WPS Index Methodology

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index captures 13 indicators of women’s status classified under three dimensions: inclusion (economic, social, political); justice (formal and informal discrimination); and security (at the individual, community, and societal levels). It combines performance across these indicators and dimensions to generate a country’s score, between 0 (worst) and 1 (best), and establish its ranking.

The indicator data comes from highly reputable sources, including UN agencies, the World Bank, and the Gallup World Poll. While all indicators represent the most recent values available, data collection cannot keep pace with evolving global events. As a result, the impacts of current crises and conflicts may not be consistently accounted for across our data.

The 2025/26 WPS Index ranks 181 countries and economies, adding four more countries compared to the 2023 Index and 28 more countries compared to the inaugural 2017/18 index. Structural updates to the WPS Index that were introduced in the prior 2023 WPS Index are kept in place. To ensure consistency and comparability, we recalculated older WPS Index scores and rankings using the updated methodology and published key findings here.

Countries are classified according to the four human development categories, income levels, as well as fragility and conflict status using the latest World Bank classifications.

We also calculate the correlation of the WPS Index with other indices of national outcomes. This is done by recording scores for countries available in both the WPS Index and the other national outcome indices, and then calculating the correlation coefficient in Excel for each of the indices. 
Section 1 and Appendix 1 in the WPS Index report provide detailed information on the methodology, including definitions and source information of the WPS Index indicators.

Please email giwps@georgetown.edu in case of any questions.