Introduction

What is the state of women’s rights in the world today? That is a complex question that requires one to take into account many factors, such as women’s access to education, labor force participation, whether laws exist to protect women, maternal mortality rates and more. The conversation becomes even more complex when you take into account the different ways we can “split up” the world, such as by region, GDP-level, or degree of legal protections for women. In this post, I focus on the state of women’s rights in 2023 and use country-level data to investigate:

1. In which countries (or regions) do women have the most access to education; the labor market; and legal protections?
2. Do countries that “do better” on women’s rights tend to share any common traits?
3. If women have more legal protections in certain countries, is it also true that these countries will have better maternal health outcomes?

Dataset and Limitations

For this analysis, I combined 2023 survey and administrative data from the World Bank’s Gender portal, World Population Review, and other publicly available sources (here and here). Country names and year were used to merge the data and produce a final dataset with each of the 142 rows representing a different country in 2023.

The dataset includes basic continuous variables like population size, overall gross domestic product (GDP), average maternal mortality (representing deaths per 100,000 mothers), women and men’s education rates and the ratio of women to men in the labor market. There are also binary variables focused on country-level legal protections, such as whether a country prohibits gender discrimination in access to credit; prohibits sexual harassment at work; or mandates equal pay for equal work. Finally, there is a regional variable representing where countries belong (i.e., Asia and the Middle East; North America; Europe; Africa; Australia and the Pacific; and Latin America and the Caribbean). 

One limitation was missing data. 53 out of the 195 recognized countries in the world did not appear in the data I found, and many of these missing countries were in the Middle East. This is why, for the purposes of this analysis, I combine “Asia and the Middle East” as a regional category. Furthermore, information on male and female education rates is missing for about half of the countries in the dataset and therefore does not provide a completely accurate picture of the gender gap in education worldwide. However, the following analysis represents an earnest attempt at depicting global trends pertaining to women’s rights and outcomes.

Narrative and Visualizations

Question 1: In which countries or regions do women work the most, receive the most education, and enjoy the most legal protections?

1.1. Work

Figure 1 ranks countries in terms of which have the highest female labor force participation relative to men. These are countries in which women work closer to a 1:1 ratio with men. Of the 19 countries with the highest global female labor force participation, only 1 country (Burundi) has women working in parity with men (ratio: 1.03). That means that women in Burundi are actually three percentage points more likely to work than men.

However, the other 18 highest-ranking countries shown in Figure 1 all have female labor participation rates that lag men’s. For example, Mozambique, which is second on the list, has a ratio of .98, meaning that women work two percentage points less than men on average. This would suggest that, in most of the world, there is gender disparity in workforce participation.

Interestingly, eleven of the top 19 countries depicted in Figure 1 are in Africa, suggesting that Africa is a leader in female labor force participation. Simultaneously, the US, Canada, and many European countries do not make this list because they have female labor force participation rates of less than .9 (meaning women work more than ten percent less than men in these countries). 

The map in Figure 2 provides a more complete picture of labor force participation by country, showing that countries with the lowest rates of female labor force participation are in the Middle East. For example, in Afghanistan, women work 7 percent as much as men, and in Iraq, women work 15 percent as much.

Figure 1: Top 19 Countries with the Highest Female Labor Force Participation

Figure 2: Mapping Countries by Women’s Labor Force Participation Relative to Men

1.2 Education

There are 73 countries for which data is available on gendered education rates, and Figure 3 ranks them. Numbers which are negative mean that women receive less education than men on average, and numbers that are greater than or equal to zero suggest gender parity in education.

Unfortunately, in seventy-two of the 73 countries, women are educated less than men on average. The only exception is Moldova, where women are actually three percentage points more likely to be educated than men.

After Moldova, the countries ranked in order of the smallest gender gap in education are: Nigeria (less than 1%); Belarus (about 4%); Zimbabwe (6.6%); Vietnam (7.7%); Seychelles (8.3%) and Norway (9.6%). Once again, we see that African countries (like Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Seychelles) are leading the charge in closing the female education gap. 

However, Western countries are not doing as well. In Canada, women trail men on education by 13 percentage points. In the UK, women tend to be 15% less educated than men on average. Finally, the United States is ranked 53 out of 73 countries because women tend to be 25% less educated than men. Given that the US is a developed country, it is baffling that women are systematically receiving less education than in parts of Africa.

Finally, Figure 3 shows that the gender gap is highest in Jordan, at over 60%, followed by Tunisia (50%) and India (45%). This suggests that women tend to have less of a chance of receiving an education than men in Asia and the Middle East.

