A new report has found that despite some progress, sexist laws continue to undermine women’s rights worldwide.

The study, released on Tuesday by Equality Now, an international human rights organisation working for women and girls rights, highlights slow and uneven legal reforms, with many governments failing to eliminate discrimination against women and girls.

No country has achieved full legal equality, and a growing backlash threatens hard-won gains, says the report.

The report, titled ‘Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+30 Review Process (6th Edition)’, examines sex-discriminatory laws that block progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 5—gender equality.

“Women and girls deserve full protection of their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights under the Beijing Platform and other international human rights commitments,” co-author Antonia Kirkland says in the report’s summary.

But many governments, including those in South Asia, uphold laws that restrict women’s rights based on religious, cultural, and nationalist grounds. This includes disparities in marriage, divorce, property ownership and employment.

According to the World Bank’s ‘Women, Business and the Law 2024 (WBL 2024)’ report, 139 out of 190 countries lack adequate child marriage laws, failing to set the minimum marriage age at 18 for both men and women. Some countries have even set a lower marriage age for girls.

In Bangladesh, for example, the legal marriage age is 18 for women and 21 for men. Despite the law, child marriage remains widespread in the country—53.8 percent of rural women and 44 percent of urban women are married before turning 18.

Not just in South Asia, child marriage remains a global issue, with 640 million women and girls having been married as children. Each year, 12 million more girls enter into child marriages.

Disparities remain in terms of post marriage events too. Forty-five countries impose different divorce rules for men and women, while 67 nations do not grant women the same remarriage rights as men.

The report also accentuates the persistence of marital rape exemptions in many countries. In India, for instance, marital rape remains legal. Although India’s domestic violence law of 2006 allows women to file civil cases for marital rape, criminal law still exempts husbands from prosecution if their wife is over 18.

In Afghanistan, the situation for women is dire. The Taliban’s draconian laws have banned women and girls from public life, work, education, and leisure, stripping them of nearly all fundamental rights.

Legal discrimination extends to economic rights as well. The WBL 2024 report found that in 92 countries, women lack legal protection guaranteeing equal pay for equal work. In 77 countries, women are barred from working in the same jobs and industries as men.

Not just that, 81 economies fail to account for childcare-related work absences in pension calculations, leaving women financially disadvantaged in old age.

Meanwhile, in Nepal, while certain restrictions on women’s property rights have been lifted, sex-discriminatory laws persist. In 2023, Nepal failed to amend its Citizenship Act to remove gender-based nationality provisions, highlighting constitutional reforms are still needed in the country.

Closing the gender gap could boost the global economy by at least $7 trillion, according to the report. However, at the current pace, the United Nations estimates it will take over 280 years to remove all sex-discriminatory laws worldwide.