The Paths to Equal: New Twin Indices on Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality
This report centres on the unfinished business of our time: delivering on the promise of gender equality, securing the human rights of women and girls and ensuring that their fundamental freedoms are fully realized. To address the empowerment of all women and girls and gender equality, the human development approach, rooted in capabilities, provides a conceptual framework. It pivots on enlarging opportunities for all people, equally. As progress towards gender equality stalls, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have joined forces to expand measures that guide national and international policy action, research and advocacy on the empowerment of all women and girls and gender equality. The result of this collaboration is the twin experimental gender indices in this report. The first, the new Women’s Empowerment Index, focuses on measuring women’s power and freedoms to make choices and seize opportunities in life. It is the first UN gender index to include violence against women and girls as a standalone dimension. The second, the Global Gender Parity Index, assesses the gender gap across four dimensions of human development: health, education, inclusion and decisionmaking. Together, they provide a more complete picture of countries’ progress towards women’s empowerment and gender equality. These indices are a key contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stock-taking moment at the 2023 SDG Summit and a means of furthering efforts to achieve SDG 5 on gender equality.