Figure 3: Countries Ranked by Gender Gap in Female and Male Education

1.3 Legal Protections

Figure 4 uses pie charts to depict the share of countries in each region that do and do not offer legal protections for women. The relevant legal protections are prohibitions on sexual harassment, prohibitions on gender discrimination in access to credit, and laws mandating equal pay for equal work. If a country offered any of these three protections, it was considered a country with legal protections for women (represented in pink). If not, the country was considered a country without legal protections for women (and represented in grey).

Figure 4 shows that North America and Europe are the only continents where every country therein has at least one legal protection for women. (Notably, there are only two countries in North America, so this is not a tremendous feat.) Latin America and the Caribbean follow closely with 95% of countries offering protections for women (the 5% that do not are accounted for by just 1 country, Guatemala). 

In Africa and Asia and the Middle East, 88% of countries in each region afford women protections. Surprisingly, Japan–a highly developed country–is one of the countries that does not offer any legal protections for women. This suggests that a country’s development is not always predictive of how progressive its legal system will be. 

Finally, Australia and the Pacific trail the world in legal protections for women. Here, 42% of countries in the region (or 5 countries) do not have any legal protections for women. These are smaller island nations like Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Tuvalu.

Figure 4: The Proportion of Countries by Region with Any Legal Protections for Women

Question 2: Do countries that “do better” on women’s rights tend to share any common traits?

2.1 GDP and Labor Force Participation

An open question is whether countries with higher GDPs have better female labor force participation than lower GDP countries. GDP is the total cost of goods and services a country generates each year and is a good proxy for country-level wealth. GDP can be divided by the population of each country to generate GDP per capita, which may be used as a proxy for the average wealth of a citizen in each country. 

Figure 5 shows how countries around the world fare on average GDP per capita. One finding is that regions with the highest per capita GDPs are in North America, Europe, and Australia and the Pacific. Specifically, per capita income is highest in Ireland ($77k), Norway ($75k) and Iceland ($67k), followed by the US ($65k), Australia ($54k), Canada ($47k) and New Zealand ($43k). There are twenty-eight countries in the dataset with per capita GDPs of $2,000 or less, representing very poor (or under-developed) countries. These tend to fall in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East, and Africa. These countries include: Nicaragua and India ($1,900), Cambodia ($1,600), Pakistan ($1,400),  Benin ($1,200), Mali ($900), Burkina Faso ($770), Togo ($670), Niger ($550), and Afghanistan ($500).

Figure 5: Average GDP per capita by Country

Figure 6 builds on the above understanding of GDP, using color to index whether a country is low, medium or high GDP. Countries are “high” if they have per capita GDPs of $25,000 or higher. Countries are “medium” if they have per capita GDPs between $10,000 and $25,000 dollars. Finally, countries are “low” if they have per capita GDPs of less than $10,000.

This scatterplot shows that, as GDP increases, women tend to close the gap in labor force participation with men. This pattern is represented by the following three countries:

• High GDP: In Luxembourg, GDP per capita is $110k on average. Here, women work 87% as much as men (or 13% less).
• Medium GDP: In Greece, GDP per capita is $20k. Here, women work 75% as much as men (or 25% less). 
• Low GDP: In Uzbekistan, GDP per capita is $1,700. Here, women work 55% as much as men (or 45% less). 

Evidently, as GDP increases, the gap in female labor force participation with men narrows. Yet, this is not an absolute trend. For example, Burundi is one of the world’s lowest GDP countries ($260 per capita), yet it is the only country in the dataset where women have labor force parity with men (women actually work three percentage points more than men here). By contrast, Italy is a relatively high GDP country ($33k per capita), yet women work only 70% as much as men (or 30% less). GDP can help us hazard a guess about a country’s female labor force participation, but it is not completely predictive of it.

Figure 6: Country-Level GDP and Female Labor Force Participation

2.2 GDP and Legal Protections for Women

Next, I explore whether a country’s GDP per capita can predict whether it offers certain legal protections for women. My hypothesis was that countries with higher GDPs would have greater protections for women. Figure 7 zooms in specifically on the share of countries in each region mandating equal pay for equal work, with each bar totaling 100 percent of countries in a region. Countries in pink are those that offer equal pay for equal work, and countries in grey do not.

Figure 7 shows that Europe has the greatest share of countries in any region mandating equal pay, at 87%. These countries include high GDP countries that one would expect to have progressive legal systems, such as Norway ($75k per capita), France ($40k per capita), Germany ($46k per capita), and the UK ($42k per capita).

