in some cases, what you would see is the fathers and the mothers, but especially the fathers, would talk to you about how they’d seen their girls become good at math, or they’d seen their girls become good at a particular subject. And then they thought, well, wait a minute, maybe she can earn more if she’s working, potentially, than if we marry her off and then her wealth goes into somebody else’s household. And so families—some would say, well, we didn’t marry our daughter—the money isn’t enough to make a difference. Which it was very low. But I’d say, OK, well, then why didn’t you marry her? Well, we figured, you know, as long as she’s going to be here, you know, we might as well, you know, take the money and let her turn 18, and then we’ll use it. Now, there were obstacles. You know, people would say, oh, they’re going to use it for their wedding or whatever. But, you know, talk—at the very least girls were getting to 18. And you would see real—in some of the families we spoke with, you would really see a different recognition, because really what you’re trying to do is revalue the girl. And no one really likes to talk about it in terms of assets, right, but that is in a lot of ways—we come from the financial services world—I mean, that’s what you’re doing is changing the value of the girl, because they have access to more, and because they were brainwashed. So with that, if we have questions then I will take them. If not, this is a very quiet group. Oh, yes, Masuda. And I would just ask you to please just flip your card if you have a question. Masuda. Q: Yeah. Masuda, Insight Group and Women for Afghan Women. So this question of wealth and movement of women is something that really interests me. How do you—do we have any stats on how women, especially the refugees, move their money, how much money they typically have on them, and what their challenges are? Because I would imagine in a world where blockchain does change some of this, that people could actually have mobile wallets, that they could take their wealth in and use their fingers to access. I’m just wondering what your thinking is on that. And I asked this question at the Gates Foundation some time ago. And I know that there wasn’t a lot of response from folks. So I know that the private sector’s supposed to solve some of these problems. I was curious to know if you think they are. GROWN: So just on the blockchains, at our event yesterday, I think it was a colleague of U.N. Women who asked this question of how blockchain is being used in humanitarian contexts. And we heard a little bit about how World Food Program and some of the other humanitarian organizations are really trying to use blockchain and set up these systems. I really think that digital finance is really critical for displaced populations. And this is something that is a big agenda, as you just recognized, for the Gates Foundation, as well for the World Bank, because I think it will help them to carry their property with them. You know, but digital finance also needs to have that foundation of the digital identity, which it doesn’t always have, so. LEMMON: Tell me about the intersection. I want to piggyback on Masuda’s question. What is the intersection—and I’d really like to go to both of you on this—what is the intersection between financial—access to financial services and having something that shows who you are, some form of ID? GROWN: You start, and then I’ll join in. Q: So I think the recent Findex was similar to the last Findex in that, you know, in think about 20 percent—so, one in five people who are unable to open up a bank account, it’s because of lack of documentation. Now with the know your customer regulations, you need a form of identification to prove who you are. And that’s where that— LEMMON: You cannot open up a bank account if you do not have ID? Q: Yeah, some form of—it doesn’t necessarily always have to be a national ID. It can be other forms of ID. But without a form of identification that’s recognized by government or some other official form, you’re unable to open it. So that’s, I think, the direct link. It’s—particularly with the new—the new regulations in place. I think a digital form of ID, what that allows is something in addition to just having a more paper-based form of ID. You know, for example, in India, with the electronic know your customer rules, you’re able to open up a bank account now in a couple of minutes as opposed to what may have taken a week or two, because you can authenticate biometrically right then and there. And so that’s where the digital form of ID— GROWN: And I think for us, at the Bank Group, going forward, pushing for us the intersection—whether it’s through blockchain or other promising disruptive technologies—the intersection between digital finance and digital identification has a lot of potential and a lot of promise. And one of the things that we don’t yet see is the connection yet between these systems, except in a few places. Q: Yeah. I think the one thing with blockchain—and I know everyone’s excited about it, and it’s a new technology—I think it’s still unproven in certain—and I think it—so we’re all watching carefully, learning, trying to pilot and understand, I think, collectively. But there’s still a-ways to go in terms of what blockchain can and cannot do. GROWN: So there’s pilots right now. There’s nothing that has— LEMMON: Where is there—or, are there any pilots— Q: So not with ID specifically, but the Bank Group has a blockchain lab that— LEMMON: Yeah, we have—we have pilots in three different countries. And I heard this yesterday and I should remember what they are, and I’m apologizing. (Laughter.) I’ll tell you which ones they are later. (Laughter.) LANG: The only thing I would say on this, I’m not aware of how this has been used yet to help people cross borders, like people who are actually getting ready to flee, because in those kind of situations if your money’s not already in a form where you can take it with you in that way, then it’s almost too late at that point. And people are just taking what they can carry. And there, I’m kind of thinking what’s happening with the Rohingya in Bangladesh most immediately. But one of the things that—and this, while the blockchain, what she’s talking about, people are sprinting, there’s a little bit of jogging going on, on the humanitarian side of it, where in places like Jordan, for example, they’re now—and most people have probably heard about this—they’re using iris scans to—at bank teller machines—in order to dispense, you know, the like limited cash supplements that have been coming from WFP or from UNICEF or from other forms. So that it’s a way of sort of jumping around some of the identification issues in order to make sure that, you know, women are getting—women and men are getting the basic allotments that they’re supposed to get under the electronic currency. LEMMON: It’s so interesting. The iris scanning for this—sort of for verification, how—have you seen any reaction to it? Have you heard any reaction to it? Or are people generally—I mean, in some ways, because you don’t have the leakage of, like, somebody getting your money, but then it’s also your iris. So I mean, it’s— LANG: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve heard a couple of—so, anecdotally when we interviewed a bunch of people there as a great deal of sort of suspicion about what exactly this is all about, and also deep concern on behalf of a number of Syrian refugees, some of whom were formerly registered about there had been a period of time where if you were sort of caught outside of a camp or if you were seen trying to access part of the labor market that you shouldn’t, that the security forces sort of moved you not one of the less interesting, one of the less-hospitable camps. So there was a very strong disincentive for engaging directly with the economy or the government in a way that would bring in the national security apparatus. Now, I don’t know how much that’s cleared up, like, since the—in the last year, in particular, as the compact has improved. But it was definitely an issue early on. LEMMON: Yeah, please. Oh, if you have more to add. Q: No. Go ahead. Q: Actually, I just wanted to sort of come in and echo your comments that—and Caren’s. So the U.N.