We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women's careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and...

Does increased legal infrastructure empower victims to leave abusive relationships? Structural barriers often prevent victims of intimate partner violence from seeking help, with two-thirds of female victims in Europe neither reporting incidents nor accessing support. I study Germany’s 2002...

Entrepreneurship aims to contribute significantly to economic development, a trend that has been progressively growing over time. Nonetheless, female entrepreneurs continue to face substantial challenges, including limited access to financial resources and sociocultural barriers. The influence...

This Brief explores how childcare responsibilities shape women’s entrepreneurial choices and business growth, drawing on data from the Women, Business and the Law project as well as complementary evidence from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Nigeria. Globally, women spend nearly three times as much...

Can college-educated women in rapidly developing economies balance career and family, or does compressed economic growth polarize their choices? This paper investigates how Indonesian women navigate these dual objectives across birth cohorts from the 1950s to the 1990s. It utilizes 38 years of...

Economic research on time use has traditionally focused on the total time individuals spend across different activities. However, less is known about time-use agency, or the ability to make strategic choices on allocating one’s time. This paper presents the findings from a novel,...

This paper examines the effect of women’s political empowerment on public spending efficiency in developing countries. Using a large panel of 126 developing countries over 1995–2021, the paper constructs public spending efficiency scores based on Stochastic Frontier Analysis, capturing...

This paper presents a dataset and an analytical framework to study the welfare effects of tariff changes on women. The data is an extension of the Household Impacts of Tariffs (HIT) dataset, which contains harmonized household survey data for 54 low and lower middle-income countries. It includes...

This report takes stock of gender equality in ECA, with a particular focus on women’s access to economic opportunities and jobs, alongside the urgent challenge of VAWG. It highlights the World Bank Group–supported initiatives across the region, illustrating both the range of solutions being...

In developing countries, women live longer than ever and make up the majority of older people. Many play central roles in their families and communities well into advanced ages, both as income earners and as unpaid carers of grandchildren, spouses, and even their own parents. Older women’s...

Women are essential to the growth of any progressive society. Equal access to employment is necessary for both women's empowerment and global economic growth. However, discrimination against women persists at all career levels, making it challenging for them to overcome barriers to leadership...

The paper aims to provide spatial evidence on where to prioritize place-based support for women's entrepreneurship by linking the geography of female founders to the proximity of formal support infrastructure in Germany. To pursue this objective, we assemble nationwide venture microdata covering...

This qualitative study explores the construction of financial literacy in the context of retirement among young women in Israel, in light of available cultural schemas. The research challenges economic models that rely solely on assumptions of rationality and self-interest, offering a...

Engineering remains a highly gendered and racialised profession in South Africa, shaped by enduring historical inequalities and the imprint of institutionalised exclusion that structures women's experiences of belonging and professional legitimacy. While women's underrepresentation in STEM is...

Digital transformation is central to circular economy (CE) strategies, yet the intersection between digital innovation and women's entrepreneurship remains underexplored. We examine how IoT, AI, blockchain, data analytics and platform technologies are represented in CE-oriented management...

Health-harmful norms persist because they fulfill a socially valued function. In many Nigerian communities, female genital cutting (FGC) is practiced because it is believed to discourage sex outside marriage, outweighing its perceived costs for many households. This paper examines the impact of...

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education is vital for Indonesia's technological progress and economic competitiveness. Yet, female students remain underrepresented in STEM pathways despite consistently strong academic performance. Evidence from Bandung city junior...

This article investigates whether increasing economic status through adopting digital payment capabilities in Delhi fosters economic and financial inclusion among urban women street vendors in Mahila Haat. Digital freedom is a new step forward in technology for everyone. Still, a woman not only...

Despite several policies and legislation enactments to address gender inequality in the post-apartheid South African employment landscape, a significant proportion of female academics still face marginalization and underrepresentation in senior executive positions. This paper aims to investigate...

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5, 7, and 8 aim to achieve gender equality for women, ensure affordable and sustainable energy, and promote economic growth and decent work for all, respectively. However, women remain underrepresented within the sustainable energy sector...

Concerns about corporate scandals and abusive leadership suggest that individuals with an opportunistic and manipulative personality sort into managerial positions. Indeed, a fledgling number of econometric studies have shown that individuals high in Machiavellianism are more likely to hold a...

