The country that treats women as an inferior species is also the country where everyone is poor. New numbers from the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund leave no room for polite evasion: Afghanistan finishes dead-last on every global scorecard of female opportunity and finishes within the bottom five on every measure of income. UN Women calculates that Afghan women can access only twenty-four percent of the life chances available to men, the worst “gender gap” recorded among 114 states. Simultaneously, the IMF projects a GDP per capita of roughly 386 U.S. dollars for 2025, lower than every sovereign economy on earth except South Sudan and Yemen. The coincidence is not an accident; it is a mirror.
Travel through any district today and the reflection is immediate. Girls’ schools are padlocked after grade six, so half the population is barred from the skills needed to keep accounts, keep patients alive, or keep the electricity running. Women are formally excluded from most wage work, so the labor market shrinks to the size of the male half of the country and GDP shrinks with it. Property and credit are still stamped “male only,” so the immense reservoir of female entrepreneurship that powered neighboring Bangladesh or Vietnam remains untapped. The World Bank estimates that pushing women’s labor participation up to the South-Asian average would add six percentage points to national growth; instead, the Taliban have driven participation down to twenty-four percent, one of the lowest rates ever measured.
The same policies that impoverish women impoverish everyone else. When half the doctors, teachers, and engineers are legally prevented from practicing, the cost is not abstract; it is paid in infant deaths, illiterate boys, and power grids that never get built. Agriculture, which still employs sixty percent of Afghans, is crippled by rules that forbid female extension agents from entering fields, so half the harvest walks to market uneaten. The result is a vicious circle: less production, less tax revenue, less public investment, and—since foreign donors refuse to bankroll gender apartheid—less outside capital to break the fall. Domestic revenue has actually risen modestly, but the World Bank warns that declining grants and a population exploding at 8.6 percent a year still translate into a four percent drop in GDP per capita in 2025. In plain language, the average Afghan will produce and earn less than last year because the economy is being asked to feed more mouths with fewer hands.
Compare the pattern to countries that moved in the opposite direction. In 1971 Bangladesh was poorer than Afghanistan and equally patriarchal; then it started pouring girls into schools and factories. Female garment workers now generate eighty percent of export earnings, micro-credit networks run by women reach ninety percent of villages, and GDP per capita has multiplied twelve-fold. The lesson is that misogyny is not a cultural footnote—it is a developmental death sentence.
Afghanistan’s rulers insist their restrictions safeguard “national values,” but the market disagrees. Traders price a country’s future just as they price wheat or diesel, and the price they assign to Afghanistan is 386 dollars a head. That figure is not simply a statistic; it is the monetary translation of locked classroom doors, of operating theaters without female nurses, of fields tended by exhausted men because their wives and daughters are not allowed outside. It is what misogyny costs when it is written into law.
Sources
IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2025 (GDP per capita projections)
UN Women, “Gender Gap in Afghanistan Reaches 76%,” Tawazon Media, 26 Oct 2025World Bank, “Afghanistan Development Update,” 10 Dec 2025
Trading Economics, “Afghanistan GDP per Capita,” 2025 consensus estimate
