From poverty to power: How investing in women can transform the world
Gender equality symbol.
What you need to know:
- The Gender Snapshot 2025 by UN Women and UN DESA warns that time is running out to achieve global gender equality.
- With five years left before the 2030 deadline, women still face rising poverty, hunger, and exclusion from leadership and technology.
Gender equality stands at a defining moment. The choices made today will determine whether the world moves towards a future of shared prosperity, justice, and opportunity—or backslides into deeper poverty, weaker economies, and eroded human rights.
The Gender Snapshot 2025, produced by UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, lays bare the urgent state of progress. With only five years remaining to meet the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world faces a clear ultimatum: act now or lose the promise of equality for generations to come.
Poverty has a woman’s face
Ten per cent of women live in extreme poverty, a number that has not improved since 2020. By 2030, 351 million women and girls could still be trapped in extreme poverty. Women continue to shoulder more unpaid care work than men and remain locked out of land ownership, finance, and decent jobs—denied the tools needed to thrive.
Hungry, tired, and overlooked
In 2024, women were more likely than men to go hungry, with 26.1 per cent facing food insecurity compared to 24.2 per cent of men—that’s 64 million more women than men. Women also spend nearly three more years of their lives than men in poor health. By 2030, one in three women of reproductive age could be living with anaemia, a condition that drains energy, productivity, and health. Hunger and poor health keep women away from school, work, and leadership, with the effects rippling through families and economies.
School doors open, but child marriage and violence cut futures short
Girls are now more likely than boys to finish school, but the path to leadership remains broken. For many girls, education ends abruptly—nearly one in five young women are married before turning 18. Violence is also widespread, with one in eight women aged 15–49 experiencing partner violence in the past year. Harmful practices continue to rob girls of dignity and autonomy. Each year, four million girls undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), half before their fifth birthday. At the current rate, progress must be 27 times faster to end FGM by 2030.
Power, paychecks, and the AI divide
Women hold just 27 per cent of parliamentary seats and 30 per cent of management positions. At this pace, gender equality in leadership is nearly a century away. Quota systems have shown that progress is possible—some countries have doubled women’s share of parliamentary seats—but overall change remains slow.
Even when women work, they are often clustered in lower-paying jobs with limited career mobility. As the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution accelerates, inequality risks being hardcoded into the future. Women make up only 29 per cent of the global tech workforce and just 14 per cent of tech leadership roles. Nearly 28 per cent of women’s jobs are at risk from AI automation, compared to 21 per cent of men’s.
Yet the digital era also offers opportunity. Closing the gender digital divide could benefit 343 million women and girls, lift 30 million out of extreme poverty, improve food security for 42 million, and spark $1.5 trillion in global growth by 2030.
Highest price in conflict and climate chaos
In 2024, 676 million women and girls lived within 50 kilometres of deadly conflict—the highest number in decades. At the same time, climate change is intensifying floods, droughts, and deadly heat, with women among the first to feel the impact. Climate change alone could push another 158 million women into poverty by 2050, nearly half of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet women are still excluded from peace negotiations and climate planning.
No data, no progress
Since 2025, more than half of national statistical offices have reported budget cuts, including to critical surveys on health and demographics. Only 57 per cent of the gender data needed to track progress is available. Just one in four countries knows how much it spends on gender equality, and only half of national gender institutions are adequately staffed. Without reliable data, governments cannot effectively lead the race for equality. Protecting data means protecting progress.
Five years to cash in on equality
The world has only five years left to decide whether equality will remain a hollow promise or become a lived reality. The stakes could not be higher. Keeping women in poverty, sidelined from leadership, and exposed to violence amounts to economic sabotage—it drains growth, wastes potential, and holds societies back.
According to UN Women, investing in women could lift hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty, add $4 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and generate $342 trillion cumulatively by 2050.
Despite the challenges, there are reasons for optimism. Girls are surpassing boys in school completion, women are gaining seats in Parliament, and nearly 100 countries have reformed discriminatory laws in just five years—from outlawing child marriage to enacting consent-based rape laws.
Still, poverty, hunger, war, climate disasters, and backlash against feminism threaten to erase decades of progress. The Gender Snapshot 2025 identifies six game-changing areas for the next five years: digital inclusion, freedom from poverty, safety from violence, equal decision-making, peace and security, and climate justice.
