Beyond Legal Reform: How Social Norms Decide Women’s Access to Work, Pay, and Safety

The World Bank’s “I Want to Break Free” shows that gender-equal laws alone cannot transform women’s economic lives unless social norms also change, because norms determine whether laws are accepted, enforced, or resisted. Drawing on evidence across work, safety, family, and assets, the paper argues that real progress requires aligning legal reform with deliberate efforts to shift entrenched gender norms.

Produced by the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group under the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) program, “I Want to Break Free: How Laws and Social Norms Open Doors for Women” tackles a central puzzle in gender equality: why legal reforms that look strong on paper often fail to deliver equal economic outcomes for women. Drawing on a systematic review of 130 studies across countries and regions, the paper shows that laws do not work in isolation. Social norms, shared beliefs about what women and men should do, decide whether laws are enforced, accepted, ignored, or resisted. This insight matters because global data show big differences in women’s work, pay, and safety even among countries with similar gender-equal laws.

Laws Change Rules, Norms Shape Reality

The paper explains that laws influence women’s lives in two ways. First, they have direct effects by removing legal barriers or granting rights, such as the right to work, own property, or be protected from violence. Second, they have indirect effects by signaling what society considers acceptable. These signals can encourage change, but they can also fail if social norms remain hostile. Importantly, the relationship runs both ways: norms shape which laws are adopted and how they are enforced, while changes in women’s economic roles can slowly reshape norms. Ignoring this feedback loop leads to overestimating what legal reform alone can achieve.

How Gender Norms Are Measured, and What’s Missing

Measuring social norms is difficult, and the paper carefully reviews the available tools. Qualitative methods like interviews and ethnographic studies provide deep insights into everyday life, but are hard to scale. Large surveys, such as the World Values Survey, Demographic and Health Surveys, Gallup World Poll, Afrobarometer, and the UN’s Gender Social Norms Index, allow comparisons across countries, but they rely on self-reported attitudes and often miss how norms are enforced or how people are punished for breaking them. A major gap identified throughout the review is the lack of long-term data, which makes it hard to see whether norms truly change after legal reforms or whether apparent progress is temporary.

What the Evidence Shows Across Women’s Lives

Using the WBL framework, the paper reviews how laws and norms interact across key areas of women’s lives. In safety, laws against domestic violence work best where norms already make separation or reporting socially acceptable; where stigma remains strong, legal protection is often unused. In mobility, women’s ability to move freely is limited not only by laws but by fear of harassment and social expectations, and some gender-segregated “safety” policies end up reinforcing stereotypes. In work and pay, norms about women’s roles in the home continue to shape labor supply, job choice, and wages, even after legal barriers are removed. Pay transparency laws have reduced gender wage gaps in some countries, but only where enforcement is credible.

Marriage, parenthood, and childcare show especially strong norm effects. Divorce and inheritance reforms improve women’s bargaining power mainly in societies where traditional norms are already weakening; elsewhere, families may find ways around the law. Caregiving norms mean women still bear most unpaid work, limiting the impact of parental leave and childcare policies. In entrepreneurship, social expectations about risk-taking and authority reduce women’s ability to benefit from credit and training, and there is little causal evidence that financial anti-discrimination laws boost women-owned businesses. In assets and pensions, property and retirement rules shape women’s long-term security, but reforms can provoke backlash when norms resist women’s economic independence.

What’s Missing and What Needs to Change

The study finds major gaps in existing research. Only a small share of studies examine laws and norms together; causal evidence is limited, and most research focuses on high-income countries. There is little systematic work on backlash, circumvention, or the social penalties faced by women who defy norms. The authors conclude that legal reform is necessary but not sufficient. To make laws work, policymakers must also invest in changing social norms through information campaigns, community engagement, legal awareness, and better data, especially long-term and mixed-method research. Without this combined approach, legal rights risk remaining symbolic rather than truly transformative for women’s economic empowerment.