—and I can speak specifically to U.N. Women—has been very much looking into the blockchain application, particularly in humanitarian settings. We haven’t jumped in yet. We’re talking to lots of people. But, you know, it’s attractive because, talking about Zaatari, we partnered with WFP a few years ago and ran the biggest cash reward program for women then. And, you know, Gayle’s comment about why women wanted to use their thumbs, that was not—you know, it’s not surprise, if you’re, you know, doing this every day and you know. We want to give the money to the women and well, because we know what happens when the men are the ones in humanitarian settings getting the money or the food, right? And that’s come out for a while now. So we—so, yeah, so the bigger picture is we’re very much exploring it. But I think before we would invest in it too deeply, we want to see a little bit more on the outcomes and figure out really how you do this because, I mean, to be frank, the U.N. isn’t on the cutting edge of technological issues. (Laughter.) LEMMON: Yeah, and I just—(inaudible)—and I’ll come to Ricki—I interviewed a girl in Syria who was 16, two children. One was two and a half and one was six months old. And she told me every girl she knew—and she was clearly educated and had been through some schooling and was very savvy, knew Skype, you know, was talking to me about things. And we met her in really like the husk of a building that had been bombed out, that she was—they had fled to from Raqqa to Tabqah. And she said to me, you know, every girl I know has either been disappeared, forced into marriage, married, or kidnapped—every girl that I knew from school. And she said, and I’m lucky, because at least I like my husband. And I thought, you know, that’s a—she said, all my hopes now are for the next generation. It is really startling to hear girls not even 17 talk about how all her hopes are for the next generation because the early marriage issue is very much alive and well. And there is—back to the ID—for people who are being forced into it, there’s no way to show, you know, if you could go to authorities, to the authorities, what age you really are if you don’t have that ID with you. Ricki. Q: I was going to make the point, financial services has been my field for a long time. And in 1983, I was speaking in Ecuador at a conference on ATMs. (Laughter.) And this was, of course, a kind of hot thing then. And I was making all the points about how we protect people under U.S. law, and how they could do the same thing. The main issue everybody in the room was worried about was whether the government could track them through ATM machines. So it isn’t at all surprising to me—and I was going to ask the question, I’m glad it came up—that security issues would be a great concern for people, particularly in countries with a great deal of disruption and a lack of safety. And I wonder what the international organizations can do. They have typically, at least, some additional leverage they can use to try to protect individual identification information. Is anybody looking at this? LEMMON: Yeah. Let’s talk about, you know, can it be a danger to people to have an ID? GROWN: It can. And I’m going to ask Vyjayanti because we’ve been working on this and she’s been leading on this. Q: So, I mean, I think data protection, privacy issues are critical. I think there is just as much—there is development benefits for having an ID. There’s also potential misuse of digital forms of ID. But I think what we, and many of the partners are doing, is to ensure that when we are supporting some of these efforts that we support countries in putting in place the sound privacy data protection laws. So we have an ID-enabling environment assessment framework, which allows us to go in and look at the gaps and what exists, and the gaps in the country’s data protection privacy, and also other things such as exclusion and discrimination in laws, and then provide that support. And so in every single one of our country operations, there’s a—that’s one of the key foundations of any of our engagements. I think in addition to that, what we’re also starting to look at is more of the technology and processes. So you have the legal and regulatory foundations, but then you can also look at some of the elements of design. So privacy by design in a system. So elements of user consent and control. And so that’s a new stream of work that’s underway as well. GROWN: But one thing Vyjayanti didn’t mention is we took the lead with a number of partner organizations to establish a set of principles that we hope will set the standards for country governments, for international partners working on identification. And the commitments of these principles include safeguarding data privacy, security, and user rights through comprehensive legal and regulatory frameworks. So many organizations have now—how many have signed onto this? Q: Twenty-four now. GROWN: Twenty-four organizations. And I think that’s really important in terms of at least more of an ethical framework for the work that we do. LANG: I just want to ask one question—a follow-up question on this. How does that work in, say, a country like Lebanon or a country like Jordan? And I ask this, because I remember having some meetings with the national intelligence services in both countries and sort of talking about how they saw the refugee situation, whether it was a threat or not. And it was fascinating, in Jordan, sort of behind closed doors, they would say: We got a handle on that. We know where they are. And we have a very good sense of who’s moving, and what position—like, what communities, what their family relationships look like. And part of that is some of this tech and being able to know who’s where and who’s registered under what systems. Do you have—I mean, with a country like Jordan or Lebanon where, you know, some of the—I’m just curious how the legal issues play out and how the legal protections are enforced in these situations. Q: We haven’t engaged specifically on ID in these two countries. I think when we engage—and if we are providing, for example, both advisory and technical assistance support, but also financing, then we do have greater influence and leverage. And so in all the countries in which we are going to be supporting the systems, that’s a non-starter, where we would be looking at that and ensuring. I think the question sometimes is a sequencing. You’re not going to have all the regulations in place. So there is an element of the sequencing that is required. I mean, this is not just an issue for ID alone. And even from all of our phones, you know, data protection and privacy is an issue more broadly. And we know from Facebook and others— GROWN: How many of you have received more than 100 emails in the last four days, now that the European laws have gone into effect? Q: Oh, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And with the AI and so many other things, I think—so I do think ID ends up being a bit of lightning rod and a focus, but so we are looking at this as if that’s an opening to ensuring good regulations, then let’s do it that way. LEMMON: Yeah. I’d like to go to Rosita. Q: Just a couple of comments. I’ve been trying to get smart on actually some of the issues that you were pointing to. One was just I’ve noticed there are some people who are trying to get ahead of what’s being called a tech-lash. So some of it is, you know, these fears—you know, based on where you live. So you’re afraid of your government, you don’t trust your government, and there are a number of funders and others who are working in the policy space that are trying to get ahead of that. Actually, Amir Network has a body of work, Ford Foundation also is looking at that. And I think that you will soon see a number of other funders that are going to be building teams and portfolios of investments because there’s a very fine line, I think, between consumer protection, which at the end of the day, when it comes to data and its governance and ownership, it’s a sovereign issue—both at the country level, the government has to decide, but then at the individual level. And that’s where kind of the line is where funders kind of have to stop and respect, or at least we choose to in terms of saying, hey, this is your call, government. This is your call individual. But we’re going to enable and empower you with the facts. So that fine line—so there’s kind of the consume protection side of the argument, but then there’s the opportunities that you might be missing out on. So Vyjayanti mentioned the artificial intelligence. So the—I forget the name of the organization—but there’s this center that looks at data privacy. They issued a report on the unintended consequences of the new EU regulation on privacy. And one of them was saying absolutely it’s going to protect—provide consumer protection on one hand, but it’s also going to thwart the impact that innovations like artificial intelligence can have. And so I think that’s that really delicate balance that all of us have to be a part of, testing and making sure stays in balance is that at the same time while we’re trying to protect individuals and their information and their privacy, we also are thwarting the same innovations that can help those people. And in our case, we’re looking at the poor and trying to get them into the system. And so there’s these laws that are trying to protect the system from itself is essentially keeping these other technologies from happening. So keeping that balance. And then the other observations and financial services—for the poor perspective on this issue, is a lot of financial service providers feel this huge burden that many in their governments really expect them to play a role of law enforcement, particularly as it relates to the proving of identity and making sure they’re complying with anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism. That’s a huge burden and results in high costs of transactions, which results in not everyone being able to be able to afford to be a part of that economy. And results in financial exclusion. So there—again, there’s an opportunity to lower these costs for the financial service providers if you star sharing information between law enforcements, agencies of the government, and financial services providers. And you can imagine why a consumer might not want that, because they only want their bank to have that information. They don’t want their government to have that. But actually at the end of the day, they might win or gain much more if these information flows are coming. So I think something that I’m hoping the Council will continue to kind of provide leadership on is really looking at these points of tension, where an ideal world would have a frictionless flow of