Trends in women’s status over time: Key findings from revised WPS Index estimates for 2017-2023

Regionally, East Asia and the Pacific • Prioritize investments in women as investments in and the Middle East and North Africa saw the most the wellbeing of everyone in society. [...] the others being Lebanon and Tunisia––where women have equal rights in terms of opening bank accounts Figure 4 displays the top ten countries in terms of score and accumulating credit.3 Bahrain also encompasses the improvement, five of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa highest rate of women’s business participation in the and four of which are from the MENA region. [...] protections, benefits, and safety standards.33 At the indicator level, women’s financial inclusion and legal protections have expanded the most globally, while The year 2022 was the deadliest in terms of battle deaths women’s employment and proximity to conflict have from armed conflict since 1994, the year of the Rwandan worsened the most. [...] relevant regions and groups; • the aggregation of the normalized indicators within The 2023 WPS Index is based on 13 indicators, while the the dimension at the country level was done using an previous three editions, published in 2017, 2019, and 2021, arithmetic mean, and the aggregation of dimensional were based on 11 indicators. [...] In order to obtain the time series obtained from the regional aggregates of the of comparable WPS Index values, the WPS Index was corresponding country indicators; and recalculated for 2017/18, 2019/20, and 2021/22 using • the regional aggregates were obtained as the the same 13 indicators used for the 2023/24 WPS Index.