Legal enforcement, institutional capacity and women’s labour participation in management contexts

Purpose This study aims to examine why gender-equal laws do not translate uniformly into women’s economic participation and what this implies for organisations and human resource management. Drawing on the legal-institutional conversion model (LICM), it tests five hypotheses linking legal frameworks, supportive capacity, enforcement perceptions and state dependence to female labour force participation (FLFP) across 161 economies (2000–2023). Design/methodology/approach System GMM dynamic panel estimation (Blundell and Bond, 1998) is applied to 3,570 observations from the World Bank Women, Business and the Law data set and World Development Indicators. Seven model specifications are estimated. A novel construct, the legal-implementation conversion efficiency (LICE) gap, captures divergence between legal equality and institutional delivery capacity. Findings Legal frameworks positively predict FLFP, supporting the LICM premise. Strong state dependence indicates past participation shapes current outcomes. Supportive capacity does not condition the returns to legal reform. Enforcement perceptions weaken those returns, indicating a substitution dynamic in which legal reform has greater association with participation where enforcement is weaker. The LICE gap does not predict within-country changes over time and instead reflects a stable cross-national structural characteristic. All significant relationships are concentrated in developing economies, where organisations and managers face the sharpest implementation gaps, while no measurable association is observed in high-income contexts. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first dynamic panel application of the WBL three-pillar architecture in management scholarship. By identifying a substitution dynamic between legal reform and enforcement, it challenges prevailing assumptions about the uniform effectiveness of legal equality in shaping women’s economic participation and informs organisational and HRM strategies in diverse enforcement contexts.