LONDON, United Kingdom — Kazakhstan ranks 76th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2024, making it the leading nation in Central Asia on gender equality. Yet, behind that ranking lies a more complicated story — one of landmark legislation hard-won through public grief, persistent gaps in access to support and determined activists and international organizations pushing for real change in women’s rights in Kazakhstan.
A Country Galvanized by Tragedy
In November 2023, Saltanat Nukenova, a 31-year-old woman, was brutally murdered by her then-husband Kuandyk Bishimbayev, a former minister of the national economy. The trial that followed became the first live-streamed murder trial in Central Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers daily across TikTok and Telegram channels and transforming the courtroom into a national reckoning.
Bishimbayev received a 24-year prison sentence in May 2024. More significantly, the public outrage his trial ignited — fueled by hashtags #SupportSaltanat and #LifeImprisonment reaching millions — forced domestic violence from the policy periphery to the center of national politics. Parliament passed sweeping legislative amendments within weeks.
The backdrop made that urgency impossible to dispute. According to a UN Women study from 2018, domestic violence kills around 400 women in Kazakhstan annually. The Prosecutor General’s Office has put the annual figure at a minimum of 80 deaths. In 2023 alone, police received 99,026 complaints related to family violence. More than 60% of those cases previously collapsed when victims, often under familial pressure, withdrew their statements.
The Saltanat Law: What Changed
On April 15, 2024, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed what the public swiftly named “Saltanat’s Law” — formally, the Law on Ensuring the Rights of Women and the Safety of Children. It came into force on June 16, 2024.
The legislation reversed a damaging 2017 decision that had decriminalized battery and minor bodily harm, reclassifying domestic abuse as an administrative offense. Under that framework, in 2023, more than half of 47,600 administrative domestic violence cases were terminated without consequence. The Saltanat Law reintroduced criminal liability for battery and intentional infliction of minor harm, introduced penalties for repeat offenses within a year, prohibited reconciliation in cases involving minors or repeat physical violence and introduced life imprisonment for the murder and sexual violence of children.
The early data shows measurable impact. In the first quarter of 2025, more than 17,200 domestic violence reports were received — a 21.3% decrease from the 22,000 reported in the same period in 2024. Officials at Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs also recorded a 20.5% drop in domestic violence cases in the first five months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024, with serious offenses declining by 29% and particularly grave offenses by 44%. District police inspectors issued 27,042 protective orders in that quarter. Since the law’s enactment, at least 25 individuals convicted of sexual violence against children have received life sentences.
Critically, the law also removed the option for repeated reconciliation — the mechanism that had allowed more than 60% of domestic violence cases to collapse. Administrative arrests doubled in the wake of the legislation, affirming what human rights advocates have long argued: it is the inevitability of punishment, not its severity, that disrupts cycles of abuse.
Where Gaps Remain
Despite these gains, structural support for survivors remains inadequate. At the time of the law’s adoption, 49 crisis centers operated nationwide. By mid-2025, that number grew to 69, yet 85% of districts still lack access to a shelter. Shymkent, a city of more than 1.2 million people, has only one center despite receiving 11,000 violence-related complaints, and the Abay and Kyzylorda regions have none. Funding remains unstable: in spring 2025, the largest crisis center in the Turkestan region nearly closed due to unpaid utility bills, and no stable government funding mechanism for these centers currently exists.
Beyond domestic violence, the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Index placed Kazakhstan 92nd out of 148 countries — a significant drop from 76th in 2024 — highlighting continued deficits in political empowerment and economic participation. The gender wage gap stood at 25.2% in favor of men as of the most recent available data.
How Poverty Wears a Woman’s Face
Kazakhstan does not break down its official poverty statistics by gender, but the economic data that does exist makes clear that women carry a disproportionate share of the country’s financial vulnerability. World Bank figures from 2024 show that only 66% of working-age women in Kazakhstan participate in the economy, compared with 76% of men, and female unemployment stands at 5.5% against 4.4% for men.
