Country Rankings

Explore the global index that ranks countries on women’s workforce equality. Although inequality for women in the workforce persists worldwide, governments are beginning to understand the costs—and take action.

  • Top 10
  • Bottom 10

This report measures the formal legal obstacles to women’s economic participation around the world. While there is often a large gap between laws on the books and their implementation, formal legal equality is a critical first step to closing the gap between women and men in the economy. All the top-ranked countries score at least a 90 out of 100 on protecting women’s access to institutions and their use of property. Many countries miss the mark on protecting women from violence, providing incentives to work, and eliminating barriers to jobs. No country gets a perfect score on women’s workplace equality, but Australia comes closest, with a score of 94.9 out of 100.

Out of the 189 countries covered, none of those ranked at the bottom scores highly on a single indicator. The ten bottom-ranked countries have near-zero scores for protecting women from violence and allowing women to build credit. Yemen is ranked last, with a score of 24.2 out of 100.

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Women’s access to employment and economic opportunity depends on many factors, from underlying economic conditions to social norms. This interactive highlights one critical precondition for women’s economic participation: equality under the law. The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2018 report presents data on close to 170 gender inequalities in legal treatment in 189 countries, grouped into seven categories: accessing institutions, building credit, getting a job, going to court, protecting women from violence, providing incentives to work, and using property. The World Bank then scored countries on a narrower list of fifty legal gender inequalities selected from the full data set. For completeness, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) added to this list an additional six legal gender inequalities from the World Bank data set, selected because of their significance to women’s rights and opportunities. CFR then calculated a ranking of countries, giving each an overall average score between 0 and 100 (100 being the best).

Download the data

This data set includes the Council on Foreign Relations’ expanded set of scored questions and its country rankings.

See the methodology

Source: World Bank

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This country is not in the data set. The World Bank scored 189 countries on their level of legal inequalities related to women’s work.

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Regions

  • East Asia and the Pacific
  • Europe and Central Asia
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Middle East and North Africa
  • OECD
  • South Asia
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
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All income groups

Income

  • High
  • Upper middle
  • Lower middle
  • Low
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Order by

  • Highest to lowest score
  • Lowest to highest score

View score

  • Overall average
  • Accessing institutions
  • Building credit
  • Getting a job
  • Going to court
  • Protecting women from violence
  • Providing incentives to work
  • Using property

Mexico

Region

Latin America and the Caribbean

Income group

Upper middle

Average score

92.8 / 100

Individual indicator score

  • Accessing institutions
    100
  • Building credit
    100
  • Getting a job
    79.1
  • Going to court
    100
  • Protecting women from violence
    87.5
  • Providing incentives to work
    83.3
  • Using property
    100
Learn more about the legal barriers women face in the workplace
See the methodology for more information

How Mexico ranks:

1 of 32

Latin America and the Caribbean

1 of 51

Upper middle income group

5 of 189

Globally

Women’s Workplace Inequality Worldwide

This chart visualizes countries’ gross national income (GNI) per capita against their score for women’s workplace inequality. 
The size of the circle represents the country’s female population.

Average score

2017 gni per capita (US $)

log scale

GNI per capita data not available for: Mexico

The legal barriers Mexico should address:

  • Accessing institutions
  • Building credit
  • Getting a job
  • Going to court
  • Protecting women from violence
  • Providing incentives to work
  • Using property

Mexico has no barriers to address in this category.

Mexico has no barriers to address in this category.

  1. There is legally mandated paid maternity leave, but it is less than fourteen weeks.
  2. There is no legally mandated paid parental leave.
  3. The law does not mandate equal remuneration for work of equal value.
  4. Parents cannot work flexibly.

Mexico has no barriers to address in this category.

  1. There are no civil remedies for sexual harassment in the workplace.
  1. Employers do not have to provide leave for employees to care for sick relatives.

Mexico has no barriers to address in this category.

Legal reforms Mexico has implemented between 2015 and 2017:

No reforms were undertaken between 2015 and 2017 related to women’s workplace equality.

Increased gender parity

Neutral to gender parity

Decreased gender parity

See all

Learn more about the legal barriers to work that women face around the world