ReliefWeb

Klugman, Jeni; Marianne Dahl & Ingrid Vik Bakken (2018) The Women, Peace, and Security Index: A Global Index of Women’s Wellbeing, PRIO Paper. Oslo: PRIO.

Achieving gender equality has been a prioritized goal of the international community for many years, yet women in the world today still face injustice, exclusion and violence. To track progress on women’s rights and female empowerment, quantitative and comparable indices on a global scale are useful. This is the background for introducing the new Women, Peace, and Security Index, created by researchers at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Women’s wellbeing is measured along three dimensions – inclusion, injustice, and security. The index provides an important tool with which to understand key achievements, as well as insights into the work that remains to achieve gender equitable societies.

Brief Point

• The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS)
  Index bridges insights from gender and development indices with those from peace and security indices.

• Countries are ranked across three dimensions of women’s wellbeing: inclusion, justice and security.

• The index ranks 153 countries and covers more than 98 percent of the world’s population.

• The index reveals that there are significant differences both across and within regions. There is potential for improvement in all regions, including in those countries that are ranked among the top ten.

• The WPS Index is useful to several key stakeholder groups, such as policy makers, civil society, businesses and investors, academics, and the international development community