SDG 5 / Target 5.5: ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life

Trend analysis of the official SDG data using the SDG Data Explorer Tool created by the Commonwealth Secretariat shows that among all Commonwealth countries, the proportion of women in managerial positions is highest in Barbados at 48.6% and the lowest in Pakistan at 4.93%. The Commonwealth country that has made the greatest improvement in appointing women to managerial positions since the year 2000 is Malta. Based on the data that is available, the Commonwealth average for the proportion of women in managerial positions over this period has improved marginally from 29.21% in 2000 to 33.24% in 2019.

SDG5: 2021 data on Women MPs and Ministers in the Commonwealth

According to the ‘Women in Politics 2021’ data published by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women recently, 21.5% of the elected MPs in Commonwealth countries are women currently. On the same measure, the average is 25% for countries that make up the rest of the world. 

The three countries that currently do not have any elected women MPs include Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. At the beginning of 2021, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Papua New Guinea were the Commonwealth countries that did not have a single female minister in their governments.

The charts below show the Commonwealth countries that top the league for female political representatives in each region of the world.

For further details see the full report

One in five Parliamentarians in Commonwealth countries are women

Rwanda has registered a 250% increase (from 14 to 49 out of 80 MPs) over the last two decades in the number of female MPs as a proportion of total MPs, the largest improvement recorded by any Commonwealth country in this period. On average, 19.5% of MPs in the Commonwealth countries are women. Data for 2018 shows the proportion of women parliamentarians is higher than the Commonwealth average for 22 countries. The countries that made the slowest progress in reducing the gender imbalance among parliamentarians in the same period are Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Kiribati, Kingdom of Eswatini and Tonga.