Gender Gap Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gender Equality, a woman stands by a picnic table watching a vibrant sunset over a sea of clouds
A woman stands by a picnic table watching a vibrant sunset over a sea of clouds | photo Amel Uzunovic

Gender Gap Bosnia and Herzegovina — Tracking the Progress of Women and Girls

Bosnia and Herzegovina ranks 73rd in the world for gender equality — and the gap looks different depending on which part of the country you are in.

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Gender Gap Bosnia and Herzegovina — What the Numbers Actually Show

Bosnia and Herzegovina improved its position in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report, rising from 86th in 2023 to 78th in 2024 and now 73rd out of 148 countries, with a score of 0.717. That upward trend is real. So is the distance still to travel.

BiH is not an EU member state, but it is an official candidate. In March 2024, the European Council opened EU accession negotiations with the country. That matters for this page, because gender equality is a core EU accession requirement — and the pressure it creates is one of the most significant drivers of policy change currently operating in BiH.

What makes BiH’s gender gap unusual is its structure. The country has two entities — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and Republika Srpska (RS) — plus the Brčko District, each with their own governments, laws, and political cultures. Gender equality legislation, domestic violence law, and women’s political representation all look different depending on which part of the country you are measuring. No single national figure fully captures what it means to be a woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina today.

This page follows the same structure used across all RYB Gender Gap pages: pay, power, safety, and education, each checked against the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goal target, with RYB connecting the data rather than producing it.

Pay and Economic Participation — SDG Target 5.4

Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina participate in the formal labour force at significantly lower rates than men. Men make up 61% of the labour force, women only 39% — a gap of 22 percentage points that has remained stubbornly wide for years. The work participation sub-domain of EIGE’s Gender Equality Index scored 61.4 for BiH in 2024, more than 21 points below the EU average of 83.3.

A key factor is the structural dependence of women’s employment on childcare availability. The 2024 Gender Equality Barometer, launched by UNDP BiH and the Agency for Gender Equality, found that career choices women make are often directly dependent on the quality of childcare infrastructure. Where childcare is unavailable or unaffordable, women leave the labour market — or never fully enter it.

A full gender pay gap figure at the national level does not yet exist for BiH. The Money domain of the EIGE Gender Equality Index cannot currently be calculated due to a lack of gender-disaggregated data. This data gap is itself a finding: SDG target 5.4 requires monitoring of unpaid care and domestic work alongside paid employment, and the mechanisms to do this consistently across BiH’s entities are still being built.

Power and Political Representation — SDG Target 5.5 and SDG 16.7

This is the most visible and most contested dimension of BiH’s gender gap — and the one where the country’s political complexity is hardest to separate from the data.

As of July 2025, the House of Representatives had eight women members, representing 19.1% of the total. In the upper house, the House of Peoples, only one woman serves, representing 6.7%. Women’s representation in parliament has fallen to its lowest point since 2010, despite an electoral code that mandates a minimum of 40% of each gender on candidate lists.

The gap between a 40% candidate quota and a 19% outcome tells its own story. Party placement matters as much as presence on a list. Women are frequently placed lower on proportional lists, where they are less likely to be elected even when the quota is technically met. UNDP BiH’s baseline study on barriers to political participation found that structural party culture, financial barriers, and informal networks consistently work against women’s effective political participation.

EIGE’s Power domain score for BiH was 46.3 in 2024, down from 49.1 in 2023 — a declining trend. The Economic Power sub-domain fell sharply, from 51.8 in 2023 to 43.8 in 2024, reflecting the low share of women on company boards and in senior financial leadership. The Social Power sub-domain also declined. Only Political Power showed a modest upward movement, from 42.9 in 2023 to 44.6 in 2024, suggesting that some incremental parliamentary progress is occurring even as overall power indicators slip.

SDG Target 5.5 calls for women’s full and effective participation in decision-making at every level. At the current rate of change, BiH’s own Equal Future data projects that it will take decades to reach parity in parliament. The next elections for the House of Representatives are scheduled for 2026.

Safety — SDG Target 5.2 and SDG 16.1

Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have a single national law criminalizing domestic violence. That is the defining fact of this section.

The two entities handle domestic violence through their own separate legal frameworks, with different definitions, different enforcement capacities, and significantly different political cultures around the issue. In February 2025, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina parliament adopted a new law on domestic violence protection — including a mandatory 24-hour SOS hotline, expanded police powers to detain suspected perpetrators for up to 48 hours, and a requirement that police attend every reported case. That is a genuine step forward for FBiH’s 2.3 million people.

In Republika Srpska, the picture is different. A draft law on femicide was withdrawn in 2024 after conservative activists objected to the term “gender-based violence,” which they called “gender ideology.” The RS president publicly supported the protesters. Human Rights Watch’s 2025 World Report documented this directly: in Republika Srpska, a draft law on femicide was withdrawn because conservative activists took issue with the term “gender-based violence” — and the RS president backed their position.

The Council of Europe’s gap analysis in September 2024 found that criminal laws in BiH do not yet include the absence of freely given consent as a core component of sexual violence definitions — a requirement of the Istanbul Convention, which BiH has ratified but not yet fully implemented. Digital violence against women was identified as a growing area where current law falls short.