both money and information. But how do you do that in a way that really protects people? Because that’s how you’re going to get everyone in one system. And essentially all boats will be lifted, but there’s going to be these tensions both at the national sovereign level, at the individual protection level. And it’s kind of like who gets to decide in a global economy? LEMMON: Yeah, and it’s the points of tension and the points of intersection, right, because they’re coming directly into contact. On the one hand, getting an ID for a mom in Haryana is going to be incredible in terms of she can go and get her government money with her thumbprint. On the other hand, you now know every place she’s going to move around, and a lot of times that she does it, right? So just last—we have three minutes left. We’re going to go to Charlotte. And then we’ll wrap up. And I’m sure our folks will stay around for a moment or two if you have additional questions. Q: So thank you. So I’m with the Peace Corps. So just two quick things. One, I always remember visiting a volunteer in Morocco a few years ago who attended a Girls Leading Our Way camp that we do. And it was the first time that she was even leaving her family, right, going to a camp for a week. And first time she danced, first time she did a lot of the different, you know, activities. And what struck me, we were invited to have lunch—oh, the most delicious food—and the father is the one who was more transformed, because she came back and then had different conversations with the father. So it was—I’m glad you mentioned literacy and education and how the young people cannot affect—you know, have an intergenerational change. So, I’m hoping we do more investing also in, you know, girls’ education and empowerment. And then my question was, is there a correlation between having more women parliamentarians in some of these countries to changing legal barriers? GROWN: Some of my colleagues did a study about—well, actually, it’s dated 2013. And there’s others outside in academia as well, that shows that having more females participate at the national level in parliaments is more likely to lead to laws and regulations on the traditional women’s issues. So relating to health, to education, to social protection, to care. There is also other evidence from economists that have done work looking at the impact of reservations and quotas and set-asides at the municipal level, for instance, in India, in Afghanistan, that show that when you have this threshold of at least 30 percent of women who participate, women do express in a fiscal context different—somewhat different preferences than men for where the budge should go. So in West Bengal, in India, both men and women wanted education for the kids. But then a second priority for the men was roads, but women wanted water and sanitation. In an impact evaluation of the local village councils in Afghanistan that was done by some of my colleagues at the Bank, Afghanistan actually has 30 percent set aside of the local village councils. There’s also been even more impacts actually on girls. So seeing girls—seeing women participate in public spaces and public roles has changed their aspirations and what they would like to do going forward. So there’s a mounting body of evidence on this. And we can, if you’re interested, give you a lot of citations. So the bank itself does not actively work in political spaces, but we’re using this evidence to actually argue in the governance structures that we help to create or set up—whether it’s utilities in the energy sector or the water users associations—really ensure, find mechanisms to create those pipelines and ensure that women can meaningfully participate in governance. We have a strong—and there’s a lot of work in the business literature as well shows that having more women, for instance, on corporate board. So there’s a lot of emerging evidence that’s—well, not emerging—a lot of evidence that’s converging on this issue. LEMMON: And with that, I want to say thank you for what has definitely been such an interesting and very specific conversation, because to me it’s really important that we talk about these in terms of what they mean for people’s lives, whether you’re a mom who Hardin just recently interviewed in Jordan, or, you know, a woman in India who’s really thinking about what her family’s future looks like. So this is just one more stop on the road to conversation. Continue to join us for this Gates-funded series. And we very much look forward to the next discussion. Thank you so much. (Applause.) LANG: Thank you very much, Gayle. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

Despite the relationship between women’s labor force participation and growth, legal barriers continue to inhibit women’s economic potential around the world. According to the World Bank’s 2018 Women, Business, and the Law report, 2.7 billion women globally are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. World Bank legal expert and 2018 report author Sarah Iqbal explores the most comprehensive data set on legal barriers women face worldwide and discusses how to level the legal playing field for women. This meeting is generously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.    Transcript BIGIO: Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. My name is Jamille Bigio. I’m a senior fellow with the Council’s Women and Foreign Policy Program. Our program has worked with leading scholars for 15 years to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy and national security interests. I want to take a moment before we begin to thank our advisory council members who are here with us today as well as the Gates Foundation for its generous support of today’s discussion. I also want to remind everyone that the presentation discussion and question-and-answer period will be on the record. So right now you have, hopefully, heard the estimate that $28 trillion could be added to global annual GDP simply by leveling the playing field between women and men at work. But despite these financial stakes, most countries still have laws and policies on the books that make it harder for women to work. The World Bank is helping countries understand the effect of these discriminatory laws. The Women, Business, and the Law report, now in its fifth iteration, examines how the legal and regulatory environment affects women’s ability to get jobs and to start businesses. They’ve just launched their latest research with some sobering findings. Here are just a few—that 2.7 billion women globally are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men; 104 economies still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs; and, in the context of the #MeToo movement, as we look at workplace discrimination, 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace. But the Bank also found that there’s reason for hope. Governments are starting to take notice and are undertaking legal reforms that are helping to make the environment more equal for women to work and to pursue economic opportunities. I’m thrilled that we are joined today by World Bank legal expert and the 2018 report author, Sarah Iqbal. She comes to this role with a rich background in the law, on issues of financial inclusion, and on women’s rights. We’re so lucky to be able to hear from her about the World Bank’s latest research. Sarah, before we dive into what the research has actually found, can you talk to us a little bit about how this report came about? Why has the World Bank undertaken this massive research effort to document the legal rights of women around the world? IQBAL: Thank you so much, Jamille. And I’d like to thank all of you for coming here this morning. It’s really an honor and a privilege for me to be here, and I wanted to explain a little bit how we came about doing this research. It’s the tenth year now and the fifth edition of the report, and I have to say the reason we started doing this was almost accidental. Some of you who work on women’s rights might realize this and we started this because about 10—actually, 11 years ago, the World Bank’s board, which is composed of all of the member states of the World Bank, asked another project that we work on—the Doing Business project—to look at how the legal and regulatory environment for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises actually affects women. So the idea is there’s a legal and regulatory environment. It should function the same for women and for men just because it’s general neutral. But so we started asking survey respondents, mainly lawyers, judges, people who work in setting up sort of enterprises, how is this different for men and women and what we got was a series of answers that, basically, told us we didn’t know what we didn’t know and we were asking the wrong questions. So, basically, what these people from 190 countries around the world told us is, you’re asking about up here, but the barriers—the legal barriers—for women are actually down here. So you’re missing all these barriers to entry—things like sort of do you need your husband’s permission to, you know, leave your home—do you need your husband’s permission to actually sign a contract or register a business. If you’re already looking at sort of operating in the business environment, you’re not focusing on unequal property rights, unequal inheritance, job restrictions on women—all of these things that we now understand you need a gender lens to look at sort of things that prevent women from doing the same thing as