Being a woman has been a very difficult mission from the beginning of humanity till our days, as she faces a lot of obstacles from birth till death. Speaking as a woman and as a human, I consider that gender inequality is a personnel issue that every woman should stand against, asking for equal rights to men. Therefore, I searched for data that can best track the severity of this issue, and found the dataset of the World Bank about genders. Among a set of indicators, I found one indicator that can speak it all, which is the WBL index.

A WBL index is how much a woman scores as man i.e. how much there are laws that support her and treat her equally to men in all the stages of her life: marriage, employment, salary, inheritance, entrepreneurship… Therefore, WBL index is the average score of all these factors, where a score of 100 means that a woman has the same rights as a man. The less this index is, the less women are treated as men.

In this visual, one can see that Morocco has the highest WBL index among all the countries in Arab World, where it has scored 75.6 i.e. a woman in Morocco has three quarters of a man’s rights. Lebanon is lying in the middle, and has scored 52.5 meaning that a Lebanese woman has half the rights of a man. Jordan has the lowest WBL index where it has scored 40.6. However, I tended not to include Saudi Arabia’s status because of the contradicting sources defining its status, but noting that its position in gender equality has improved remarkably after the reforms taken by the government.

In order to reduce this gap between men and women, governments should update their laws to give equal rights for both genders, tackling all the previously mentioned factors: marriage, employment, salary… Moreover, children and parents should be educated that men and women are of equal importance and no gender is superior to the other, given the fact that humanity wouldn’t have continued to exist without the existence of both men and women. Thus, genders should be given equal rights.