Do gender discrimination laws converge? Global evidence

While legal gender equality is increasingly recognized as a driver of socio-economic development, its global convergence dynamics remain empirically underexplored. This study is the first to apply the Phillips and Sul (Econometrica 75(6):1771–1855, 2007) club convergence methodology to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law index to analyze convergence in legal gender equality across 190 countries from 1971 to 2024. The findings reject full-sample convergence and instead reveal two distinct convergence clubs that converge in growth but not in levels. A dominant club comprising 97% of countries exhibits convergence in growth toward a common steady-state path. The remaining countries - Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, the West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen - constitute a distinct convergence club, possibly due to deep-rooted historical impediments to achieving parity in legal rights between women and men. These results underscore the existence of multiple equilibrium paths in legal gender equality and highlight the need for policy frameworks that combine global advocacy with context-sensitive legal reforms.