Among 181 countries from around the world, Denmark is the best country for women, according to the 2025-2026 Women, Peace, and Security Index at Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security.
Since 2017, scholars at Georgetown have tracked global progress and declines in women’s status biannually. For each country analyzed, the researchers examine 13 indicators of women’s status within three dimensions: inclusion (education, financial inclusion, employment, cellphone use, and parliamentary representation), justice (absence of legal discrimination, access to justice, maternal mortality, and son bias), and security (intimate partner violence, community safety, political violence targeting women, and proximity to conflict). Although many areas have experienced improvements, global progress on women’s status has stagnated since Georgetown’s 2017 index.
Denmark has remained the top country for women since the 2023 rankings, while Afghanistan ranked the lowest again. The United States moved up six spots from the prior report, now sitting at 31st place. This is largely due to the country’s first improvement in maternal mortality in nearly two decades. But, among developed countries, the U.S. still ranks last in maternal mortality.
Despite the overall high scores in developed countries, progress in women’s rights has stalled over the past decade. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain the second-best region for women, but have experienced declines since the 2021 index. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women’s status has also declined, primarily due to security indicators. However, two countries in the region – Costa Rica and Uruguay – cracked the top 20 percent of the index for the first time.
In East Asia and the Pacific, there has been a consistent upward trend in women’s status since 2019, despite many countries experiencing ongoing gaps in education, parliamentary representation, and maternal mortality, as well as a persistent preference for male children. While they still face ongoing challenges, countries in sub-Saharan Africa and those classified as fragile states have seen the largest gains in women’s status since 2017.
One of the primary drivers in the decline of women’s status is proximity to conflict. In 2024, 676 million women around the world were exposed to conflict – a 74 percent increase from 2010. Among countries where women live close to conflict, political violence towards women is three times worse than the global average in countries where women are far from conflict. However, some conflict-affected countries have seen major improvements in women’s well-being. Yemen has experienced large gains in inclusion scores, while the Republic of Congo has experienced the largest overall improvement in women’s status since 2017.