World survey on the role of women in development

The 2024 edition focuses on the theme, “Harnessing social protection for gender equality, resilience and transformation”. The report explores how integrated, gender-responsive social protection systems can advance gender equality in the context of more frequent disasters and chronic crises, including for groups facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. In doing so, it takes stock of gender gaps in coverage, adequacy, and comprehensiveness and identifies promising practices for closing them. It also explores how social protection systems can be financed in a progressive, gender-equitable, and sustainable way.

To produce the report, UN Women brought together researchers, policymakers, civil society actors, and UN system partners, with the aim of delivering a report with strong and sustained inputs and buy-in, which will provide guidance to policymakers and support advocacy for a new generation of gender-responsive social protection systems.

Expert Group Meeting reports

• The world survey on the role of women in development 2024: Gender, poverty dynamics and the implications for social protection in a world of repeated shocks and protracted crises, report of the Expert Group Meeting held in Brighton (UK), 11 September, 2023
• The world survey on the role of women in development 2024: Harnessing social protection for gender equality, resilience and transformation, report of the virtual Expert Group Meeting, 5–6 October, 2023

Expert Group Meeting papers

• Care as a fourth pillar of welfare and social protection systems (English) (Spanish)
• Financing social protection: Feminist alternatives to austerity (English) (Spanish)
• Integrating income, employment support and care in Latin America: A Gender Perspective
• Ensuring social protection delivery for, with and by women: The experiences of informal women workers’ solidarity organisations
• Integrated approaches to social protection, care and employment
• Risks and benefits of digital tools for social protection delivery from a gender perspective
• Targeting social assistance in the context of crises and austerity: The case of Sri Lanka
• Gender, unpaid care and social protection: Policy priorities for West and Central Africa

• Why addressing women’s income and time poverty matters for sustainable development (2019)
• Gender equality and sustainable development (2014)
• Women’s control over economic resources and access to financial resources, including microfinance (2009)
• Women and international migration (2004)
• Globalization, gender and work (1999)
• Women in a changing global economy (1994)
• World survey on the role of women in development (1989)
• World survey on the role of women in development (1984)