Women face job restrictions in Bangladesh: WB
Women in South Asia continue to trail their peers in many other parts of the world, as discriminatory laws thwart their economic advancement, according to the World Bank (WB) Groups 2016 Report on Women, Business and the Law, which was released yesterday. In Bangladesh, women face job restrictions, such as working in certain factory jobs or working in certain occupations, such as mining, and in Nepal, women cannot confer citizenship on their children or on their non-national spouses in the same way as men. This limits access to government services for some of the countys most marginalised children. And in Bhutan, under the Companies Act, a woman director of a company must include her husbands name, address and nationality within the company registry.
The report, published every two years, examines laws that impede womens employment and entrepreneurship in 173 economies throughout the world. The 2016 edition expands coverage in South Asia from five to eight economies, adding Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives.
Several economies from South Asia are among the most restrictive in the world in the dimensions measured, affecting womens entrepreneurship and employment. The region, as a whole, has been lagging in enacting reforms in the areas measured by the report, with only three reforms made in two economies in the past two years.
