The Gender Snapshot 2025 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Publisher: UN Women and UN DESA (Statistics Division), joint annual report
Edition: 2025 edition, released for the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action
Focus: Progress on SDG 5 and on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals
Related: WEF Global Gender Gap 2025, the parallel index and its parity timelines

The Gender Snapshot is UN Women and UN DESA’s annual reading of SDG 5 and of gender across all 17 Goals. The 2025 edition finds progress real but far too slow: at the current pace, gender parity in management is nearly a century away and parity in employment nearly two centuries. The quieter finding is about the data itself. Even the dedicated gender goal can be measured only 57.4% of the time.

The headline

Thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action, the report assesses gender equality under each of the 17 SDGs and finds gains on laws and some outcomes set against stagnation in political and economic power. Women held 27.2% of national parliament seats as of 1 January 2025, up less than 5 percentage points in a decade, and 102 countries have never had a woman Head of State or Government. No country achieves a perfect score across the four legal areas the report measures.

The Gender Snapshot 2025: “Decision-making remains in men’s hands, in all walks of life, everywhere in the world.”

The numbers

Extreme poverty. 9.2% of women and girls live in extreme poverty (376 million) versus 8.6% of men and boys; on current trends 351 million women could still be extremely poor by 2030.
Parliaments. Women held 27.2% of national parliamentary seats as of 1 January 2025, up 4.9 percentage points from 2015; local-government representation stagnated at 35.5% in 2023 and 2024.
Management. Women occupy 30% of managerial positions; at the current pace, gender parity in management will take nearly a century, reaching only 32% by 2050.
Legal reform. 99 positive legal reforms from 2019–2024 removed discriminatory laws, yet only 38 countries (29%) set 18 as the minimum marriage age without exceptions and just 63 (48%) base rape laws on lack of consent.
Violence. Over 1 in 8 women aged 15–49 was subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months (12.5%).
Employment. In 2024, 46.4% of working-age women were employed versus 69.5% of men; over the past 30 years the gender employment gap has narrowed by only 4 percentage points.

The counting angle

The Snapshot is, at heart, a data exercise, and it is candid about how thin the data is. Each goal chapter opens by counting its indicators, and by counting how many are gender-specific: for SDG 6 on water it is 0 of 11, and for SDG 7 on energy it is 0 of 6. Even SDG 5’s own indicators can be measured only 57.4% of the time at any point, though that is up from 47.0% in 2022. And the measurement base is now shrinking. Nearly 7 in 10 national statistics offices report funding cuts since January 2025 (68.3% overall, and 51% for Demographic and Health Surveys), while only 26% of 121 countries have comprehensive systems to track what they spend on gender equality, a share unchanged since 2021.

Our read: You cannot close a gap you cannot see. The gains here are real, but the more durable finding is that gender data is both incomplete and newly at risk, right as the counting matters most in the final stretch to 2030. When a goal chapter has zero gender-specific indicators, the silence is the result.

Watch & read

Progress on the SDGs: The Gender Snapshot 2025, the full report (UN Women & UN DESA).
WEF Global Gender Gap 2025, the parallel index that puts a single number on the years-to-parity question.

Figures are as reported by UN Women and UN DESA; projections (poverty, parity timelines) are the report’s own scenario estimates. Indicator counts are drawn from each goal chapter’s header in the report.