Kichwa Cotacachi midwife Martha Arotingo stands amid the abundance of her garden, cradling the plants and flowers she draws upon in her practice. In quiet repose, she embodies generations of ancestral knowledge, sustaining culturally rooted, dignified maternal care in the face of formal health systems that continue to fail women.
Our 2025 report, Holding the Line, recorded the first across-the-board regression since our monitoring began: every core variable had gone backwards.
This year, the direction has turned. The core variables we measure have recovered some ground, but the recovery is partial, unevenly shared, and it follows the same lines of power that have always run through global health.
In 2026 the Index assessed 198 organisations across 37 countries, together employing more than four million people: 145 non-profit organisations and 53 for-profit companies.
We monitor because the record matters. Public commitments, the language organisations use and what they are willing to disclose are what pressure reaches first, and without an independent account year on year that change goes unrecorded. That pressure has not lifted. Funding has been withdrawn and organisations working for gender justice continue to be targeted, including through lists that name them. We recognise what that costs and stand in solidarity with those organisations, as we provide a public measure of what the past year has done to the sector.
Every core variable except one recovered some ground in 2026, but almost all remain below their 2024 peaks. This is recovery in progress, not recovery complete.
of organisations (35/198) were in the bottom two performance categories in 2026, an improvement of 7 percentage points from 25% (49/198) in 2025
of organisations (90/198) were in the top two performance categories in 2026, an improvement of 7 percentage points from 38% (76/198) in 2025
of non-profits (82/145) are high or very high performers
of for-profits (8/53) are high or very high performers
Non-profit organisations account for most of the gains and every very high performer is a non-profit. On several variables, for-profit companies are still falling – fairness and equity policies have declined each year since 2024, and commitment to gender equality sits 16 percentage points below its 2024 level.
Arm-in-arm, a young figure supports an elder as they navigate a steep urban street. Above them, a tangle of wires echoes the infrastructural and bureaucratic complexities that shape unequal access to public space. Together, they trace the radical potential of care and interdependence within a world unequally designed.
Every year when your report comes out, we take it to the board. They hold us accountable. And honestly, none of us ever want to walk into that room and say we’ve gone down. I would hate to explain why that happened. That motivates you. When we say, ‘Here’s where we are, and here are our gaps,’ the board says, ‘Okay — fix it.’
Hands clasped before her, a girl stands at the front of a classroom of boys: the only female student among them. Her singular presence gives human form to the gender inequalities that continue to shape girls' access to education in Bangladesh.
of CEO roles are held by women (75/198)
of board chair roles are held by women (60/174)
These trend figures use the 131 organisations monitored continuously since 2018, so differ slightly from the 2026 full-sample figures.
Nearly seven in 10 CEOs are nationals of high-income countries. The US and UK together hold 38% of all leadership seats, and just one CEO in 198 was educated in a low-income country.
No for-profit company in the sample had a CEO or board chair who was a national of, or educated in, a low-income country. Just 3% (6/198) of CEO positions were held by nationals of low-income countries. At the same time, the number of countries with at least one CEO or board chair increased from 42 in 2020 to 65 in 2026.
Twenty-four countries recorded their first representation over the period, most of them low- or middle-income, including Botswana, Djibouti, Malawi, Nepal, Togo and Zimbabwe; most held one or two seats. Among countries with a net change of three or more top leadership positions, those that decreased were all high-income.
As abortion access is restricted across the border in Texas, Mexican acompañantas work to secure safe, free care for women and pregnant people in the US. Here, connected through interwoven braids, the women embody a transnational politics of solidarity, care and reproductive resistance.
The pattern points to policy adoption driven by human resources compliance rather than institutional commitment.
The number of US-funded organisations with a public commitment or workplace policy for gender equality, fairness and equity fell across the board in 2025 and has only partly recovered since. Between 2025 and 2026, the number with a public commitment to gender equality rose from 54 to 60 (of 72). On every variable the 2026 figure remained below its 2024 level.