The available data on violence is limited. In 2018 — the most recent nationally representative figure — 3.4% of women aged 15–49 reported physical or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months. This figure is likely an undercount. Only 77.8% of the legal frameworks needed to monitor gender-based violence under SDG indicators are currently in place in BiH, and femicide cases documented in 2024 demonstrated, in Human Rights Watch’s words, “authorities’ failure to prevent and sanction violence even in cases in which the perpetrator has a known history of violence against the complainant.”

The OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina has been active on gender-based violence monitoring for several years, including a dedicated survey on sexual harassment, and continues to support legislative reform across both entities. Their May 2025 conference on coordinated action to end violence against women brought together institutions from across BiH for the first time in several years.

Education — SDG Target 4.5

Education is the area where BiH’s gender gap runs in women’s favour. Girls consistently outperform boys in secondary school completion and increasingly in tertiary enrolment. EIGE’s Knowledge domain scored 58.7 for BiH in 2022, the most recent full calculation — 4 points below the EU average, but still the highest-scoring domain in BiH’s partial index.

The disconnect between educational attainment and labour market participation is stark. BiH women have been entering higher education at growing rates, yet their labour force participation remains among the lowest in the Western Balkans. The 2024 Gender Equality Barometer found that deeply rooted expectations about domestic roles for women — rather than a lack of education or aspiration — are the primary structural barrier. Women’s economic inactivity in BiH is closely correlated with the number of young children in a household, and with the absence of affordable childcare.

This pattern repeats across the Western Balkans, and the EU accession process now names it explicitly as a reform priority: closing the gap between women’s education levels and their economic participation is directly tied to BiH’s progress toward EU membership.

The EU Accession Factor

For BiH, the EU accession process is not just a diplomatic project — it is the main external driver pushing gender equality reform forward. When the European Council opened negotiations in March 2024, it created a concrete, monitored obligation to bring BiH’s gender equality legislation in line with EU standards. That includes criminal law harmonization under the Istanbul Convention, gender-disaggregated data collection, and women’s political participation.

The Federation parliament’s 2025 domestic violence law is partly a product of this pressure. So is BiH’s partial EIGE Gender Equality Index, first published in 2022 and updated since — a technical project funded through the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA). The act of measuring gender equality in a comparable, EU-standard way is itself a reform, because it makes gaps visible that were previously invisible in national statistics.

The challenge is that entity-level politics can move in different directions simultaneously. What progresses in the Federation can stall or reverse in Republika Srpska. No EU accession requirement can override BiH’s internal constitutional structure, which means gender equality progress in BiH depends on political will in both entities — and that will remains uneven.

RYB’s Place in This Picture

RYB does not produce the WEF index, the EIGE partial scores, or the UN Women data cited on this page. The Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Agency for Gender Equality, EIGE, UN Women, UNDP, OSCE, and Human Rights Watch do that work. What RYB does is bring the picture together in plain language and connect it to the global framework it belongs to.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s gender gap story is one of genuine, measurable progress — and one of genuine, legally embedded obstacles. A country that helped shape the international Women, Peace and Security agenda through its women’s post-war peacebuilding, and that was one of the first post-conflict states to adopt a UNSCR 1325 National Action Plan, still lacks a uniform national law against domestic violence in 2025. Both of those things are true at the same time.

This is also the data that Culture Women’s Day Bosnia and Herzegovina exists to surface — the gap between what Bosnian women built in the aftermath of 1995, and what the country’s institutions have and have not yet delivered in return.

World Economic Forum

Global Gender Gap Report Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks countries on their progress towards gender parity across four thematic dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

2025
Rank: 73 (out of 148 countries)
Score: 0.717
› report

2024
Rank: 78 (out of 146 countries)

2023
Rank: 86 (out of 146 countries)

European Institute for Gender Equality

Gender Equality Index — Bosnia and Herzegovina (Partial)

EIGE has been working with BiH since 2013 to build capacity in gender equality data. BiH launched its first partial Gender Equality Index in 2022, funded through the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance. The index covers the Knowledge and Power domains fully, and the Work and Health domains partially. The Money domain cannot yet be calculated due to data gaps.

2024 scores:
Knowledge domain: 58.7 (EU average: 62.7)
Power domain: 46.3 (EU average: 61.4)
Work participation sub-domain: 61.4 (EU average: 83.3)

› EIGE BiH country profile

UN Women

Women Count Data Hub: Bosnia and Herzegovina

Country Fact Sheet
› data.unwomen.org/country/bosnia-and-herzegovina

Looking Forward

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s gender gap is moving in the right direction by the headline numbers — 73rd in 2025, up from 86th in 2023. That progress is real. So are its structural limits.

The country cannot pass a single national domestic violence law because its political structure does not allow it. Women’s parliamentary representation is at its lowest point in fifteen years despite a 40% candidate quota. The pay gap cannot even be measured at the national level because the data does not yet exist. And the entity that is blocking a femicide law is doing so by politically weaponizing the language of “gender ideology.”

At the same time: the Federation parliament passed a new domestic violence law in 2025. BiH’s WEF rank has improved by 13 places in two years. EU accession pressure is real and increasing. Women’s civil society in BiH — forged in the hardest possible circumstances after 1995 — remains one of the most organizationally experienced in the Western Balkans.

Tracking all of it, openly and together, is what SDG 5 and SDG 16 ask of every country. It is also what RYB asks of itself, one country page at a time.

Sources

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