everybody else. We just assumed that women could do the same things as men and we didn’t realize we weren’t actually looking in the right way. So, basically, after that first year of realizing the mistake that we made, we took a step back and we started to do more research to understand better what are the particular obstacles to women because they are women, and we came up with this set of seven indicators: accessing institutions, using property, getting a job, providing incentives to work, building credit, going to court, and protecting women from violence. And I think it’s really important to understand that when you’re looking at women’s issues you need to look with a gender lens, because I see it a lot with my colleagues who work on these issues. I see it with other organizations as well. We just don’t know what we don’t know and we assume a lot things, and the problem is if you don’t look with a gender lens you miss things. And I tell this story a lot just because people feel like, oh, the World Bank should know what it’s doing on gender and I can tell you it really didn’t 10 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then and I would say the international community has as well. So that gives us reason to hope. But the results of the 2018 report are also sort of a good cautionary tale about the long way we still need to go. BIGIO: Well, on that note, what did you all find in this latest report? What have been some of the most striking findings for you, in terms of the extent of the discriminatory laws? And have we seen the legal environment get better for women since the 10 years that you started doing this research? IQBAL: So starting with the first part, I do think there’s quite pervasive legal restrictions that prevent women from reaching their economic potential. So, for example, a third of the economies in the data set—68 economies—actually still have at least one form of legal restriction that prevents women’s freedom of movement or voice or agency, and this is really basic things like, you know, needing your husband’s permission to leave your house or leave the country or needing an extra signature or your husband’s name or his permission to get a passport or a national ID card or signing a contract—some of these really basic things that we assume that everyone has the ability to do. So, for example, I’m based in D.C., right. So yesterday I came to New York. I actually, you knew, flew because that was easier after work. I needed to show my driver’s license to get on that plane. Well, if I needed my husband’s permission to get that national ID card, that driver’s license, maybe I wouldn’t be here speaking with you—all of these really basic things, right, and these are mostly economies in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East and North Africa that have these type of restrictions. However, as Jamille mentioned, there’s 104 economies that still have at least one form of job restriction on women. I mean, that, to me, was stunning because I knew there was a lot of job restrictions—I didn’t assume that it was, you know, over half of all economies, and this is something like in the Russian Federation there’s a regulation whereby women can’t do 456 specific jobs because they are women. You know, these are things like being a captain on a ship, being a train driver, driving a certain type of tractor, being a plumber, electrician. All of these are actually sort of low-skill high-wage jobs, right, and that makes a difference because, you know, women want to be able to earn more and they can’t because they’re women, and this is for nonpregnant women, non-nursing mothers, so just sort of a woman who shouldn’t have any sort of constraints in terms of what she can and cannot do. And a lot of these are well intentioned, and by that I mean they’re meant to protect women. A lot of them are tied to demographic concerns. Most of them are, basically, leftover legacy legislation. So in the Russian Federation it’s a holdover law from the Soviet Union. You see similar types of restrictions throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It’s actually very pervasive in that region. Some economies don’t permit women to work in jobs that are immoral. What does that mean? I don't know. I think sort of it’s very discretionary and that can prevent women from working in certain industries. In Argentina, women can’t work in distilleries. You know, in France there’s a weightlifting requirement whereby women can’t actually work in jobs that require them to lift weights above a certain threshold. In Madagascar, they can’t work with certain types of sort of printed material. In Guinea, they can’t use certain types of hammers. They’re all very strange pieces of legislation. You see in a lot of commonwealth countries holdovers of things like the Factories Act. So women can’t work on certain type of machinery, and you see the same laws in South Asia and exactly the same laws in the Caribbean and that’s because they’re holdovers from old British law. And so one of the things that we work on with our colleagues is trying to remove these restrictions because it’s about the choice of jobs, right. So women should be able to determine what they want to do and don’t want to do by themselves. It shouldn’t be legislation that prevents them from doing this type of thing. And one other thing I wanted to point out is the importance of the #MeToo and the Time’s Up movement, which really started, you know, based on sexual harassment, based on sexual assault, but has also shifted into other workplace issues like the gender pay gap. Well, one of the things that we find is a lot of the gender pay gap comes from things like occupational segregation, and occupational segregation is exacerbated when you have these type of job restrictions. So we did some research and we find there’s a larger gender pay gap in countries that have at least one job restriction because women get sorted into jobs that pay less. And in terms of sexual harassment itself, you know, 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in employment, but we find where countries do such—have such laws actually more women owned firms. And that’s the other thing—we did a lot of analysis looking at what is the effect—what is the economic effect of these type of legal restrictions and we found, you know, on things like women’s ownership and leadership of firms, women’s leadership in the political environment, both in parliamentary positions but also in ministerial positions, the more legal restrictions you have, the less women in leadership. And it’s because, you know, if you don’t have women entering the labor market—if you don’t have women working in firms, they don’t rise up. If you don’t have women entering the government, you know, you’re never going to have them at those leadership positions because they’re stopped at the door. They’re stopped from leaving their home. They’re stopped from getting on that plane and coming and making a presentation. BIGIO: So you talked a little bit about what the implications are for women’s economic participation, for their leadership, when countries have these kinds of discriminatory laws. How does that then connect to economic growth for countries? IQBAL: I mean, basically, if you’re locking out a certain proportion of your labor force—of your work force—your economy is not growing as much as it could have. So there’s a lot of research from McKinsey and others showing the cost of sort of legal exclusion. The IMF has done a lot of research on this as well, and the idea is, you know, sort of what are the economic gains that could be had if you let women into the labor market—if you let them into the jobs of their choices—if you let them have the entrepreneurial sort of ability. And, actually, there are some impact evaluations that are also showing the specific consequences of reforming certain laws, right, because a lot of the analysis that we do is global and aggregate, and you mentioned the McKinsey—the McKinsey report and what are the economic gains globally. But, for example—you see in India, for example, they reformed the Hindu Succession Act and they reformed it to allow women to inherit joint family property in the same way as men, and they did it at the state level first. Now it’s throughout India, but because they did it at the state level were able to sort of estimate, basically, the gains from this reform And there are papers that look at this showing that, you know, the outcomes for women after this reform, and you see more women having bank accounts. You see more sort of women having sanitary latrines in the home, the gains for girls’ education, especially the second-generation gains are much higher, and it’s a reflection of preferences, right. So if I, as a woman, have greater access to financial resources because I’m able to inherit in the same way as men, maybe my preferences are taken into greater account in the home, right. So my bargaining power is greater and then I can say to my husband, OK, I want to send my daughter to school as well as my son—OK, it’s important for me to have my own bank account—yes, I want a sanitary latrine in my home instead of going out into the field. There was another impact evaluation done in Ethiopia. So they reformed the family law in Ethiopia also at the state level first and then they did it nationally and, basically, that showed it removed things like sort of—it used to be the case that you needed your husband’s permission to work. Now that’s no longer the case. They introduced