North America consists of two high GDP countries, Canada ($47k per capita) and the United States ($65k per capita). Yet, Canada mandates equal pay for equal work and the US does not. In fact, Africa has a greater share of countries that mandate equal pay (61%) than North America (50%).This includes some very war-torn and low income countries like Angola ($3k per capita), South Sudan ($1k per capita), and Togo ($700 per capita), making their offering of legal protections for equal pay even more impressive. 

In Australia and the Pacific, high GDP countries like Australia ($54k per capita) and New Zealand ($42k per capita) mandate equal pay for equal work. Yet there are also lower income countries that mandate this, such as the Marshall Islands ($3,800 per capita) and Kiribati ($1,650 per capita). In Asia and the Middle East, only 42% of countries offer protections for equal pay. Interestingly, Japan, a very high GDP country ($40k per capita), does not offer these legal protections (and neither do poorer countries like India and Afghanistan

Evidently, there seems to be no correlation between a country’s GDP and whether it offers legal protections for equal pay. This is surprising, and suggests that there can be high GDP countries where women have a harder time receiving equal pay than in some low GDP countries.

Figure 7: The Proportion of Countries by Region Mandating Equal Pay for Women

2.3 Legal Protections and Women’s Labor Force Participation

Next, I investigated a potential relationship between women’s labor force participation and the degree of legal protections that country offered women in 2023. I hypothesized that countries with more legal protections for women would have narrower gaps in labor force participation between men and women. 

Figure 8 categorizes countries by the number of legal protections they offer, which could be as many as three or as little as zero. Within each category, women’s labor force participation is calculated as a group average. Women’s average workforce participation was comparable across categories. Although women worked the most in countries with 3 legal protections (.79, or 79% as much as men), this was not much higher than women’s participation in countries with two legal protections (.74 or 74%) or no protections (.76 or 76%). 

Moreover, countries with greater legal protections didn’t always have higher levels of female workforce participation. For example, countries with at least one protection for women have an average female labor participation rate of about 66%, meaning that women work 34% less than men. However, in countries with no legal protections, women work 76% as much (or 24% less than men). This means that women are 10% more likely to work in countries without legal protections than they are in countries with at least one legal protection. While surprising, this could mean that countries with legal protections for women don’t always enforce them, resulting in institutional barriers for women who wish to enter the workplace (regardless of the protections the law affords them).

Figure 8: Women’s Labor Force Participation and the Degree of Gendered Legal Protections the Law Offers

2.4 Women’s Labor Force Participation and Education

Next, I investigate whether female labor force participation can be predicted by a country’s relative female education level. That is, do a greater share of women tend to be educated in countries where the gender gap in the labor force is narrower? 

Figure 9 explores whether there is such a correlation while controlling for GDP (to ensure that countries are compared to similar ones). A country’s gender gap in education is depicted on the x axis. If the number is less than 0, it means that women trail men in educational attainment. The y axis, in turn, represents the gender gap in the labor market. If the number is less than 1, women work less than men on average.

Ultimately, for every GDP-level, the education gap and the labor force participation gap are positively related. This means that women’s labor force participation increases as female education levels increase. A good example is comparing Jordan and Tunisia, which are both “low GDP” countries. In Jordan, women tend to be educated .61 (or 61%) less than men on average. Furthermore, women in Jordan tend to participate in the labor force .23 (or 23%) as much of the time as men. Yet, if we look at Tunisia, both the education gap and the labor force participation gap are smaller. Here, women are educated 50% less of the time than men, and women work 40% as much of the time as men.

Interestingly, Figure 9 suggests that women’s participation in the labor force and educational access is not always predicted by GDP. For example, Nigeria has a much lower GDP than Italy. However, Nigerian women work 25% more of the time relative to men than Italian women. Moreover, women are about 22 percentage points more likely to be educated in Nigeria than in Italy. 

Figure 9. Education and Workforce Gaps by Country, Controlling for GDP

Question 3: If women have more protections in certain countries, is it also true that these countries will have better maternal health outcomes?

3.1 Legal Protections and Maternal Mortality

Next, I explore whether a country’s degree of legal protections for women are linked to a country’s rates of maternal mortality. My hypothesis was the countries that offer protections against sexual harassment would have lower maternal mortality rates because they are more attuned to women’s rights.

Figure 10 is a graduated symbol graph where maternal mortality, measured as deaths per 100,000 mothers, is converted from a continuous variable into a categorical one. There are four observed categories of maternal death: 1-300 deaths, 301-600 deaths, 601-900 deaths, and 901-1,200 deaths. Each circle represents a mortality category, and the size of circles is proportionate to the number of countries that fall into this category. Countries in pink are those that have legal protections against sexual harassment, and ones in grey do not. 

