Unseen and Unprotected: How Laws Worldwide Neglect Women with Disabilities' Rights

A World Bank brief reveals that most global legal systems fail to protect the rights of women with disabilities in family life, employment, and protection from violence. Despite a few promising reforms, inclusive laws remain the exception, not the norm.

A powerful policy brief from the World Bank’s “Women, Business and the Law” (WBL) project, supported by the Human Rights, Inclusion and Empowerment (HRIE) Umbrella Trust Fund, offers a rare, data-rich look at how global legal systems fail women with disabilities. Compiled by researchers Julia Constanze Braunmiller and Marie Dry, and supported by evidence from institutions like the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the brief analyzes legal frameworks across 190 economies. The conclusion is both stark and urgent: most countries do not protect the basic rights of women with disabilities in critical areas such as family life, employment, and protection from violence. Despite international commitments like the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the legal recognition of this group’s unique needs remains dangerously inadequate.

The Overlooked Intersection of Gender and Disability

Globally, one in five women lives with a disability, and the intersection of gender and disability compounds their exclusion. Yet, policies addressing gender inequality and disability rights rarely overlap, leaving women with disabilities sidelined in both spheres. The WBL team introduced 11 new indicators across four domains nondiscrimination, parental rights, labor market inclusion, and gender-based violence, to assess whether national laws address this intersection. The findings reveal that only a quarter of economies have legal provisions that even begin to address the rights of women with disabilities. Advocacy efforts, such as those by the Middle East-based organization “Stars of Hope,” have worked to fill this void by influencing policy and increasing awareness, but systemic reform remains limited.

Parental Rights: Still a Distant Dream

One of the most intimate areas of exclusion is family life. Despite the CRPD’s clear stance that persons with disabilities should retain their rights to marry and parent, many women, particularly those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities, face forced sterilization or automatic loss of custody. In 2022, the WBL project found that only 27 economies have laws supporting the parental rights of disabled women, and even fewer provide direct aid. Benin, for example, protects against discriminatory custody decisions based on disability. Korea offers home-visit caregivers for mothers with disabilities, and France includes human assistance in its disability benefits for parents. Togo requires maternal health care workers to give special attention to women with disabilities during and after childbirth. While these laws are promising, they remain rare, and in many parts of the world, disabled women still face structural disqualification from parenthood.

Barriers to Work: Legal Silence and Missed Opportunities

The labor market presents some of the most glaring disparities. According to ILO data from 14 economies, women with disabilities are nearly 50 percentage points less likely to be employed than non-disabled men. Only six of the 111 economies that legally require reasonable workplace accommodation for disabled people specifically mention women. Ethiopia is among the few countries making progress. Its 2008 Proclamation mandates both affirmative action and protective workplace measures specifically for women with disabilities, addressing their dual burden. However, enforcement is weak, fines for non-compliance are negligible, and stigma remains high.

Incentives like tax breaks and employment quotas, common tools to promote inclusion, also fail to account for gender. Only five countries tailor such policies to support women with disabilities. Korea stands out for providing wage subsidies that prioritize this demographic. Still, these efforts are insufficient. Sheltered workshops, which segregate disabled workers, are still widely used despite evidence that they rarely transition workers into mainstream employment and often result in isolation and exploitation.

Violence and Harassment: Protection Without Access

The risk of gender-based violence is alarmingly high for women with disabilities, who are almost twice as likely as their non-disabled peers to experience domestic violence. Yet only 51 of the 160 economies with domestic violence laws explicitly protect this group, and a mere 17 ensure accessible survivor services such as shelters or emergency hotlines. Peru’s domestic violence law mandates an intersectional approach, requiring courts to consider disability as a vulnerability factor. Mozambique treats disability as an aggravating circumstance in sentencing offenders. Korea has taken a step further by mandating that shelters specifically for people with disabilities offer tailored services that ensure accessibility. Even in countries with progressive legal frameworks, however, implementation remains inconsistent, and women continue to face physical and legal barriers to support.

The picture is similar in the workplace, where 144 countries prohibit sexual harassment, but only 30 explicitly include protections for persons with disabilities. Some nations, including Algeria, Canada, and Nepal, offer direct legal protection, while others, like Chad and Togo, impose harsher penalties for offenses against persons with disabilities. Nonetheless, these are the exceptions. The vast majority of countries remain silent on the unique vulnerabilities that disabled women face in both public and private spheres.

A Call for Inclusive Legal Reform

Only 14 percent of economies offer legal recognition of parental rights for disabled women, fewer than 3 percent account for them in labor inclusion policies, and only 27 percent provide any protection from violence and harassment. This legal invisibility reflects a broader societal neglect that not only denies women with disabilities their basic rights but also hinders social and economic development. Still, there are beacons of progress. Countries like Ethiopia, Korea, Spain, Peru, and Togo offer promising examples that, if replicated and scaled, could inspire global reforms. But for that to happen, women with disabilities must be given a seat at the policymaking table because, as disability activists have long said, “Nothing about us without us.”