joint titling as well and there you see more women also working outside the home, more women working in higher value-added sectors. And one of the things that you asked earlier, which I forgot to answer, is sort of gains over time, right, and sort of we’ve been looking at this data over the past 10 years, but a few years ago we did a 50-year data set. So we looked in both property rights and sort of legal capacity issues over 50 years for a hundred countries and we found actually tremendous gains, right. So half of the restrictions in sub-Saharan Africa were removed in this period, basically, from decolonization to 2010, and sort of this was interesting for a variety of sort of analysis, both in showing what are the drivers of reform but also showing the pace of reform. In this round of the report, we found that 65 economies had made 87 positive changes, and actually taking it back even further, if we look in countries like the U.K., if we look in the United States at the state level, it wasn’t that long ago—it was in the last hundred years that women started getting property rights. You know, there was—it used to be the case in all common law countries married women didn’t have the same property rights as single women. When you got married, you gave up your property rights to your husband, and there was a series of acts introduced in the U.K. and also in U.S. states in the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years called the Married Women’s Property Act, and the basis for these was actually giving married women the same property rights of single women, and you see some sort of analysis—economic analysis—of the consequences of giving these property rights to married women. You know, more women started taking out patents in U.S. states where they equalized the law. More women started opening businesses. You started seeing greater investment in things like children’s health. So, you know, there are sort of trends in terms of going forward. I do think, even now, the trend is a positive one over time. But the problem is the pace, right. So things are getting better but not fast enough, and I think sort of this year, last year, the #MeToo movement, the Time’s Up movement, all of these sort of awareness-raising campaigns, the fact that we’re concentrating on these issues, actually presents an opportune time to actually improve the pace, to get the reform moving faster. BIGIO: As you pointed to with the research, there’s certainly evidence that would, hopefully, drive countries to undertake these legal reforms, whether to help them realize the economic gains of having more women in the workforce or the benefits to families. How are countries undertaking these reforms? And we also know, of course, that just changing the law on the books doesn’t always translate into changes in practice or in the everyday lives of women. So how do you look at the implementation mechanisms as well? IQBAL: So in terms of how countries are undertaking these changes, I think part of it is just highlighting the laws that exist, right, and a lot of the countries that we work in, which are developing countries, often policymakers aren’t aware that these restrictions are there, right, and it’s because it doesn’t affect them directly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat across the table from policymakers and said, OK, you know, in your family law there’s XYZ restriction—you know, husbands need to give their wives permission to work, and it’s generally men in the delegation—you know, a large group of men—and they’ll say that’s not the case—I don’t have to give my wife permission. You know, that’s kind of the standard response, and you show them the law, right, and they say, OK, you know, that’s not the case—it’s not implemented—maybe it’s there. And then, you know, you’ll see kind of one woman in the back and she’s kind of nodding her head because she knows this is an issue and sort of it’s not her voice that comes to the front of the table. We do a lot of work with civil society organizations in these countries, you know, and we always ask, you know, are these issues that are on the books and are not implemented. I mean, the question is really who are the policymakers. Yes, they don’t need to give their wives permission—yes, they don’t need to give their daughters permission because their wives and daughters are relatively wealthy—they’re relatively well educated. But if you go and you talk to civil society organizations that work in the rural areas, you know, that work outside of the main business city, these are restrictions that are enforced. And it’s not like the husband takes his wife to court, but it informs the social norms. There’s a whole system in place that, you know, puts it into effect, and the question is who are we trying to help. It’s not necessarily the empowered, educated, relatively well-off women. It’s one’s who maybe don’t know their rights, who don’t know the avenues, and are encumbered both by the legal restrictions and the social and cultural norms, which reinforce each other. And that actually brings me to the next part of your question, which is, you know, sort of, OK, the law is one thing—what about the implementation and effectiveness of that law. And I think there’s a push-pull, right. In some countries, society, the social norms, things change and then the law is a holdover and it gets changed later, right, and then it’s actually relatively easier to change because it’s not so much engrained in the identity of a—of a people of a culture. In other areas—and we’ve seen this in countries, too—the law changes first and it kind of pulls society after it, and the question is how much you want to push with that and also then how do you work on the implementation side, and I’ll give you an example. So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it used to have one of the most restrictive family codes that I have personally seen. It was, literally, verbatim based on the French Code Napoleon, which was introduced by the Belgians, basically, and you had similar legislation throughout West Africa. And it used to be the case in France, you know, in a lot of continental Europe and also in West Africa, based on the Code Napoleon, that married women had the legal capacity of, essentially, minors, right. They couldn’t sign, you know, a contract, open a bank account, register property, initiate court proceedings without their husband’s written permission—you know, I, the husband of Sarah Iqbal, allow her to have this bank account—it goes in your file. This was removed in continental Europe sort of—you know, I would say, in France in the ’60s and the ’70s they removed the last vestiges of this. In parts of West Africa, sort of there’s been reform over time, but in DRC it was, basically, verbatim, and we did a mapping of this. You could look at the old Code Napoleon and the DRC civil code article by article, word by word. It was the same. And so the World Bank actually worked with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for a number of years to show them both the economic consequences of this to build up a constituency around this to show reforms that happened in the region in countries like Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire and others on, you know, why they should be reformed and also explaining, you know, where it was coming from, how it was introduced—how it wasn’t, you know, sort of intrinsic to the culture of DRC but, rather, was something that was introduced. And so this has been reformed. But in terms of the implementation, you know, a lot of the implementing authorities—and by this I mean, like, you know, land registrars, you know, business registrars, banks, others—don’t really know, right. They’re not aware. Women themselves might not be fully aware. So there’s another project looking at the enforcement and implementation, and a large part of it is training—training for people on the front lines like the registrars, you know, sort of like judges, people working at the municipal and administrative levels and also just an awareness-raising campaign with civil society organizations about, you know, what women’s new legal rights are, and this takes time. You know, implementing any law takes time. It takes an effective administrative framework and it takes financial resources. BIGIO: It’s powerful to hear that the benefit of creating this comprehensive data set isn’t just for the ability to compare between countries and to look at what’s the status of women globally but also to have the country-level data—to be able to do the advocacy with a specific country that these are the barriers here and make sure that people are aware and that policymakers are, hopefully, undertaking the reform that you’ve talked about. Looking at how countries do compare to one another, one of the things that you all have done for the first time in this report is to actually score specific indicators, and I know that there’s some thinking around whether you transition this into actually ranking countries and having the ability to compare in that way between how countries are faring in terms of the legal environments for women. Can you talk a little bit about what that process has been to score these for the first time and what the benefits and challenges are of doing a gender ranking? IQBAL: Sure. So previous to this edition of the report, we presented what we call raw data, right. So, essentially, you know, we had a series of questions and answers, laying out the legal environment for women in 189 