Global Gender Gap Report 202561To achieve gender parity across spheres of life, economies need to advance framework conditions and administer resources at their disposal to make and sustain progress. When the conditions necessary to support these frameworks—such as policies, services and budgets — are missing, insufficient or lack continuity, economies are limited in their ability to reach their parity goals within a given time frame. This tension, often referred to as the “implementation gap”, illustrates the practical distance between the high standards set by legal frameworks and the on-the-ground capacity to deliver on them. It also remains one of the most critical challenges for economies to overcome. In 2024, the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law 2.0 dataset introduced the “supportive framework” indicator for the first time to capture these enabling conditions. This indicator reflects the existence of policies, plans, budgets, institutions, data systems and access to justice mechanisms intended to operationalize legal rights. It complements the “legal framework” component, which assesses whether laws support gender equality in areas such as work, pay, marriage and parenthood. Legal frameworks reflect ambition, while supportive frameworks reflect implementation capacity. Many countries have better developed legal systems but continue to lack the mechanisms to enforce or support those laws. Conversely, a few economies with modest legal frameworks have invested in supportive conditions to meet legal requirements.Across the 148 economies covered in this edition of the Global Gender Gap Report there is a near-universal implementation gap, where supportive framework scores lag behind those of the legal framework. Only five economies —Belize, Bangladesh, Canada, Jordan and the United Kingdom—have higher supportive framework scores than legal ones. This suggests that, relative to their legal environment, these economies have a more developed infrastructure (programs, institutions, and policies) to promote gender equality. However, this group is highly heterogeneous: legal framework scores range from 33% to over 90%, while supportive framework scores range from 35% to 98%. More importantly, the presence of a reverse gap does not necessarily mean strong legal protections are in place—only that efforts to operationalize laws may be comparatively better advanced. The role of legal frameworks 2.5

GGGR 2025