Two countries,
opposite
directions

Gender outcomes are usually discussed as though they move slowly and culturally. One of these two countries is evidence that they can move quickly and deliberately. The other is evidence of what happens without that.

Saudi Arabia: a level that moved

Vision 2030 set a target of 30% female labour force participation by 2030. Participation has risen from around 17% to roughly 36%, passing the original target years early, and the goal has since been revised upward towards 40%.123 Roughly 1.3 million additional Saudi women have entered the workforce since 2016.2

Whatever one's view of the wider context, the rate of change is remarkable, and the World Economic Forum's own analysis places Saudi Arabia among the economies that have moved fastest toward parity since 2006.4

Pakistan: a level that did not

In the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025, Pakistan ranked last of 148 economies. Its overall parity score fell from 57% to 56.7% year on year, and its weakest subindex was Economic Participation and Opportunity at 34.7%. Women make up roughly 22.8% of the labour force.456

Figure 1

Female labour force participation

Saudi Arabia, now~36%

Saudi Arabia, 2016~17%

Pakistan~22.8%

What the comparison does and does not show

Two cautions, because this is exactly the kind of comparison that gets used badly.

A participation rate is not a wellbeing measure. It counts whether women are in the labour market, not the quality, safety, pay or security of the work. A rising rate is a real and significant change, and it is not the same as parity — Saudi Arabia's overall index position remains well down the table even as its trajectory stands out.

Rank movements are noisy; levels and trends are not. Pakistan's position at the bottom of the table is less informative than the fact that its own score declined year on year, and that its economic participation subindex sits at roughly a third of parity. Those are the numbers to design against.

The useful comparison is not which country is better. It is that one of them demonstrates the rate at which this can change when it is treated as a delivery problem.

The lesson that transfers

Saudi Arabia's shift did not come from an awareness campaign. It came from a set of concrete, boring, enforceable changes — legal reforms on mobility and employment, transport access, childcare provision, quotas and targets attached to institutions with the authority to enforce them, and a public numerical target that made progress measurable and failure visible.

That last element is the one most often skipped elsewhere, and it is the cheapest to copy. A stated numerical target with a date attached converts an aspiration into something an institution can be held to. Vision 2030's 30% target was not achieved because it was ambitious; it was achieved because it was specific, and because somebody was accountable for reporting against it.

What this means for how we design

Our own work in Pakistan sits inside these numbers, and the constraints show up concretely.

• Economic participation is the binding subindex, so livelihoods and retention indicators matter more than attitudinal ones. Measuring a change in stated attitudes is cheap and mostly uninformative. Measuring whether a girl stayed in school, or whether a woman kept earning twelve months later, is neither.
• The pipeline is where the leverage is. A woman's labour market participation is decided years earlier, partly by whether she completed school. That is why we measure school days retained rather than products distributed — it is an economic participation indicator wearing an education indicator's clothes.
• Household decision-makers are part of the design. Programmes aimed at women that engage only women systematically underperform where the household controls mobility and assets. Engaging mothers, fathers, teachers and community leaders is not dilution of a gender programme; it is what makes one work.
• Set a number and publish against it. The most transferable thing in the Saudi experience is the discipline of a stated target with a date, reported against publicly whether or not it is met.

The honest close

We work in one country that has moved faster on women's economic participation than almost anywhere in the world, and one that finished last on the most widely-cited parity index there is. We do not think the second fact is a reason to work anywhere else. It is the reason to work there.

What it does change is the standard of evidence. In a context where the headline numbers are this poor, an organisation claiming large gender outcomes on weak measurement is not helping — it is adding noise to a picture that already has too much. Smaller, verified, honestly-bounded results are worth more here than anywhere.