economies. But it was a little bit hard to understand at the country level what to focus on. Our own colleagues told us this. Our stakeholders, counterparts, civil society organizations, and governments also said, you know, what do I do with this, right. So there are all these yeses and noes—what is the thing that I should be focusing on. So one of the things that we did in this edition is introduce scoring. So we took the set of information that we were looking at and we refined it into scored indicators for the sort of seven areas. So you can see now for a country, say, Pakistan, you know, what is the score on accessing institutions, what is the score on protecting women from violence, and it’s a number from zero to a hundred—zero being the worst, a hundred being the best—and it’s easy to see at a glance, OK, how is Pakistan doing, you know, relative to Bangladesh, relative to Sri Lanka. You know, so that actually really helps policymakers hone in. And we’ve started to get a lot of feedback from a variety of people, including governments, saying, OK, why is my score on this indicator not as good as my neighbor—basically, what can I do to improve, or saying no, you’re wrong—I should have a higher score, and it engage—it’s allowed a lot of country dialogue—a lot of engagement. In the past two months since the launch of the report, we’ve gotten a lot of requests, a lot of what we call data challenges where governments are saying, you know, you’re wrong, and it generates a lot of dialogue. One of the things that we were thinking about and we haven’t done and we’re still sort of trying to figure out if it’s something that we should be doing, going forward, is whether or not we want to introduce an economy ranking. The project that we spun out of—the one that I was talking about earlier, Doing Business—has a country ranking. So it ranks countries on the business and regulatory environment in its indicators and this has generated a lot of engagement for the Bank, a lot of reform in countries, to improve the legal environment for entrepreneurship, and it’s a controversial thing to have a ranking. So the pros are really the amount of reform, the amount of dialogue, the amount of engagement that it takes, and I would say the cons are, basically, the controversy for the—for an organization like the World Bank. We need to sort of make sure that we are doing all of our homework in terms of is this the right set of things to be looking at—you know, what does the econometric analysis tell us, and then there’s also a very strong consultative process and, you know, discussions with our shareholders that we need to go into and do. So whether or not we do a ranking I would say is a question for my management and the management of the World Bank. But I do know, you know, sitting next to the Doing Business project, that having a ranking actually generates a lot of high-level attention and reform. I know when the last Doing Business report launched, India, I believe, went up in the ranking. And then, on Prime Minister Modi’s Facebook page, they were talking about, you know, how great it was that India went up in the Doing Business ranking. It’s a priority for many of the BRICS economies. I mean, it gets a lot of high-level engagement. BIGIO: And you’ve highlighted, as you’ve looked at this latest research, that the problem has been the pace, so to look at whether it’s this avenue or what are other avenues there are to help speed up the pace of legal reform to make sure that women and men actually have an equal playing field when it comes to engaging in the workforce. With that we’re going to open to the question-answer period. Please raise your placard if you would like to speak. When I call on you, please introduce yourself. Please. Q: Thank you for making the trip from Washington. This is wonderfully interesting. I wondered if you could expand on a couple of things; first, your discussion about the work that the Bank is doing with civil society. I mean, it’s long argued that the most effective route to reform in country is with the engagement of women’s movements on the ground. And you mentioned that. And I know that that’s a big change for the Bank. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more. And secondly—and I’m not sure how directly this relates, but I’ve been intrigued to hear more about what the impact has been of the fund that was announced with much fanfare last year by Ivanka Trump and the Saudi Arabian prince of $100 million to advance women’s entrepreneurship. You mentioned that the Bank is working on that. And I gather that’s being managed by the Bank. So if you could tell us more specifically about that. So I have something I can say positive, if there is something to say positive, or negative if not. IQBAL: Great. So in terms of the question on civil society, I agree with you. I think working with civil-society organizations is crucially important when you work on women’s legal rights. I will say the Bank does more work on civil society than it used to. It certainly doesn’t have a reputation for working with civil-society organizations. I will say, from the inside, there’s a lot more work going on. We actually have a team that focuses on civil-society organizations and trying to build up those linkages. In terms of what the work the Women, Business, and the Law project does in particular is we work with civil-society organizations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, to help them understand and use the data, the idea being that we are data producers. So we produce primary data and then we sort of do a lot of outreach with different audiences to help them use, understand that data, and also to hear from them, you know, what we should be collecting. Is the data accessible? Are we presenting it in the right way? I will say the World Bank is made up of economists, and economists look at data maybe in a slightly different way than sort of non-economists do. And I say this as a non-economist, right. So my background is as a lawyer. I’ve been working with economists quite heavily for the past 10 years, and a lot of the World Bank data is not so accessible for civil-society organizations. So we work to try and make it more accessible, usable, because ultimately they’re the ones on the ground. They’re the advocates. They’re—especially in this space, they’re the ones who are working with government to try and get them to change these things. And we try and make our information more usable. So we’ve had a series of workshops, I think, in about 10 or 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We have a two-year program at work that’s about to initiate to do more. And we work a lot with organizations like the Femmes Juristes, organizations of women judges in Africa; sort of WiLDAF, which is an organization of women that works on law and development in West Africa. And what we try and do is build linkages between these civil-society organizations on the ground and the World Bank country office on the ground, because, you know, we sit in D.C., but the World Bank country office, you know, sitting, say, in Burkina Faso or in Ghana or what have you, manages the relationship with the government, right. So if we build that linkage, then a lot of the gender work actually gets included into the portfolio of that country office. And so we’re trying to build these linkages better. Your next question was on We-Fi, the women’s financing fund. I don’t work on that specifically, but I can certainly give you sort of some of the things that I’ve seen. So in terms of the impact of the fund, I’m actually more familiar with—there’s a portion of it that looks at the regulatory environment, right. So there’s a portion of it that’s sort of actually financing women entrepreneurs. That part of it I don’t know that much about. I do know more about the part of it that is focusing on sort of the regulatory environment. And, at least from my perspective where I sit, I think it’s really a good thing that it’s looked holistically, right, because there’s a lot of research that shows you can’t just give financing to women entrepreneurs but not look at other issues, you know, whether they be sort of legal barriers like the ones I was describing earlier, mentoring, other things. You actually need to look at it holistically, right. So I actually think the way that they’ve set up the fund, they’re looking at financing, which is a big issue for women entrepreneurs, but other constraints; you know, binding constraints as well. I think that’s actually really important and a big step forward. I’ve seen other funds that just focus on the financing part. And I think that’s important, but it’s not looking at the whole. And these are issues that are inextricably intertwined, right. So you can’t just look at one piece of it. BIGIO: Yeah. Q: OK, thank you. I’m Angelika Mendes-Lowney from Women’s World Banking. Thank you very much for the overview; very interesting. I have two questions. One is more general; if you could speak about which countries have made the most progress and if you can see a direct link to how that improves women’s economic participation. I don’t know if you’ve tracked that or how you track it. And the other question is a little more specific. We’ve been looking into—it’s about the building-credit aspect. We’ve been looking into how movable collateral registries can be used to—really how their potential can be unlocked to benefit women entrepreneurs. And we’ve seen—you know, you talked a little bit about the missing link between what