While the Egyptian government and the National Council for Women continue to boast about “progress” on women’s rights in Egypt, a new UN report highlights the absence of even basic legal equality for women in the country. In its latest update on "Gender Justice and the Law" initiative  in Arab countries, —a joint initiative by four UN agencies, namely the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), UN Women, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in cooperation with national institutions concerned with women’s rights—once again exposes the gap between the official narrative about “achievements” and the existing legislative reality.

The report evaluates 73 indicators in six areas of the law: the general framework of the State, legal capacity and public life, protection from violence against women and girls in the public and private spheres, work and economic benefits, family matters and personal status, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Across these indicators, Egypt scored as follows:

54% negative or partially negative (39 indicators); including 24 indicators where laws exist but still contain significant inequalities and15 indicators where laws provide no gender equality and fail to offer even minimal protection.

Thirty-two indicators were positive, meaning the law explicitly recognizes equality between women and men, with two indicators excluded due to insufficient data.

It is worth noting that the report only evaluates legal texts, without considering enforcement or actual impact.

These findings should be understood within two key contexts: First, the report is issued by international institutions that are partners and friends of the Egyptian government and was prepared in cooperation with national bodies. Secondly, the report has inherent methodological limitations, as it focuses on constitutional and legal provisions without examining their interaction with other restrictive provisions or their implementation in practice.

For example, the report considers the constitutional principle of equality between men and women as an achievement, without considering its broader constitutional context or the constraints imposed by other articles (such as Articles 2 and 3), or the fact that the constitution mandates an independent anti-discrimination commission—an obligation the state continues to ignore. In this case, constitutional equality is considered a realized indicator, regardless of its mechanisms, enforceability, or restriction by other constitutional and legal provisions.

Similarly, issuing a national strategy, such as the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women, is considered a positive indicator even if its goals have not been evaluated or met since its launch in 2015.

Even within these limitations, the report’s results remain less reflective of Egyptian women’s lived reality. Egypt scored best in work and economic benefits, which is in fact one of the worst areas for gender justice in practice, as confirmed by other international reports that assess the legal framework as a whole or measure real-world outcomes.

According to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Index, Egypt ranks 175 out of 190 geographies. The country is among the world’s ten worst performers in the Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum. For instance, while the UN report classifies equal pay for equal work as legally guaranteed, the World Bank assigns Egypt a score of 0% for pay equality when considering enforcement mechanisms. Similarly, the Gender Gap Report ranks Egypt 145 out of 148 countries for women’s expected income—the lowest among all its indicators.

The UN update shows the most severe shortcomings in: Protection from violence, family matters and personal status, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. By contrast, the area of work records relatively better performance due to recent legislative amendments.

This disparity reveals a recurring pattern in state policies on gender equality: While the state may remove some legal barriers to women’s participation in public life, employment, and citizenship in its limited constitutional sense, it strongly resists even theoretical legal equality in family law and in protecting the rights of women and children to a life free of private-sphere violence, as well as in guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights. In these areas, the state treats women as instruments for demographic or social policies, or obstacles to broader goals such as “family cohesion”, rather than independent rights-holders. The private sphere remains outside any true legal reform.

This latest update, alongside accumulated evidence, confirms that no matter how often the state celebrates achieving “justice for women” in official discourse, the reality and even legal provisions contradict this narrative and expose the true nature of these policies.

The full report is available here