Progress of the world’s women
“Progress of the world’s women” is UN Women’s periodic investigation of progress made towards a world where women, girls, and gender-diverse people live free from inequality, poverty, and violence. Provocative and insightful, this series is the product of multi-year research, in-depth analyses, and data findings that build upon the expertise of leading organizations, activists, and academics.
The ninth edition will be published in 2026 and will provide a comprehensive analysis of two of the most pressing challenges facing the world today: the rapidly accelerating heating of the planet and the stalled progress for the world’s women and girls. UN Women has embarked on an ambitious programme of work that will make the case that public action based on a framework of feminist climate justice holds the key to addressing these challenges.
The programme of work will include the development of a conceptual framework on feminist climate justice, innovative data analysis on the impacts of climate change on women’s rights and gender equality, and robust evidence on how cross-sectoral policies can be leveraged to mitigate these impacts and ensure a gender-just transition to environmental sustainability. It will also map the approaches needed to finance these policies and identify the routes to translating social mobilization into transformative, accountable, and sustainable change.
Another important component of this programme will be the development of a global policy scorecard on gender and climate that compiles and analyses government action on mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction and management from a gender perspective. As well as feeding into the evidence base for the report, the scorecard will be made available as a standalone policy tool for use by advocates to hold policymakers to account for progress on their gender equality commitments.
Gender Equality and Climate Policy Scorecard
The Gender Equality and Climate Policy Scorecard is a global monitoring tool designed to assess how effectively national climate policies address gender inequalities. It evaluates policy performance across five key gender equality dimensions, as well as the extent to which gender is mainstreamed in climate policy design and implementation.
- Factsheet no. 1: The Gender Equality and Climate Policy Scorecard: Advancing accountability in nationally determined contributions
- Factsheet no. 2: Driving gender-responsive climate action: The role of institutional enablers
- The Gender Equality and Climate Policy Scorecard: Methodological note (PDF, 276 KB)
- Enhancing gender-responsive nationally determined contributions: Insights from the Gender Equality and Climate Policy Scorecard
Progress of the world’s women: Conceptual framework
Feminist climate justice think pieces
Expert Group Meetings
- Expert Group Meeting report – Progress of the world’s women 2026: Gender equality in the age of climate crisis
- Expert Group Meeting report – Progress of the world’s women: Conceptualizing feminist climate justice
- Youth Expert Group Meeting report – Progress of the world’s women: Conceptualizing feminist climate justice
Previous editions
- Progress of the world’s women 2019–2020: Families in a changing world
- Progress of the world’s women 2015–2016: Transforming economies, realizing rights
- Progress of the world’s women 2011: In pursuit of justice
- Progress of the world’s women 2008/2009: Who answers to women?
- Progress of the world’s women 2005: Women, work and poverty
- Progress of the world’s women 2002, volume 1: Women, war, peace: The independent experts’ assessment on the impact of armed conflict on women and women’s role in peacebuilding
- Progress of the world’s women 2002, volume 2: Gender equality and the Millennium Development Goals
- Progress of the world’s women 2000