happens at the legal level and then to the actual key actors. So we’ve seen the same, that in some countries the movable collateral registries are in place, but then the financial-service providers are not necessarily aware of them. So I’m curious whether you have been looking into that in the building-credit component and what you found. Thank you. IQBAL: Great. Thank you. In terms of which countries have made progress and how that improves economic outcomes, I mean, I think there’s—you know, I talked about the two impact evaluations earlier. And there’s a time lag, right. And then how do you measure at the country level sort of the outcomes. What are the outcomes that you’re looking at? And then you need to give it enough time to actually filter through the economy. So, you know, those are actually the two best sort of tested examples that we’ve seen, although a lot of what we do is look at aggregate, right. So what we’re looking at is certain laws and policies, and then we’re looking at how it influences aggregate outcomes, the idea being that, you know, it sort of belies something that’s easy and in the control of policymakers, whereas outcomes like growth or labor-force participation—I mean, it’s very hard for policymakers to actually influence that directly unless it’s through an avenue like the law. So, you know, I can tell you, for example, in this round of the report which are the countries that made the most progress sort of quantitatively. DRC is one of them. I was talking about that earlier. You know, a country like Kenya, which introduced its first domestic-violence law, has also made a tremendous amount of progress. Zambia introduced a gender-equality act that includes actually some of the things in building credit, including, I believe, nondiscrimination in sort of financial transactions on the basis of gender. Iraq, actually, and Afghanistan both are fragile countries that have made a lot of steps forward. In Afghanistan, for example, they introduced a lot of steps on sort of legal provisions on violence against women. The question is, you know, what was their base, right. So perhaps they were coming from a lower base than certain other economies. But relative to themselves, they’ve improved a lot. What are the precise economic consequences of that? You know, it’s too early to say. We need to kind of give it time to both be effectively implemented and understood. But at the aggregate, I can tell you sort of legal reforms lead to better outcomes in a variety of areas, including sort of one of the things that you’re probably more familiar with, which is sort of women’s financial inclusion. One of the main outcome data sets that we look at is the Findex, the Global Financial Inclusion Index. They recently launched their third round last month, and what they found is the gender gap in financial inclusion is exactly the same as it was four years ago, as it was eight years ago. So there are a lot of things that basically are not being done. And the question is, you know, how do we improve sort of financial inclusion for women? How do we close that gap? Because the levels of financial inclusion are rising, meaning more people are being included in the financial system, but the gaps are the same, meaning that it’s not necessarily helping women as much as it should. And, you know, personally, I think that one of the things that we should be looking at is the legal and regulatory environment. That takes me to actually the second part of your question, which is movable collateral frameworks. And the argument there is, you know, women have less access to real property, right. They have less access to land. Sort of part of that is due to legal restrictions on things like inheritance. Part of it is just women have less titled land in their name, maybe due to social and cultural norms. It may be due to a lack of joint titling. You know, there’s different reasons in different countries. And so the question is how do you help women get access to credit where they lack access to real property, especially in developing economies, where banks basically require real property as collateral. You need land. You need housing under your name, and you just don’t have that. And so there are different ways of doing that. One way is to incorporate reputation collateral, right; so successful repayment histories to, you know, things like retailers, utilities, microfinance institutions, looking at the forms of collateral that women have and figuring out systems to incorporate that, right. So in the building-credit indicator, we do have sort of whether aspects of reputational collateral are considered. What we don’t have is movable collateral registries. And the idea there—and the Bank does a lot on collateral frameworks—is, you know, if there is not—you know, women have access to movables, right. It may be accounts receivable. It may be other things, you know, sort of warehouse receipts and others. But if there’s no framework to register and consider movable collateral, then you’re losing an opportunity to include elements that women and others also have. And there are—there is some research that I’m familiar with—I think you probably are much more familiar with this—I think movable collateral registry in Ghana. And I believe that the Bank worked on one in China as well that showed an increase in sort of women’s registration of movable collateral. It’s not something we include, although it is something that we have been discussing with our colleagues for a while. And I do think it is actually critically important for women’s access to credit. Another thing that’s interesting and we do look at is nondiscrimination, right; nondiscrimination on the basis of gender and also marital status and financial transactions. It used to be the case not that long ago in this country that you couldn’t, as a married woman, have a credit history of your own. It was kind of wrapped up with your husband. Also you couldn’t get a credit card and other things. Now we have nondiscrimination both on the basis of gender and marital status, but also on other elements. And the question is, you know, do other countries have this? Sort of are there nondiscrimination provisions sort of that help women gain access? BIGIO: Thank you. Right here. Yeah. Q: Agnes (sp)—(off mic). IQBAL: Thanks. I mean, as far as I’m aware, all of the research that I’ve seen is there isn’t really an effect on men’s employment. And I think the IMF has actually done more research. And I can point you to some papers. The idea is not so much if you’re giving women jobs, you’re taking away jobs from men. And I think that’s really basically what people are afraid of, right. So policymakers feel like, OK, if you open up these sectors to women, you’re going to be taking away jobs from men, right. And that’s the argument. But sort of based on the research that I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case that, you know, the pie is this big, and if you give a slice to women, you’re taking away slices from men. It’s generally sort of seen as if you’re opening these jobs up for women, if you have more women entrepreneurs, you’re actually creating more jobs, so the pie gets bigger and there’s more space. But I actually think the fund has done that much more work on this. BIGIO: That’s great. Thank you. Q: Jamille and Sarah, thank you very much for an excellent and very powerful presentation. I’m Natalie Hahn. I worked at the U.N. for many years, mostly in Africa. Does the World Bank make a conditionality for their loans that the laws have to change, they have to be implemented? Number one. Number two, when I look at this powerful report, it would be extraordinarily important for law faculties and law students to know about this. And you mentioned that you had the workshops in West Africa, for instance. But I could envision women lawyers in many of those countries taking the lead on this, and particularly students, and also hopefully this report to be introduced to American faculties of law. I found one of the best groups to work with is IDLO in Rome, which was founded by Ibrahim Shihata, former legal counsel to the International Development Law Organization, because they’re so well placed within these countries. And I’m wondering if you had an opportunity to work with them. IQBAL: In terms of your first question on conditionality, the answer to that is no. I don’t think the World Bank believes in conditionality. You know, really, in general, we try and encourage and influence governments to reform their laws, but not as a part of conditionality for loans. However, I do know, you know, we’ve seen, for example, the MCC, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, picked up part of this data as their Gender and the Economy scorecard. They’ve actually expanded it to include other things this year. And we see a lot of requests coming in from low-income countries on how can they improve in this element, because basically they want to get access to MCC grants. And the reason the MCC did this is, I believe, because of Lesotho. So many years ago they had an MCC grant in Lesotho before they had this Gender in the Economy as part of their scorecard. And they went in and they realized in Lesotho legally women had basically the same status as legal minors. There were all these things that women couldn’t do. So I think they worked with the government of Lesotho to reform this, but they didn’t want to be caught in that situation again. So they realized they needed to include sort of more gender-relevant