Can legal reforms shift social norms around intimate partner violence (IPV)? We examine Vietnam's 2007 Law on Domestic Violence Prevention and Control using a difference-in-differences strategy that leverages the greater relevance of legal protections for married and cohabiting women relative to...

Can employer-side wage subsidies increase hiring women in low female labor force participation settings? This paper tests this using a randomized experiment with 1,227 Pakistani firms on a national jobs platform. Treatment firms were offered a six-month wage subsidy determined via the...

Over the past century, women have gained formal political rights, yet remain under-represented in leadership-partly due to lower demand for representation among women themselves. In this paper, we shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women's...

We trace the impact of a partial liquor ban - from launch to reversal - on alcohol consumption and women's experience with intimate partner violence (IPV) in Kerala, India. Decomposing the policyinduced and reversal effects by employing difference-in-differences and event-study approaches, we...

A comprehensive understanding of the determinants of sexual violence constitutes a crucial step toward effective prevention. While there is much research on the role of socio-economic circumstances of both victims acund perpetrators, little is known about whether an individual's physical...

We study the role of mayoral gender in attracting public funding in Italian municipalities. We exploit a novel administrative dataset containing detailed information on all projects aimed at the digitalisation of local public administrations and funded under Italy's National Recovery and...

Gender-based violence (GBV) remains a critical threat to women's safety and equality worldwide, yet the role of climate and environmental stressors in shaping violence against women remains underexplored, particularly in developed countries. This study identifies the causal impact of shortrun...

Gender-based violence (GBV) remains a critical threat to women's safety and equality worldwide, yet the role of climate and environmental stressors in shaping violence against women remains underexplored, particularly in developed countries. This study identifies the causal impact of short-run...

This paper studies the causal impact of female political representation on legislative behavior, social attitudes, and gender-based crime. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close mixed-gender electoral contests, we compare electorates that narrowly elected female versus male...

We study the role of mayoral gender in attracting public funding in Italian municipalities. We exploit a novel administrative dataset containing detailed information on all projects aimed at the digitalisation of local public administrations and funded under Italy's National Recovery and...

Abortion remains a highly contested issue in women's health. Using Norwegian administrative data from a setting with legal and accessible abortion, we estimate the causal effect of abortion on mental health. Exploiting variation in age-at-abortion within a stacked difference-in-differences...

Official Spanish birth registry data report sex ratios well above expected levels between 1975 and 2000, peaking at 109 boys per 100 girls in the early 1980s, the highest in the world at that time. Prior research has attributed these elevated ratios to factors such as maternal age, birth order,...

The parliamentary elections held in Bangladesh on 12 February 2026 marked a turn­ing point in the country’s recent history. In August 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who had served for a total of 20 years, with one interruption, was removed from office. An interim government led by Nobel...

This study investigates gender differences in labor market outcomes among highly educated individuals in Japan, emphasizing heterogeneity by fields of study, with a focus on STEM. Using data from the Japanese Panel Study of Employment Dynamics (JPSED), we find that women with STEM degrees begin...

Physical activity likely improves health. Yet, even as health outcomes are positively associated with physical activity, confounding bias exists. We examine a large-scale government campaign to encourage physical activity among women in the United Kingdom as a source of an exogenous increase....

Women increasingly migrate as primary movers, yet how gender inequality shapes this process remains unclear due to methodological limitations. Competing theories predict that greater gender equality should facilitate women's migration by loosening norms and expanding women's aspirations, whereas...

Gender equality and economic growth have historically tended to move together yet identifying causal effects has been difficult. This paper uses data on the support for female suffrage in Switzerland in order to explore the impact of technology adoption on gender norms. We argue that the early...

In developing economies, women entrepreneurs play a vital role in advancing inclusive growth, yet their financial and digital capabilities often remain constrained by gendered barriers. This study investigates how financial literacy evolves into a gender-sensitive capability that drives digital...

The proportion of women on the executive and supervisory boards of Germany's largest private companies has risen considerably since data collection for the DIW Women Executives Barometer began 20 years ago. While it was just over one percent on the executive boards of Germany's 200...