KUALA LUMPUR, March 6 — A report by World Bank released yesterday listed Malaysia among the five countries which have improved the most in enacting reforms to ensure legal gender equality, alongside Jordan, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Uzbekistan.
The 2024’s version of the “Women, Business and Law” report however showed that Malaysia only scored 60.6 in the overall index, which despite an increase of 10 points from last year still fell behind regional counterparts such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Singapore.
“Today, barely half of women participate in the global workforce, compared with nearly three out of every four men.
“This is not just unfair — it’s wasteful. Countries simply cannot afford to sideline half of their population,” the report’s lead author Tea Trumbic said in an accompanying press release.
It noted that Malaysia, along with Azerbaijan, Jordan, Oman, Sierra Leone, and Uzbekistan had enacted reforms mandating equal pay for work of equal value or lifting restrictions on a woman’s ability to work in industrial or dangerous jobs.
Similarly, Malaysia was praised for introducing reforms expanding maternity together with Cyprus, Oman, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Slovak Republic, and Togo.
This referred to the Employment (Amendment) Act 2022 which amended the Employment Act 1955, to extend paid maternity leave to 98 calendar days and seven days of paid paternity leave, prohibited the dismissal of pregnant workers, and removed restrictions on women working at night in the industrial sector and binned the minister’s power to restrict a woman’s employment.
Originally set to be implemented by September 1, 2022, it was postponed until January 1, 2023.
“The long-overdue amendment aligns the legislation in Malaysia with internationally recognised labour standards, including several ILO conventions and international practices such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,” said the report, referring to the International Labour Organisation.
The report confirmed that in 2024, women all over the world are still stuck in an unequal playing field as men, facing barriers in professional settings shaped by centuries of prejudice against women.
The index further measured the relationship between laws and their effectiveness, in which Malaysia only scored 47.5 points.
World Bank said the study measures the laws affecting women’s economic inclusion, the frameworks supporting the implementation of those laws, and the opinions of experts on how those laws operate in practice.
It assessed for the first time how 190 countries are implementing existing laws to protect women, finding what it called a “shocking” gap between policy and practice.
This was done using three indexes: a legal frameworks index, a supportive frameworks index, and an expert opinions index.
In the same press statement, the World Bank also said that ending discriminatory laws and practices that prevent women from working or starting businesses could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20 per cent, which would double the rate of global growth over the next decade.
This comes as the report that showed women on average have just 64 per cent of the legal protections that men do, not the 77 per cent previously estimated, and no country — not even the wealthiest — provides true equal opportunity.
