Greater economic freedom for women leads to more well-being for women

See Seven additional countries eliminated gender discrimination for economic freedom from 2020 to 2022; 35 others continue to impose severe restrictions on women’s economic rights by Rosemarie Fike. She is an Instructor of Economics at Texas Christian University and a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute.

• This year’s Women and Progress report explains the construction of the Gender Disparity Index (GDI), which estimates the degree of gender disparity in economic freedom in each of 165 countries around the world.
• It also illustrates the effects of restricting female economic freedom.
• We compare the gender-adjusted measure of economic freedom to a broad sample of economic indicators of women’s well-being such as health, labor market, and educational outcomes. Countries are sorted into quartiles according to their gender-adjusted economic freedom scores and the average outcomes are compared across quartiles, from most free to least free. Countries with greater economic freedom tend to have more desirable scores on the measures of well-being.
• 15 countries moved towards gender parity under the law by permitting women to make more of their own economic choices. Gabon showed the greatest overall improvement since 2020, as it removed barriers to a woman’s ability to own property, open a bank account, head a household, work a job, and choose where to live. It also ended the legal requirement that a woman must obey her husband. In 2020 Gabon was among those countries with the most pervasive restrictions on women’s economic rights. It now has complete gender parity in economic freedom.
• There have been setbacks: Niger and Saudi Arabia both showed decreases in their overall GDI scores. Saudi Arabia reinstated formal restrictions on women’s mobility, removing a woman’s right to choose where to live or travel outside the country, while Niger imposed new barriers to women working industrial jobs.