Regressive forces that had spent decades building the legal, financial and narrative infrastructure to roll back gains found their opening in the United States, where an explicitly anti-gender agenda moved from the political margins into Executive Orders. In 2025, declines were steepest among organisations with active US federal funding, where we recorded falls between 19% and 33% across all variables.
This year we saw some progress restored. 17 organisations that held US federal funding in 2025 restored 26 top scores they had dropped that year. Among US-funded organisations, a board representation and inclusion policy was the only variable to fall further, from 20 to 17 (of 72). It is also the weakest policy we track: 29% (55/192) of organisations across the Index have such a policy in the public domain.
Note: The US-funded cohort is drawn from the 73 organisations identified in the 2025 Report, Holding the Line. USAID, included there, closed on 1 July 2025 and is removed, giving 72 organisations.
A young girl waves the US flag in front of a large grey building at a Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles. The flag is upside down. The US Flag Code declares that the only circumstances in which the US flag can be turned upside down is to signal 'dire distress and extreme danger to life or property'. The girl's message is clear: police brutality and systemic racism put her life and others' lives in extreme danger.
It is the US context where we’ve had to adjust how we describe our work to promote gender equality and inclusion. We have kept the work on women’s and girls’ equality going strong as this is not contested. In terms of inclusion, we have always ensured that everyone can access the help they need, regardless of their demographic or other background. We have remained true to this important principle without naming every single population group individually. However, colleagues in places that feel settled today may be one election away from having to do what our US colleagues have done.’
Seated on the studio floor, an artist paints delicate landscapes with his foot, his prosthesis resting nearby and finished postcards spread before him. Born without a full leg or arm, his practice speaks to a creative language developed through adaptation, dexterity and embodied knowledge.
The Gender and Health Index asks about two interlinked dimensions of inequality:
who holds power inside an organisation, and who benefits from the work it does.
The large figures cover every organisation assessed in 2026. The trend lines cover only the 192 organisations assessed every year since 2020 (excluding the few scored not applicable on a given variable), so their 2026 point can differ slightly from the large figure.
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Organisations monitored continuously since 2020 (n={{ trendN }}). The dashed line marks 2025, the year every variable went backwards.
See how each organisation has performed on every variable, in every year it was assessed since 2018.
Five craftspeople sit shoulder to shoulder at a loom, their hands moving across an intricate carpet in collective choreography. Their absorbed, coordinated labour reflects the central place women hold within Nepal's carpet-making tradition, where craftsmanship and economic livelihood are closely intertwined.
Global 50/50 is a monitor. We do not tell organisations how to run themselves: we hold up the evidence, year after year, and put it in the hands of those with the power to act.
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Nine years of monitoring have taught us that organisations rarely change because a report asks. They change when accountability is backed by organised power.
In the months before this Report, we put the question of how the field responds to this moment to more than 150 gender justice leaders, across four convenings and a survey of the field. The agenda they set – sustained independent monitoring, a connected movement, narrative power, changed funding, and getting organised around power – is published in The organised many: a gender justice agenda for action.
Against an intensely saturated blue ground, a single seated figure emerges in bold strokes; a body crossed, encircled and surrounded by brightly patterned fragments. Intricate forms appear across the canvas: suspended around the figure, resting against limbs and gathering densely within the torso. A body whose boundaries are porous and unsettled, carrying multiple forms, pressures and experiences within it. In this dance between body and form, Zhao explores the complexities of gender and disability.
The organisations in this Index regained ground in 2026 – the 2027 Report will show who held it, and who built on it.
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No organisation in the 2026 Report matches ‘{{ orgQ }}’. Use the Self-Assessment Tool to see how your organisation compares.
For organisations not in the Report: Use the Self-Assessment Tool
For 2026, each organisation was coded by one researcher, with a random sample independently double-coded. A third reviewer verified the data, using an AI assistant (Claude, from Anthropic; Opus 4.6) as an additional layer of verification.
Full methodologyGlobal 50/50, Regaining (some) ground: analysis of policies and practices for gender equality, fairness and equity among 198 global organisations active in health, Cambridge, UK, 2026. https://doi.org/10.56649/IHQR2859 Published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 International Licence.