Ultimately, there appears to be no correlation between the number of maternal deaths in a country and whether that country prohibits sexual harassment. That is, the size of corresponding circles for each mortality category are similar in countries with and without laws prohibiting sexual harassment. For example, 78% of countries that prohibit harassment had maternal mortality rates of 1-300 deaths per 100,000 mothers, and so did 78% of countries that do not prohibit harassment. Additionally, 15% of countries prohibiting sexual harassment and 13% of countries that do not prohibit harassment had maternal mortality rates of 301-600 deaths per 100,000 mothers–nearly identical figures!

Figure 10. Comparing Maternal Mortality for Countries with and without Prohibitions on Sexual Harassment

3.2 GDP and Maternal Mortality

While the previous figure suggested that there is no linkage between the relative maternal deaths in a country and legal protections for women, Figure 11 investigates whether GDP can be linked to relative maternal mortality. That is, is there a difference in maternal mortality rates in high, medium, and low GDP countries?

There seems to be! When looking at maternal deaths in medium and high GDP countries, the maternal mortality rate is never more than 300 deaths per 100,000 mothers. However, in low GDP countries, there is more variety in the maternal mortality rate. 70% of the time in low GDP countries, the maternal mortality rate is 1-300 deaths per 100,000 mothers. 20% of the time, the maternal mortality rate is between 301-600 deaths per 100k mothers. The remaining 10 percent of the time, the maternal mortality rate is between 600 and 1,200 deaths for every 100,000 mothers. This would suggest that maternal mortality varies by GDP, which makes sense because countries with higher GDPs have better health infrastructures. This means that women who give birth in high and medium GDP countries are likely giving birth in hospitals with the oversight of medical professionals who can provide life-saving care if complications arise during delivery.

Figure 11. Comparing Maternal Mortality for High, Medium and Low GDP Countries

Discussion and Conclusion

This analysis has yielded the following insights:

1. In most countries worldwide, women lag men in labor force participation and access to education. However, in countries with higher GDPs, women tend to have greater relative labor force participation. And, as women get more educated relative to men, they also close the gender gap in labor force participation.

2. Most countries around the world tend to offer at least one legal protection for women, but countries that offer legal protections aren’t always high GDP countries. Furthermore, the degree of legal protections afforded to women seems to have no bearing on women’s average labor force participation relative to men.

3. Women’s maternal health outcomes are comparable in countries with and without legal protections against sexual harassment. However, low GDP countries tend to have higher maternal mortality rates than medium and high GDP countries. 

Some of these findings are consistent with what we would expect, and others are not. The linkage between women’s health outcomes and GDP can be explained by access to life-saving healthcare. Women’s greater rates of labor force participation in high GDP countries can be explained by the fact that a greater share of women tend to be educated in these countries.

However, it is surprising that legal protections do not have any bearing on a country’s labor force participation rates for women. One would imagine that countries with greater legal protections for women would have less barriers to workforce entry, but evidently these laws are not always being enforced. Perhaps many countries pass these laws to appear progressive on the world stage, and not because they actually want to enhance women’s rights.

Another surprise was that GDP does not necessarily predict the degree of legal protections a country affords women. For example, many African nations offer more legal protections than higher GDP nations like Japan and the United States. Evidently, a country’s GDP does not correlate with how progressive it is, as popular culture might lead us to believe.

While based on a rich dataset, this analysis is limited in several ways. First, I did not collect this data, so I cannot gauge whether it accurately measures the underlying constructs. Second, about 50 countries are excluded from this dataset. We have no way of knowing if the trends in this analysis would hold if those countries were included. This is also 2023 data, and statistics like GDP per capita and the number of legal protections for women likely have changed in 2025. Furthermore, certain analytic decisions were made arbitrarily by the researcher, such as the decision to label countries where GDP per capita was less than $10,000 “low GDP.” While $10,000 is not a lot to live on in America, $10,000 may go farther in other countries, meaning that a country with this GDP-level might not actually be “low GDP.” Finally, this research is purely descriptive and cannot speak to causality. This means we cannot say for certain if the findings are due to chance or not.

Ultimately, this analysis provides an interesting descriptive look at trends in women’s rights and outcomes around the world. It appears that, globally, women are less educated and participate less in the workforce than men–although there are legal protections for women in much of the world (that seem to go unenforced). Future research should investigate these findings using more complete and recent data, and by deploying experimental methods.