Gender equality not achievable by 2030?

Four years before the 2030 deadline, the United Nations (UN) says none of the targets under Sustainable Development Goal 5 is on track. At the current pace, achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls could take another 171 years, according to the latest “Gender Snapshot 2026 report,” produced by UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The report’s SDG 5 tracker assesses nine targets and 18 indicators and subindicators. None has reached the level of “target met or almost met.” Ten show only marginal progress requiring significant acceleration, while three cannot yet be assessed because of insufficient data.

Here are some of the main reasons for the lag.

Too little political power

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the places where laws, budgets and policies are decided.

In 2026, women occupied only 27.4 percent of seats in national legistlature, up from 22.3 percent in 2015. At the local level, women’s representation had stagnated at 35.6 percent. At the current pace, legislative gender parity would not be reached until 2064 based on the past decade’s progress — or 2089 if the slower pace of the past five years continues.

The report also notes that six in seven countries are still led by men, while women’s share of national cabinet positions fell to 22.4 percent in 2026 after reaching 23.3 percent in 2024.

The problem is not limited to politics. Of 175 chief justices worldwide, only 31 are women, compared with 144 men.

Legal equality still incomplete

There has been progress: 99 legal reforms in 47 countries between 2019 and 2024 removed discriminatory laws or strengthened protections for women.

But the legal gap remains large. In a review of 131 countries, 51 percent still had significant gaps across the areas of legal frameworks and public life, violence against women, employment and economic benefits, and marriage and family. Globally, women enjoy only 64 percent of the legal rights enjoyed by men, according to the report. No country has achieved full legal equality.

This means passing new laws has not been enough to eliminate the structural barriers that women continue to face.

Violence remains widespread

Gender equality cannot advance while millions of women remain vulnerable to violence.

The report estimates that almost one in three women aged 15 and older — about 840 million women — has experienced partner or sexual violence during her lifetime. In the previous 12 months alone, 316 million women experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, based on World Health Organization/UN estimates.

New forms of violence are also emerging. Despite growing concern about technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, the report found that not a single world leader referred to the issue during the 2024 or 2025 United Nations General Assembly sessions.

Harmful practices affect millions 

Progress against child marriage has been made, but it remains far from eliminated.

Nearly one in five girls, or 18 percent, are married before age 18, compared with 22 percent in 2015. Female genital mutilation also remains widespread, with an estimated 230 million women and girls who have survived the practice.

The improvement in child-marriage rates demonstrates that change is possible. But the remaining scale of the problem shows why the 2030 deadline remains difficult to meet.

Heavier burden of unpaid care

One of the least visible barriers to equality is work that often goes unpaid: cooking, cleaning, caring for children and looking after family members.

Globally, women and girls spend 2.5 times as many hours as men on unpaid domestic and care work. In Northern Africa and Western Asia, the difference rises to as much as 4.9 times.

This unequal burden can limit women’s ability to pursue education, paid employment, political participation and leadership — reinforcing other gender gaps.

Lack of equal control over health and economic resources

More than four decades after the idea of women’s empowerment became a global development priority, many women still do not have full control over decisions affecting their own bodies and economic security.

Only 56.3 percent of women aged 15 to 49 who are married or in a union have full decision-making power over contraception, sexual relations and reproductive healthcare.

Land ownership is another major gap. Across 78 developing and European Union countries, women were less likely than men to own or have secure rights over agricultural land in 71 countries, or 91 percent of those studied. Nearly two-thirds of countries provide little or no legal protection for women’s land rights, while fewer than 30 percent guarantee joint land registration or women’s participation in land governance.

Fund and institutional support shrinking

Progress requires sustained investment, but funding is moving in the opposite direction.

Bilateral aid with gender-equality objectives fell by 13 percent between 2023 and 2024, reaching its lowest volume since 2021. Funding for women’s rights organizations fell by 28 percent over the same period. The report also says 42 percent of UN entities reported actual or anticipated weakening of their gender-equality efforts.

At the national level, only one in four countries with available data has the systems needed to make gender equality a transparent and trackable public-spending priority.

Not enough data to see whole picture

What cannot be measured is harder to fix.

The availability of SDG 5 data has improved considerably, reaching 56.6 percent since 2015, compared with 19.3 percent in 2019. But major gaps remain. Less than half of countries have data on unpaid care work, mobile-phone ownership, female genital mutilation, reproductive-health decision-making and women’s ownership or secure rights to agricultural land.

The report therefore warns that gaps in data can hide the experiences of women and girls and make evidence-based policymaking more difficult.

The picture presented by the “Gender Snapshot 2026” is not that gender equality is impossible. Rather, the world is not moving fast enough to achieve SDG 5 by 2030 at the current rate of progress. With only four years remaining, the United Nations says faster progress will require stronger action on women’s leadership, discriminatory laws and social norms, violence, unpaid care, economic and reproductive rights, financing and data.