The G20Economic Visibility
Opening paper: why GEVI, what it covers and what it found
The weakest dimension is institutional visibility in 11 economies, enterprise and legal rights in 6 and statistical and political voice in 2; labour participation is never the lowest. Institutional visibility, the policies, offices and budget lines behind equality laws plus women’s ministerial share, is the single most common weak point.
Reported research measures. Animation reveals the graphic; it does not represent change over time.
Abstract
The same 13-indicator index applied to the 19 sovereign members of the G20; the European Union and African Union are not scored
Across the 19 sovereign G20 members, GEVI runs from 91.1 (United Kingdom) to 47.5 (India). Seven economies score 80 or more (Visible), eight score 65 to 79 (Emerging), three score 50 to 64 (Partial) and one, India, scores below 50 (Hidden). The average across the 19 is 74.7.
The weakest dimension is institutional visibility in 11 economies, enterprise and legal rights in 6 and statistical and political voice in 2; labour participation is never the lowest. Institutional visibility, the policies, offices and budget lines behind equality laws plus women’s ministerial share, is the single most common weak point.
The G20 is a data-rich group: every economy has at least 10 of the twelve core sex-disaggregated economic rows in the World Bank landscape, 10 have all 12, and 13 have no imputed input. Scores here are therefore mostly measured, and their uncertainty comes mainly from the weights and from older inputs rather than from imputation.
Download full paper PDFPoint estimates and intervals
| Rank | Economy | GEVI | Band | 90% interval | Imputed inputs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Kingdom | 91.1 | Visible | 89.2 to 91.6 | 0 |
| 2 | France | 90.5 | Visible | 88.6 to 91.0 | 0 |
| 3 | Australia | 89.3 | Visible | 86.6 to 90.6 | 1 |
| 4 | Canada | 86.7 | Visible | 83.8 to 88.6 | 1 |
| 5 | Germany | 84.9 | Visible | 82.9 to 85.9 | 0 |
| 6 | United States | 83.2 | Visible | 80.5 to 85.1 | 0 |
| 7 | Italy | 81.0 | Visible | 78.3 to 82.3 | 0 |
| 8 | Argentina | 78.9 | Emerging | 74.4 to 81.7 | 0 |
| 9 | South Africa | 78.9 | Emerging | 74.6 to 82.4 | 0 |
| 10 | Brazil | 75.2 | Emerging | 72.4 to 77.0 | 0 |
| 11 | Mexico | 74.0 | Emerging | 69.8 to 77.8 | 0 |
| 12 | China | 73.6 | Emerging | 68.7 to 77.5 | 1 |
| 13 | South Korea | 72.6 | Emerging | 68.3 to 76.1 | 3 |
| 14 | Russia | 69.0 | Emerging | 63.8 to 73.2 | 0 |
| 15 | Japan | 67.7 | Emerging | 64.0 to 70.7 | 1 |
| 16 | Indonesia | 64.5 | Partial | 61.1 to 67.2 | 0 |
| 17 | Turkiye | 58.2 | Partial | 54.4 to 61.5 | 0 |
| 18 | Saudi Arabia | 51.8 | Partial | 48.1 to 56.1 | 1 |
| 19 | India | 47.5 | Hidden | 44.7 to 50.2 | 0 |
Purpose and scope
The Gender Economic Visibility Index asks whether women’s economic activity is present, measured and recognised in the systems that set policy, budgets and taxes. It was first applied to the 15 members of the Pacific Islands Tax Administrators Association. This series applies the same index, unchanged, to the G20, so that readers can see how far the largest economies are from parity, and where a small-island economy’s constraint is the same as a large one’s.
The G20 has 21 members: 19 sovereign countries, the European Union and the African Union. The two bodies are not scored because most of the indicators are national statistics and legal scores that do not exist for a union of states. The 19 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Method in brief
Thirteen indicators are grouped into five dimensions. Each indicator is converted to a parity score between 0 and 1: a ratio of women’s to men’s value, or a share against a 50% benchmark, capped at 1. Dimensions are simple means of their indicators, and the composite is a weighted geometric mean of the dimensions with weights 0.25, 0.20, 0.20, 0.15 and 0.20, scaled to 100.
| Dim | Dimension | Indicators | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 | Labour participation | I1 labour force participation parity; I2 youth NEET parity; I3 youth unemployment parity | 0.25 |
| D2 | Job quality and seniority | I4 non-vulnerable employment; I5 management share; I6 wage and salaried employment | 0.20 |
| D3 | Enterprise and legal rights | I7 firm ownership; I8 WBL legal frameworks; I9 WBL enforcement | 0.20 |
| D4 | Institutional visibility | I10 WBL supportive frameworks; I11 women ministers | 0.15 |
| D5 | Statistical and political voice | I12 women in parliament; I13 data availability | 0.20 |
Each input has an evidence grade (A recent measured, B older or secondary, C imputed) that sets its standard deviation (0.02, 0.06, 0.12) in a 10,000-draw Monte Carlo simulation that also draws the weights from a Dirichlet distribution. Missing values are replaced by the median of the 19 economies with data.
