WD2026: Launching the Gender Equality in Foreign Policy Index

In 2023, we launched the first Feminist Foreign Policy Index. At the time, the future felt expansive and full of possibility. More governments were exploring feminist foreign and development policy as a viable framework for external action. Existing champions were widening their focus into areas such as trade and climate. There was real debate about what a more feminist approach to foreign policy could look like across regions, how it could engage with intersectional and decolonial analysis, and how it could align more meaningfully with long-standing global and regional commitments on gender equality.

Today, we are launching the Gender Equality in Foreign Policy Index–an evolution of the original Index–in a very different political context, marked by escalating conflict, democratic erosion, attacks on multilateralism, shrinking development finance, and the deliberate hollowing out of norms once assumed secure. We’re living in a moment of contraction, where the fragility of past gains is fully visible.

The shift in the Index focus is a deliberate attempt to sharpen an agenda that has grown increasingly diluted and muted.

Gender equality is under threat. While it is still affirmed in speeches and strategies, it is treated as optional when budgets tighten, security agendas expand, or when it is offered as a bargaining chip in the pursuit of political power.

As such, the updated Index begins from a simple but increasingly urgent recognition: commitment without action has become one of the defining political failures of this moment.

Across priority areas, the Index points to a persistent pattern of soft commitment outpacing concrete follow-through. Governments adopt action plans without adequately funding them and ratify frameworks without consistent implementation. They include gender language in climate and development strategies while maintaining financing, trade, labor, migration, and security policies that compound or reinforce inequality. Even where women’s representation improves, this does not necessarily translate into greater voice, authority, or agenda-setting power. 

Across the indicators examined, the Index makes one thing clear: too much of the current model remains declaratory, fragmented, and insufficiently connected to the material conditions that shape people’s lives.

Many of the issues at stake here are not optional aspirations or branding exercises. They are rooted in obligations and commitments that governments have already accepted through international human rights law and negotiated frameworks: commitments on non-discrimination, participation, labor rights, peace and security, climate action, and development cooperation. And so, this Index is not primarily asking whether governments speak the language of feminist policy but whether they are meeting and advancing, or actually undermining, the wider body of commitments that should already be shaping their external action.

That distinction matters because the Index shows that the barriers are institutional and material. A small number of countries continue to dominate arms exports and military spending even as they endorse peace and gender equality norms. In development finance, rhetorical support for gender equality coexists with shrinking aid and uneven support for women’s rights organizations. In labor, migration, and economic justice, softer commitments and action plans are too often asked to compensate for the absence of stronger regulation, accountability, and redistribution. In climate governance, gender references are increasing, but implementation, resourcing, and leadership remain uneven, while the deeper questions of responsibility and justice are still being contested.

These findings reinforce a broader lesson that many feminist organizers have been naming for some time: we cannot afford to keep treating gender equality as a parallel track while the rules that govern debt, tax, militarization, trade, labor, migration, and climate finance are negotiated elsewhere. If those systems remain intact, gender equality commitments will continue to be partial, vulnerable, and easy to reverse.

So, what is this Gender Equality in Foreign Policy Index for?

It is a mapping of where governments stand and an invitation to rethink strategy. It suggests that the next phase of work must be more political, more cross-sectoral, and more disciplined about where we direct our attention. We need to spend less time treating declarations as endpoints and more time asking where power is actually moving. Which budgets are expanding, and which ones are shrinking? Which norms are being reinforced, and which are being hollowed out? Where are the live negotiations that will shape fiscal space, public services, labor protections, climate finance, corporate accountability, or peace and security? And how do we intervene there earlier, more collectively, and with greater clarity?

In this moment, pragmatism should not mean doing less with less, lowering ambition, or settling for symbolic inclusion. It should mean identifying where leverage still exists and using it strategically to connect existing frameworks to implementation and accountability, to strengthen coordination across movements and sectors, and to push gender equality back into the heart of the decisions that shape resources, rights, and power.

The updated Index is offered in that spirit. Not as a scorecard for its own sake, and not as an exercise in accountability, but as a tool for political clarity. A way to see more clearly where progress remains meaningful, where contradictions are widening, and where opportunities still exist to move from endorsement to change.