The International Peace Institute, the Government of Norway, and Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS) hosted a panel discussion on advancing the measurement of women’s inclusion, justice, and security by linking the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Index to WPS in practice. A recording of the event can be found here.
Gender equality is closely linked to peace and sustainable development. The international community has increasingly recognized this nexus, as reflected in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, and the more recent Sustaining Peace Agenda. Complementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, these resolutions highlight the role of women in building peaceful and just societies.
Global indices are a way to assess and compare national progress by distilling an array of complex information into a single number and ranking. While there are a growing number of global indices, none have brought together women’s inclusion, access to justice, and security. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security and the Peace Institute of Oslo have developed the first global index to capture peace, security, and women’s inclusion, drawing from 153 countries covering 98 percent of the world’s population.
The new WPS Index provides valuable insights and opportunities for stakeholders to discuss challenges and identify major routes for change around a shared agenda for women’s inclusion, justice, and security. The index also invites consideration of how to best collect and report accurate and inclusive data, with particular emphasis on the individual, household, community, and state levels.
This event was designed to inform and facilitate discussion amongst Commission on the Status of Women participants, member states, academics, and civil society. It brought together different stakeholders in order to discuss data collection in the WPS space, using key insights from the WPS Index to explore priorities for action and the global state of the WPS agenda, as well as ways to better use data to promote and support women’s rights, sustainability, and peace.