Global Gender Gap Report 2025 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Publisher: World Economic Forum, Centre for the New Economy and Society, with data collaborations from LinkedIn and the World Bank
Edition: 19th edition, June 2025, benchmarking 148 economies on a 0–100% parity scale
Focus: The annual Global Gender Gap Index across four subindexes: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment
Related: Gender Snapshot 2025, the UN’s companion read on SDG 5 progress.

The Global Gender Gap Index is the longest-running measure of how far the world has closed the gap between women and men. The 2025 edition puts global parity at 68.8% closed, but the pace is glacial: on current trends full parity is 123 years away, more than a century past the 2030 deadline the SDGs set for gender equality.

The headline

Across 148 economies the global gender gap stands at 68.8% closed in 2025, up just 0.3 percentage points on the comparable set of economies from 2024. No economy has reached full parity. The four subindexes tell diverging stories: Health and Survival is 96.2% closed and Educational Attainment 95.1%, while Economic Participation and Opportunity sits at 61.0% and Political Empowerment, the furthest behind by far, at just 22.9%. At the current rate the political gap alone would take 162 years to close and the economic gap 135 years.

Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum: “Amid such change, gender parity is both a principle and a strategy.”

The numbers

Global parity. 68.8% of the gender gap closed across 148 economies, the highest score in the index’s history and up 4.8 percentage points since 2006.
Time to parity. 123 years to full parity on the constant 100-economy sample, a decade faster than last year’s estimate but still overshooting the SDG deadline by 118 years.
Furthest behind. Political Empowerment is only 22.9% closed, ranging from 0.6% in Vanuatu to 95.4% in Iceland; only nine economies have closed more than half of it.
The top of the table. Iceland leads at 92.6%, its 16th consecutive year at #1 and the only economy above 90%, followed by Finland (87.9%), Norway (86.3%) and the United Kingdom (83.8%).
Biggest mover. Bangladesh gained 8.6 percentage points and rose 75 places to 24th, the largest jump in the edition; Togo fell 44 places to 121st.
By income. High-income economies have closed 74.3% of their gap, ahead of upper-middle (69.6%), low-income (66.4%) and lower-middle (66.0%) groups.
Work and leadership. Women’s workforce participation reached 41.2% in 2024, yet only 29.5% of tertiary-educated senior managers are women.

The counting angle

The index counts ratios, not levels. Each score is the value of an indicator for women divided by the value for men, capped at parity, so it measures the distance between the sexes and not whether either is well served. That design choice hides two things worth naming. Female-favouring gaps are truncated, so the fact that women out-enrol men in tertiary education in 109 economies simply reads as “parity” rather than a reversal. And the near-full Health and Survival score of 96.2% rests on two indicators, sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy, that barely move and can mask deterioration underneath. Coverage is also uneven: an economy needs data on 12 of the 14 indicators to appear at all, which keeps roughly a third of the world’s economies off the board and skews the political average toward the most populous, lowest-scoring states.

Our read: The single number to watch is 123 years. It converts a slow-moving average into a deadline the SDGs cannot meet, and it is driven almost entirely by the political and economic subindexes where progress has stalled. Health and education parity are close enough to full that they add little further momentum, so the headline gap will only narrow when power and pay do.

Watch & read

Global Gender Gap Report 2025, the full report and interactive data platform (World Economic Forum).
Gender Snapshot 2025, the UN’s indicator-level tracking of SDG 5.

Figures are the WEF’s own, from the Global Gender Gap Index 2025. Parity scores express the share of the gap closed on a 0–100% scale; time-to-parity projections are the report’s own estimates based on the 100 economies covered continuously since 2006.