Gender Gap United States — The World's Richest Economy Still Has No Paid Maternity Leave
The United States ranks 42rd of 148 countries on gender equality (2025), behind most of its peer democracies. It's also the only OECD country with no federal paid maternity leave at all.
US
Gender Gap United States — Progress That Stalled Partway
By some measures, American women have already won. They earn the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, a complete reversal of the 1970s. Women hold a record share of Congress. A woman has served as Vice President. None of that has closed the gap: the U.S. ranks 43rd of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2024 index, behind most other wealthy democracies, and has for several years running.
The clearest single explanation is that America’s gains stopped at the office door. Educational and some political progress kept climbing while the policy scaffolding around work and family, paid leave, affordable childcare, healthcare access, simply never got built. The U.S. remains the only country in the OECD with no statutory paid maternity leave, a fact that surprises most visitors more than any ranking number could.
This page follows the same structure as Gender Gap Netherlands and Gender Gap Finland: pay, power, safety, and education, each checked against the relevant UN target. As a non-European country, this page draws on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers, alongside the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report.
Pay — SDG Target 5.4
Women in full-time work earned about 83 cents for every dollar men earned in 2023, up from 59 cents when the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, but the gap has narrowed by less than 10 points since the 1990s and has essentially stalled. It also varies sharply by race: white women earn about 79 cents to a white man’s dollar, Black women 64 cents, Latina women 57 cents, and Asian American women 90 cents. Economists who control for occupation, hours, and experience still find discrimination accounts for roughly 38% of what remains.
Female labor force participation peaked at 60.3% in 1999 and has since drifted down to 56.8%, a pattern that runs opposite to most peer economies, where participation kept rising. The reason most often cited isn’t culture, it’s cost: full-time infant childcare averages $11,000 a year, more than public college tuition in 33 states, and consumes over a third of a single parent’s median income. Only 23% of American workers have access to any paid family leave through their employer; the unpaid federal leave guaranteed by law covers just 56% of the workforce. The wealth gap compounds all of this: single women hold roughly 32 cents of wealth for every dollar single men hold.
Power — SDG Target 5.5 and SDG 16.7
Women hold about 28% of seats in Congress, the highest share in U.S. history, up from just 10% in 1992’s “Year of the Woman.” Twelve women currently serve as governors. Kamala Harris became the first woman Vice President in 2020, but no woman has yet been elected president, and the U.S. still sits well behind the 63 countries that have had a woman as head of state. On the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s global ranking of women’s parliamentary representation, the U.S. places outside the top 60, behind countries including Rwanda, Mexico, and Sweden, none of which has ever elected a female American-style head of government but all of which use gender quotas the U.S. has never adopted.
Representation thins further for women of color, who hold just over 10% of Congress despite making up roughly a fifth of the U.S. population. The judiciary tells a more encouraging story: four of nine Supreme Court justices are women, and women hold about a third of federal and state judgeships nationally.
Safety — SDG Target 5.2 and SDG 16.1
An estimated one in four American women experiences severe physical violence from an intimate partner in her lifetime, and one in five experiences completed or attempted rape. The Violence Against Women Act, first passed in 1994 and reauthorized as recently as 2022, remains the primary federal response, though funding for support services and law enforcement follow-through are both widely described as inadequate to the scale of the problem. Native American women face the starkest numbers of any group in the country: more than 84% report experiencing violence at some point in their lives.
Workplace sexual harassment remains common and underreported: 38% of women report experiencing it, while 72% of incidents go unreported, most often out of fear of retaliation. The #MeToo movement, which gained national force in 2017, shifted public conversation and prompted some institutional reforms, but its longer-term effect on actual harassment rates is still unclear.
Education — Reversed, With a New Gap Underneath
American women haven’t just closed the education gap, they’ve inverted it. Women now earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees, 61% of master’s degrees, and 54% of doctoral degrees, a complete reversal from 1970, when men earned 59% of all college degrees. The crossover happened in the early 1980s and the gap has widened in women’s favor ever since.
