Women’s Rights

Women’s rights are human rights that all women have. But in practice, these rights are often not protected to the same extent as the rights of men.

Among others, women’s rights include: physical integrity rights, such as being free from violence and making choices over their own body; social rights, such as going to school and participating in public life; economic rights, such as owning property, working a job of their choice, and being paid equally for it; and political rights, such as voting for and holding public office.

The protection of these rights allows women to live the lives they want and to thrive in them.

On this page, you can find data and visualizations on how the protection of women’s rights has changed over time, and how it differs across countries.

Research & Writing

Featured image for the article on how many maternal deaths could be avoided. Stylized bar chart with lines indicating the differences in size between them.

If we can make maternal deaths as rare as they are in the healthiest countries we can save almost 300,000 mothers each year

Featured image for the article on the key facts and trends in female labor force participation. Several stylized lines going up.

Working women: Key facts and trends in female labor force participation

Interactive Charts on Women’s Rights

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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Bastian Herre, Pablo Arriagada, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Hannah Ritchie, Joe Hasell and Max Roser (2023) - "Women’s Rights". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://staging-owid.netlify.app/women-rights' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-women-rights,
    author = {Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Hannah Ritchie and Joe Hasell and Max Roser},
    title = {Women’s Rights},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2023},
    note = {https://staging-owid.netlify.app/women-rights}
}
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