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Statistics: Status of Women Around the World

These statistics were compiled by the Global Fund for Women. Grants from the Global Fund for Women support women’s organizations working to protect women from violence, increase girls’ access to education, improve economic opportunity and make communications technology available to women.

Access to Education

  • 855,000,000 people in the world are illiterate. 70% of them are women.
  • Girls represent 60% of the 325 million children not in school.
  • Educated girls usually have smaller families when they grow up, and healthier pregnancies. A 10% increase in girls’ primary education can be expected to decrease infant mortality by 4.1 per 1000 births.

Economic Status

  • 70% of the 1.6 billion people living in severe poverty are women and girls.
  • Only 1% of the world’s assets are in the name of women.
  • There is no country in the world where women’s wages are equal to those of men.
  • For nearly nine hundred million women worldwide, the average daily income is less than one dollar.

Violence Against Women

  • Domestic Violence is the leading cause of death for women worldwide.
  • One out of every three women worldwide has been beaten, forced into sex or experienced another form of violent abuse.
  • Using rape as a weapon of war has been common in ethnic based conflicts. Nearly 20,000 Muslim women were raped during the Balkan war, and the rape of 15,000 women took place in one year of ethnic-based violence in Rwanda.
  • Two million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation each year, and hence are at risk of suffering a wide range of harmful consequences from psychological trauma to hemorrhage, HIV infection, complications during childbirth and death.

Political Power

  • Only 13% of members of national parliaments worldwide are women.
  • In the 21st century, some countries still do not permit women to vote. Among these are Brunei, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

Health

  1. 600,000 women die each year from pregnancy related causes.
  2. Parents in countries such as China and India sometimes use sex determination tests to find out if their fetus is a girl. Of 8,000 fetuses aborted at a Bombay clinic, 7,999 were female.
  3. Reproductive health services for all women would cost $12 billion a year; $12 billion a year is spent on perfume in Europe and the United States.
  4. Basic health and nutrition for all would cost $13 billion a year; $17 billion a year is spent on pet food in Europe and the United States.

Human Security

  • Over 1 million women are trafficked each year worldwide for forced labor, domestic servitude or sexual exploitation.

Sources: United Nations Development Project; Council for Adult Education, Women’s Learning Partnership; United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); Bread for the World; Johns Hopkins Institute for Public Health; Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University; International Center for Research on Women; Congressional Research Service.