Statistics that reveal the biggest challenges facing Dominican women today

Although women represent just over half of the population in the Dominican Republic, data from national and international organizations show that they continue to face significant challenges due to gaps in several key areas.

Employment, income, security, violence, and economic autonomy are where the gaps are most evident. The report “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Regional Gender Agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean: Gender Indicators for the Dominican Republic, 2024,” prepared by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ( ECLAC ), UN Women, and the National Statistics Office (ONE), indicates that 25.6% of women in the lowest income quintile have no income of their own.

Regarding employment, the contrasts are more marked: although Creole women have a clear advantage in education, the same is not true for job positions.

According to the latest macroeconomic analysis disaggregated by sex, published by the then Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development and reported by The Woman Post, the Dominican Republic’s working-age population averaged 8.1 million people in 2024. Of this group, 52.2% were women. Only 49.3% of women were employed, compared to 75.9% of men.

“This 26.6 percentage point difference shows a clear gap in access to employment. It demonstrates that, although more women are studying after secondary school, they still face difficulties applying their skills in the workplace,” the publication states.

The report “Progress and Challenges of the Dominican Republic in the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action,“ prepared by the Center for Gender Studies of the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (Intec) and published in 2025, warns that Dominican women continue to face significant barriers to accessing economic resources and formal employment opportunities.

According to the document, “these structural limitations directly impact women’s economic autonomy and the living conditions of thousands of households headed by them.”

One of the main obstacles identified is access to credit. According to data from the Superintendency of Banks cited in the report, only 25.3% of women in the economically active population have access to financing, which is equivalent to approximately one in four. This situation limits women’s opportunities for entrepreneurship, investment, and economic growth in the country.

The study also indicates that the savings gap between men and women has widened significantly in recent years. Between 2019 and 2024, the difference in savings balances by gender increased 2.6 times in favor of men. This inequality reflects women’s reduced capacity to accumulate financial resources and highlights the structural difficulties they face in achieving economic stability.

Among the reasons for this gap, the report highlights the lack of financial guarantees, exclusionary processes within the banking system, and persistent distrust by some lending institutions toward women. These barriers become even more pronounced in rural areas, where opportunities to access the formal financial system are more limited.

The high level of informal employment among women compounds these difficulties. The report indicates that 49.4% of women work in informal occupations, such as street vending, domestic work, or subsistence farming. In 2024, at least 1,031,842 women were employed in these types of jobs, characterized by the absence of social security, labor benefits, and economic stability.

The report also warns that, although there are social assistance programs such as Supérate (which includes other social components), these do not always reach women living in contexts of greater exclusion, particularly in rural areas and marginalized communities.

However, the study underlines that the problem goes beyond the coverage of these programs and points to the structure of the Dominican labor market, where wage gaps between men and women persist, along with high levels of informality and a considerably higher female unemployment rate than male unemployment.

At the end of 2025, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed that the Dominican Republic recorded 89 victims of femicide in 2024, representing a rate of 1.5 per 100,000 women, an increase from the 69 cases reported in 2023.

The study also highlights the persistent risks for Dominican girls, noting that 31.5% of women aged 20 to 24 were married or in a union before the age of 18, and 9.4% before the age of 15.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), cited in the report, 28.5% of Dominican women between the ages of 15 and 49 have suffered physical or sexual violence from their partner throughout their lives, and 22.8% in the last year.

The interim UNICEF representative in the country, Anyoli Sanabria, emphasized that each femicide devastates the lives of children and violates their right to grow up in safe environments.

Sanabria noted that UNICEF is working with authorities and community organizations to strengthen prevention, detection, and response systems, including training families and educators, expanding care pathways, and promoting legal reforms to protect children and adolescents.

She urged the Government to eliminate the remaining exception in the Penal Code that allows physical punishment in the home, stating that this type of violence often precedes femicides.

Globally, the country has shown moderate progress in gender equality. In 2025, the Dominican Republic scored 0.73 on the Global Gender Gap Index and ranked 61st out of 148 countries assessed.