Around the world, women continue to face inequalities in every aspect of their lives. Visible gender gaps, such as those in the labour market and education, limit women’s rights and opportunities.

These gaps are deeply rooted in discriminatory social institutions – the “hidden part of the iceberg”. Discrimination embedded in formal and informal laws, as well as social norms, often remains unseen and hard to measure, creating structural barriers that hinder progress towards gender equality.

The SIGI measures discriminatory social institutions in key areas that affect women’s and girls’ lives. Produced by the OECD Development Centre since 2009, the SIGI has been instrumental in documenting the persistence and prevalence of gender discrimination across countries at different stages of development. 

The SIGI is a composite index that builds on a framework of 4 dimensions:

Discriminatory social institutions: a mixed picture of progress and setbacks 

Between 2019 and 2023, more and more countries around the world have tackled discriminatory social institutions, notably through legal reforms that protect women’s rights and grant them equal opportunities. 

Changes in social norms have resulted in both progress and setbacks, but they reveal that the biases against women’s economic empowerment have worsened between 2014 and 2022.

Discriminatory social institutions are at the heart of gender inequality. They curtail women’s access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. They also limit their participation in the global response to climate change – even though they are among the most affected.

Policy makers have been paying increasing attention to these hidden and deep-rooted barriers to women’s empowerment. However, progress is slow and major environmental, economic, and social challenges threaten to reverse the trend, which calls for countries to step up efforts to reform laws and address biases.

The SIGI measures discrimination against women in social institutions across 179 countries. By taking into account laws, social norms and practices that restrict women’s and girls’ rights and access to empowerment opportunities and resources, the SIGI captures the underlying drivers of gender inequality.

The SIGI aims to support policymaking by providing the necessary data to policy- and decision-makers, experts and researchers, international and philanthropic organisations, as well as the public at large. It is one of the official data sources for monitoring SDG Indicator 5.1.1 on “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor gender equality and women’s empowerment”, together with UN Women and the World Bank Group’s Women Business and the Law.