A newer, narrower gap has opened underneath that headline number: women still earn fewer than a quarter of degrees in engineering, computer science, and physics, while earning over 80% of degrees in education, health, and psychology. That segregation by field feeds directly back into the Pay section above, since STEM careers remain among the highest-paid in the American economy.
RYB’s Place in This Picture
RYB does not run the Census Bureau’s surveys, the BLS wage data, or CAWP’s tracking of women in office. The federal agencies and university research centers cited throughout this page do that work. What RYB does is connect it to the same global framework used everywhere else on this site. The SDGs United States page tracks the country against all seventeen UN goals; this page is the deep dive into the two goals concerning women and girls specifically, and Culture Women’s Day United States covers the suffrage history and Women’s Equality Day this data sits on top of.
World Economic Forum
Global Gender Gap Report — United States
2025
Rank: 42 (out of 148 countries)
Score: 0.756
› report
2024
Rank: 43 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.747
2023
Rank: 43 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.748
2022
Rank: 27 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.769
2021
Rank: 30 (out of 156 countries)
Score: 0.763
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Center for American Women and Politics (Rutgers)
National Data — United States
The BLS Women in the Labor Force databook and CAWP’s Women in Elective Office tracker are the primary national sources for the Pay and Power sections above, updated annually.
› bls.gov Women’s Databook
› cawp.rutgers.edu
UN Women
Women Count Data Hub: United States
Country Fact Sheet
› data.unwomen.org/country/united-states-of-america
Looking Forward
The United States doesn’t fit the pattern of a country simply behind on gender equality. It’s a country where one dimension, education, has been solved and then some, while another, family and workplace policy, has barely been addressed at all. Both are true in the same country at the same time, which is exactly why WEF’s index, and this page, track four dimensions separately rather than collapsing everything into a single number.
The clearest gap between American self-image and American data is the paid-leave finding: a country that leads the world on GDP and on women’s educational attainment is also the only OECD member offering no statutory paid maternity leave at all. That’s not a ranking quirk. It’s a policy choice, still unmade, sitting underneath most of the other numbers on this page.
Sources and Links
- Women in the Labor Force: A Databook — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | bls.gov
- American Time Use Survey — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | bls.gov
- The Wage Gap: The Who, How, Why, and What To Do — National Women’s Law Center | nwlc.org
- Women in Elective Office — Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University | cawp.rutgers.edu
- Women in National Parliaments — Inter-Parliamentary Union | ipu.org
- The US and the High Price of Child Care — Child Care Aware of America | childcareaware.org
- Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | cdc.gov
- Statistics on Domestic Violence — National Coalition Against Domestic Violence | ncadv.org
- Gender and Work — Pew Research Center | pewresearch.org
- Global Gender Gap Report 2024 — World Economic Forum | weforum.org
- Women Count Data Hub: United States — UN Women | data.unwomen.org
- SDGs United States — RYB Global Development | redyellowblue.org/data/us/sdgs/
- Culture Women’s Day United States — RYB Global Development | redyellowblue.org/data/us/wdus/
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR)
Families, fertility and feminism: landmarks in women’s rights
by Liz Ford
Women have fought long and hard to secure access to family planning and abortion, and reduce maternal mortality. A modern timeline of that struggle tells a story full of highs and lows.
› theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jul/27/families-fertility-feminism-landmarks-in-womens-rights-timeline
Women’s March
January 21, 2017
Women’s March on Washington
We did it! On January 21, over 5 Million of us worldwide and over 1 Million in Washington, D.C., came to march, speak and make our voices heard. But it doesn’t end here – now is not the time to hang up our marching shoes – it’s time to get our friends, family and community together and make history.
› womensmarch.com
› Women of America: we’re going on strike. Join us so Trump will see our power
