How public-private collaboration can help close the global gender gap

Progress towards legal gender equality is advancing across regions. According to the World Bank’s 2026 Women, Business and the Law Report, between 2023 and 2025, 68 economies enacted 113 legal reforms strengthening women’s economic opportunities. Yet women globally still enjoy less than two-thirds of the legal rights available to men.

Even where legal equality exists, implementation is not automatic and often lags. Globally, only about half of the supporting mechanisms required to implement these laws — such as supporting policies, action plans, budgets and institutions — are in place. The Global Gender Gap Report 2025 highlights that robust implementation mechanisms are key to translating policy into real gender parity outcomes.

Laws create the foundation for equality. But without implementation and enforcement mechanisms, institutional capacity, resources and coordination across the public sector, the private sector and civil society, progress stalls. This disconnect between commitment and implementation — the “say-do” gap — is now one of the central barriers to closing global gender gaps.

Progress, particularly in labour markets, can be accelerated by aligning public ambition with private-sector implementation. While policy is often designed at the national level, implementation happens inside firms and institutions. Without coordination between these actors, reform momentum slows.

The World Economic Forum’s Gender Parity Accelerators are national public-private collaboration platforms that aim to advance women’s labour force participation, pay equity and leadership, while hardwiring gender parity into the future of work. Accelerators have tackled these challenges in 18 economies, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico and Panama. In Latin America, the accelerators are implemented in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank and Agence Française de Développement (AFD).

The model brings together ministers and CEOs as co-chairs and engages 50-100 of the largest national employers. Among other pathways, accelerators create spaces for structured dialogue and coordination that help close implementation gaps through three key mechanisms: aligning incentives; building business awareness and providing operational guidance; and co-designing future systems.

Implementation accelerates when gender reforms align with economic incentives and business strategy. Governments can encourage adoption through tax incentives, certification schemes and recognition mechanisms.

Accelerators can help companies understand and leverage these incentives.

For example, the Wanita MyWira Accelerator in Malaysia is helping socialize recent tax incentives introduced by the government for employers that provide flexible work arrangements and hire women returning to work after career breaks. Companies that join the Accelerator commit to hiring women who are returning to work after a career break. These women are then offered opportunities to reskill and upskill through Talentcorp’s MyMahir programme, working in roles that offer flexible arrangements, thus improving long-term retention.

Similarly, the Gender Parity Accelerator in Ecuador is supporting the implementation of the Violet Economy Law, which includes mandatory equality plans, tax incentives and quotas for board diversity. The Accelerator organizes dialogues with the private sector to explain how companies can leverage these incentives and use the law as a strategic opportunity.

Implementation of new labour laws ultimately happens inside firms — through HR policies, governance structures and accountability systems.

Accelerators help companies understand new laws, conduct gender gap assessments and develop implementation roadmaps. By providing a space for peer learning and recognition of corporate champions, they help socialize reforms and accelerate adoption.

For example, the Jordan Gender Parity Accelerator is supporting the implementation of recent reforms introducing protections against workplace sexual harassment. The Accelerator is helping companies meet these new legal requirements by providing template workplace policies and organizing in-person workshops that help firms translate legal reforms into concrete steps and exchange lessons learned and best practices.

In Japan, a new Gender Pay Gap Disclosure Law was passed in 2023, requiring large companies to report their pay gaps. The Accelerator brought together over 300 CEOs through the Male Leaders’ Coalition to exchange lessons, identify what works — from pay audits to fair promotion pathways — and hold each other accountable. In this way, the Accelerator helps ensure the law moves beyond compliance to having a real impact on pay equity.

Beyond supporting current reforms, Accelerators can also become long-term mechanisms for collaborative policy design. Early engagement with the private sector ensures that policy design reflects labour market realities.

In Panama, the Accelerator’s leadership group, including public and private sector representatives, has been formalized as the National Council for Gender Parity through an executive decree. The council provides an official mechanism for public-private consultation and collaboration on gender parity measures beyond the accelerator’s lifecycle. Similarly, in Mexico, the Gender Parity Initiative has convened consultations to inform the design of the National Care System reform. Through these public–private dialogues, companies provide input while governments use the platform to socialize government initiatives. One such initiative includes the construction of childcare facilities in industrial parks, with the platform also helping to mobilize private-sector co-investment alongside the Mexican Social Security Institute.

The next frontier in gender parity is not only passing better laws, but building stronger implementation ecosystems.

Public-private collaboration is a critical mechanism through which the ambition expressed in laws and regulations can translate into measurable outcomes. By aligning incentives, supporting companies in operationalizing reforms and co-designing future systems, dialogue platforms such as the Gender Parity Accelerators can help transform policy commitments into real progress for women and stronger, more competitive economies.