What the G20 set changes
The medians used for imputation and the upper-quartile scenario benchmarks are computed from the G20 set, so they differ from the PITAA set. A G20 score and a PITAA score are on the same scale but are not strictly comparable for imputed inputs.
Because most G20 economies are high or upper-middle income with near-universal wage employment, the parity cap binds on wage employment and non-vulnerable employment in many of them, and D2 saturates.
Account ownership by sex is available for every G20 member but is still not in the 13-indicator specification, because it was missing for the Pacific set. It is counted only in data availability (I13).
Headline findings
The top is close. The United Kingdom (91.1), France (90.5) and Australia (89.3) have overlapping intervals; their order should not be read as firm.
Institutional visibility is the common weak point. It is the lowest dimension in 11 economies and averages 0.62 across the group, against 0.87 for job quality.
Mexico shows what political voice does. With 50.4% women in parliament and 45.0% in ministerial posts, Mexico scores 1.00 on statistical and political voice, the highest in the set, but its labour participation (0.61) and enterprise scores (0.55) hold it to 74.0.
Participation gaps are large in a few big economies. Women’s labour force participation is 32.4% in India and 33.6% in Saudi Arabia, against 77.6% and 83.3% for men; Türkiye (37.1% against 71.9%) is the third widest.
Legal scores are high but enforcement lags. No G20 economy scores above 82 (Australia) on enforcement perceptions, and the gap between the legal score and the enforcement score is largest in Mexico (28.5 points), Türkiye (26.2) and Italy (25.9).
Data availability is not the constraint in most of the G20. Its role in the index is to make the point that the Pacific gaps are a data-coverage problem in a way that G20 gaps mostly are not.
How to read the country papers
Each of the 19 country papers follows the same 12 chapters and six appendices as the PITAA long papers: data audit, measurement model, indicator-by-indicator construction, aggregation trace, uncertainty, sensitivity, peer benchmarking, scenarios, value of information, recommendations and limitations. The closing paper compares the economies, tests the ranking’s robustness and sets out what the data should be used for.
| Reader | Start with | Question answered |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue authority | Country paper chapters 4, 9, 11; closing paper section 5 | Which records to add a sex field to |
| Treasury | Chapters 5, 9, 10; closing paper section 4 | Which institutional gaps to fund |
| Statistics office | Chapters 2, 10 | Which rows to add or refresh |
| G20 gender and labour groups | Opening and closing papers | Where the group stands and what a common data standard would need |
| Analyst | Chapters 3, 6, 7 and appendices | Method, diagnostics and code |
Sources and limitations
Inputs are from the World Bank Gender Data Landscapes (April 2026 edition, including Women, Business and the Law 2026) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking of 1 August 2026. Inputs were transcribed by hand from the 19 country briefs and should be checked against the source pages before publication.
Inputs were transcribed from the country briefs by hand and are unverified against the source pages.
The index rewards parity, not the level or quality of participation; a country where both sexes have low participation can still score well on D1.
Some inputs are old: Brazil firm ownership (2009), China youth NEET (2000), Argentina firm ownership (2017).
Missing values (South Korea NEET, senior management and enforcement; senior management in Canada, China and Saudi Arabia; firm ownership in Japan and Australia) are set to medians and flagged.
No sex-disaggregated taxpayer statistic was used for any economy.
The scenarios show what the index would do if an indicator changed, not what a policy would cause.
Composite and dimension scores
| Economy | GEVI | D1 to D5 |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 91.15 | 0.958 0.939 0.841 0.900 0.910 |
| France | 90.54 | 0.955 0.925 0.913 0.850 0.862 |
| Australia | 89.28 | 0.961 0.929 0.806 0.878 0.877 |
| Canada | 86.66 | 0.958 0.915 0.784 0.922 0.764 |
| Germany | 84.88 | 0.926 0.845 0.768 0.877 0.825 |
| United States | 83.24 | 0.924 0.962 0.722 0.750 0.788 |
| Italy | 81.02 | 0.851 0.832 0.866 0.640 0.828 |
| Argentina | 78.91 | 0.797 0.909 0.826 0.500 0.909 |
| South Africa | 78.86 | 0.878 0.929 0.528 0.748 0.909 |
| Brazil | 75.25 | 0.682 0.921 0.823 0.698 0.672 |
| Mexico | 74.03 | 0.606 0.895 0.554 0.790 1.000 |
| China | 73.58 | 0.866 0.915 0.737 0.428 0.723 |
| South Korea | 72.56 | 0.855 0.915 0.649 0.568 0.630 |
| Russia | 68.99 | 0.821 0.939 0.668 0.365 0.679 |
| Japan | 67.74 | 0.836 0.755 0.723 0.485 0.563 |
| Indonesia | 64.52 | 0.762 0.671 0.671 0.410 0.680 |
| Turkiye | 58.19 | 0.547 0.799 0.559 0.349 0.699 |
| Saudi Arabia | 51.78 | 0.452 0.900 0.390 0.360 0.616 |
| India | 47.51 | 0.522 0.578 0.362 0.331 0.596 |