data. As I understand it, the inclusion of that scorecard was relatively good, and they decided to expand it this year. So they’ve included more questions, including on things like child marriage. In terms of working with law schools, law faculties, law students, we try to do this. You know, we work, for example, with the International Association of Women Judges. I have a colleague who was just at their annual conference in Argentina; the idea being that we’re trying to disseminate to as many people as possible, including law schools and law faculties. But it’s a little bit difficult. We do work with the IDLO, and they actually have very strong gender programming and this is a priority for them. We also work a lot with U.N. Women, both on the SDG framework, so we’re working with U.N. Women and the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index, along with strong consultations with the CEDAW committee, to build an SDG monitoring indicator on whether or not legal frameworks discriminate against women in law and practice. That’s the—I think basically the paraphrase of the indicator that was selected. And the idea is to work on as many levels as possible. But we’re a relatively small team and we can’t be everywhere. So I would encourage all of you to go out and talk about this data set. BIGIO: Right here. Q: Hi, Sarah. Sarah O’Hagan from the Fuller Project for International Reporting. I wanted to build on that. You talk about the ministers of certain countries really contesting their rankings or that the existence of a number was suddenly a very focusing device. So is there kind of an unspoken conditionality, or will there be follow-on effects that will be beneficial or not? And a separate question, but related, that I wanted to ask you—it’s very early to talk about the prognosis or the impact of either Me Too or Time’s Up. Even though Me Too seems to be the umbrella phrase, they’re really very separate movements. And what you’re really working on is sort of the Time’s Up piece of this. And I just wondered if you might return to your earlier comments about whether legal frameworks change or social norms drive change faster, because the Time’s Up movement is clearly—in this country, we’re in a social-norms moment. And I just wondered if we might just get a little bit more from you on that kind of dialectic. IQBAL: Of course. In terms of the unspoken-conditionality part of your question, I don’t think so. I actually think it’s more of a question of competition, right. I think countries like to either be on par or better than their peers. So it wouldn’t be—for example, you know, in general, say, countries from the Middle East and North Africa wouldn’t necessarily be comparing themselves to, say, Nordic countries, but they would want to know, you know, why their score indicator maybe looks, you know, less good than Morocco or Algeria or what have you, because there’s—in any kind of scoring system, there’s implicit competitiveness; like, you know, why is my number less than the number of my neighbor? You know, I beat them in soccer or something like that, right. You see a lot of competition coming out of that. And it’s actually that peer competition that encourages countries to move. You see this in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report. You see this in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings. I don’t think it’s a conditionality issue. In terms of social norms versus legal frameworks, I think the answer is it really depends. It depends in terms of where a particular country is. Like you said, in this one, you know, it’s a social-norm change that we’re talking about, because the legal frameworks—there are gaps, such as, you know, the gap of paid maternity and parental leave, which is, you know, quite a big gap. But in other areas, it does relatively well relative to its peers. And by this I mean high-income OECD countries. But a lot of the implementation, the discussion around things like sexual harassment, sexual assault, hasn’t been there. Now it is. In other countries, you know, that’s not the case. You know, it may be that legal frameworks really aren’t at the place that they need to be. And oftentimes it’s civil-society organizations, advocates on the ground, who’ve been advocating for this reform, for these reforms, for a long time. I know, in the case of DRC, there was a lot of reform advocacy going on by civil-society organizations for decades. But, you know, oftentimes this doesn’t rise to the level of interest of policymakers. And I think you have to—you know, there’s a lot going on. And maybe gender issues aren’t the most important issue in the portfolio of the minister of finance or the minister of justice. You know, they’re going to deal with whatever’s in front of them. And maybe women’s issues are kind of not seen as important. And I think the awareness, the spotlight, really kind of changes the dynamic. And, you know, we see these movements, these hashtags, going on in Latin America, in the Middle East, in North Africa, in West Africa. You can see it in every region of the world. It’s kind of spread like wildfire. And I think that’s great, because these are issues that need to be discussed. And, you know, whatever the issue is going on on that ground, in that region, in that country, maybe it’s the social-norm issue. Maybe it’s a legal issue. But ultimately this is an umbrella, and it sort of talks to, you know, whatever is going on on the ground. And for this data set, I do think the data is an inch deep and a mile wide, right. So it compares countries to each other, but it should never be the substitute—and perhaps I should have started with this—it should never be the substitute for country-level data, for an understanding of what is going on on the ground in each country, because that is the most important determining factor of, you know, where the discussion needs to go. Q: Leah Pedersen Thomas. Thank you to both of you for your very important work; appreciate your time here, Sarah. I actually serve on the board of a maternal fetal not-for-profit in Ethiopia, where we see women who are victims of underage marriage and certainly having children at a very young age and kind of surviving through the consequences of that. My question is around enforcement by advocacy, a little bit about what you just spoke on, kind of the positive—the knock-on effects of positive peer pressure. Are you finding that local advocacy groups are erupting to really hold the government to the stated laws or the change in laws? So, for example, we see a number of women who were betrothed in marriage under the age of 18 in Ethiopia. And although Ethiopian law would suggest that getting married, believe it or not, under the age of 18 is against the law, a number of orthodox clerics continue to perform services. So we’re seeing a number of victims actually approach those clerics and say I wouldn’t be in the position I am today if you hadn’t broken the law. So I’m just curious if you’re seeing that level of advocacy, kind of that positive peer pressure, and how we can successfully harness it to really create enforcement. IQBAL: Thank you. I mean, the answer is it depends, right. So we see it in some places. And it really depends on the strength of civil society at the country level, right. And I’m actually a little bit surprised sort of by your example, just because I know in Ethiopia generally, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of issues with civil society and, you know, how that gets funded and how the government feels about it. But in terms of the specific question that you’re asking about, it’s actually really interesting. We look at, you know, age-of-marriage laws, legal age of marriage. What is the minimum age of marriage, and what are the exceptions? So often there are, you know, parental consent or judicial consent. So the age is maybe 18, but girls can get married, you know, as young as 14 if they get permission from some kind of authority. And then we also look at basically what are sanctions, right. So is there a sanction for a cleric or a judge who performs this in contravention of the law? The idea being, you know, how do you—who do you hold to account and how do you hold them to account? And if there is a sanction, you know, and it is enforced maybe through this positive peer pressure, maybe through young girls actually trying to hold, you know, people who officiated their marriage to account, maybe that would stop the cleric from doing it the next time, right. There’s sort of a detrimental effect. But again, that takes a certain level of empowerment for the girls and for their advocates to even do that. I mean, it takes a lot of, I would say, strength and bravery to be able to hold an orthodox cleric to account. BIGIO: Back to—(off mic). Q: Congratulations. I mean, that sounds like an amazing program. BIGIO: Last question. Q: (Off mic.) Thank you—(off mic). IQBAL: Thank you. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that those are two different numbers, right. So the 155, that’s looking at a different measure. That’s at least one legal restriction. And the 104 is just on job restrictions. So one is the sample size, but it’s also just looking at kind of an overarching measure, including job restrictions, but including other restrictions as well. So it’s a little bit like comparing apples and oranges. And I would say there has been improvement, but not quite that much. BIGIO: Well, thank you. Please join me in thanking Sarah. (Applause.) And thank you all. (END)