Gendered laws curb Olympic success

Legal gender equality is key for female participation in the labour market. The association between women’s legal empowerment and success in sports is another manifestation of that. Using the Women Business and the Law (WBL) index, Simeon Djankov and Eva Yiwen Zhang construct a simple measure of Olympic success for female athletes: the number of medals per one million female population. They find that an improvement in the WBL score by 10 points is associated with one additional medal by a woman athlete for the average country.