Insights from UNDP’s Women’s Empowerment Index and World Bank’s Women Business and Law Index
When it comes to improving economic outcomes for women and women’s empowerment, effective action requires reliable data. Yet, data capturing the full scope of women’s lives is often scarce, making it hard to identify what holds women—and entire economies and societies—back. Without solid evidence, the path to women enjoying the same opportunities as men is harder to achieve.
The UNDP’s human development indices and the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) Index help address this challenge. They highlight how women’s capabilities to make choices in life have been limited and reveal how laws and policies impact women’s opportunities and economic outcomes. Together, these indices reveal the connection between legal frameworks and women’s capabilities and opportunities and inform reforms that expand women’s empowerment and human potential. When women thrive, so do economies and societies, and good data helps make that possible.
UNDP’s indices and World Bank’s WBL index
The UNDP has tracked disparities for years, creating indices like the Gender Development Index (GDI), Gender Inequality Index (GII), and Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI). The latest are the twin gender indices – the Global Gender Parity Index (GGPI) and the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI). The WEI measures women’s ability to make choices and seize opportunities across five key areas: health, education, inclusion, decision-making, and freedom from violence.
The World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law (WBL) Index assesses how well women’s rights are protected in 190 economies. The WBL Index scores countries across eight categories, evaluating legal frameworks both de jure (in law) and de facto (in practice).
Both the WBL Index and the WEI track women’s empowerment. The WBL does so by examining laws that may influence women’s economic livelihood, while the WEI focuses on empowerment outcomes across key dimensions of women’s human development. Taken together, the two indices offer a clearer picture of how certain legal environments may influence women’s empowerment in practice.
Examining the WEI and WBL index
Despite measuring different dimensions of women’s empowerment, the WEI and WBL index tend to move in tandem (Figure 1). This alignment suggests that stronger legal frameworks often promote women’s empowerment, highlighting the link between laws and real-world outcomes for women. Most countries cluster along an upward trend in WBL and WEI scores. Variation increases at higher index values: countries with mid-to-low scores cluster closely around the trend line, while those with higher scores are more dispersed. This variation suggests that economic conditions and social norms may play a greater role once favorable legal conditions are in place.
Figure 1: UNDP WEI and World Bank WBL Index by HDI Category
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