That gap traces back to several compounding pressures. Women remain concentrated in lower-paying sectors and underrepresented in industries such as banking, construction and transportation, where the Asian Development Bank reports they earn only 67% of what men earn on average. Women and girls aged 15 and older also spend nearly 20% of their time on unpaid care work, compared with just 6.3% for men, often at the expense of paid employment and pension contributions. According to Kenzhegali Sagadiyev University researcher Asel Izekenova, every third working-age woman in Kazakhstan has no personal income of her own.
These pressures leave women in single-parent households and rural areas especially exposed to poverty. Yet, the same forces driving the gender wage gap downward in recent years — from 32.2% in 2013 to 25.7% in 2023 — point to a path forward. Research published in the Eurasian Journal of Gender Studies found a strong correlation between rising female educational attainment and a shrinking pay gap, and Kazakhstan’s Concept of Family and Gender Policy until 2030 has set a target of raising women’s share of decision-making positions to 30% by then. UN Women’s economic empowerment programs, detailed below, already represent a direct response to this challenge.
UN Women in Kazakhstan: Building Long-Term Change
Among the organizations driving sustained progress on women’s rights in Kazakhstan, UN Women’s country office has operated with the Kazakhstani government under a 2022–2025 strategic framework targeting three priorities: ending violence against women, advancing women’s political participation and strengthening economic empowerment. Here is what UN Women accomplished with Kazakhstan.
- Political Participation: In 2024, UN Women Kazakhstan — Working with the Ministry of Culture and Information and the National Commission on Women Affairs — delivered comprehensive training to more than 100 women across five regions, including Akmola, West Kazakhstan, East Kazakhstan, North Kazakhstan and Shymkent. Participants developed skills in leadership, strategic planning and campaign management. The training built on a 2021 legal reform that introduced a mandatory quota of 30% for women and youth in electoral party lists.
- Law Enforcement Awareness: In December 2024, the country office trained 354 representatives of law enforcement agencies, the prosecutor’s office, defense and emergency services across three regions — Atyrau, Zhambyl and North Kazakhstan — on conflict resolution, the protection of human rights and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.
- Economic Empowerment: UN Women leads Kazakhstan’s adoption of the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), a set of business commitments to gender equality. As of May 2024, Kazakhstan counted 50 WEP signatories, the most in Central Asia. In 2023, UN Women supported more than 85 women entrepreneurs through its Women’s Entrepreneurship Satellite EXPO in Astana, building skills in business planning, pricing and digital marketing. Separately, around 60 rural women across four regions received practical training in cheese-making, hop cultivation and felt needlework — trades drawing on local raw materials that help women overcome barriers including unpaid household work and limited economic opportunity. The overall eight-project Outcome 1 program under the UN Country Programme, targeting marginalized groups including women and people with disabilities, carried a total budget of $10.7 million, with $7.4 million spent between January 2021 and April 2024.
Women’s Rights in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan’s growing engagement with international gender frameworks reinforces this momentum. In 2024, Madina Dzharbusynova became the first representative from Kazakhstan or Central Asia to sit on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. In March 2025, the U.N. General Assembly backed a new Regional Center for Sustainable Development Goals for Central Asia and Afghanistan in Almaty, whose mandate includes eliminating gender-based violence.
The story of women’s rights in Kazakhstan is one of a country navigating between genuine legislative progress and deep-rooted structural resistance. The Saltanat Law arrived because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Kazakhstan demanded it — and because women’s rights groups, legal advocates and international partners had spent years building the case. The early data on declining violence offers genuine ground for optimism.
The work ahead — funding crisis centers, closing the wage gap, increasing women’s representation in government and protecting activist organizations — requires sustained political will and continued public engagement. But the momentum Kazakhstan’s women have built, often against considerable institutional resistance, shows that change in this country does not arrive quietly. It arrives because people refuse to stay silent.
– Deanna Ridzuan
Deanna is based in London, UK and focuses on Good News and Global Health for The Borgen Project.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons