​The APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040 envisages strong, balanced, secure, sustainable and inclusive growth as a key economic driver towards achieving an open, dynamic, resilient and peaceful Asia-Pacific community by 2040. The Vision commits APEC to pursue quality growth that delivers benefits and well-being for all, including women.

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To help make this a reality, APEC Leaders adopted the La Serena Roadmap for Women and Inclusive Growth (2019–2030), supported by an Implementation Plan with concrete action steps in five key areas: enhancing women’s access to capital and assets; markets; skills and capacity building; leadership opportunities, voice and agency; and innovation and technology. This work is further reinforced through the Aotearoa Plan of Action, which guides implementation of the Putrajaya Vision’s economic, trade, and structural reform priorities in ways that strengthen inclusion and resilience across the region.

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Services will play a vital role in enabling APEC economies to progress these objectives. Services are the largest productive sector in nearly all APEC economies and the largest employer of women across all skill levels. The potential for services to provide new and expanded opportunities for women has grown significantly in recent years with the region’s shift towards “servicification”—a rising share of services in production, investment, trade, and consumption—alongside the digitalisation of services trade. With over 60% of services trade now carried out in digitised form, women and women-led services firms can more readily participate in regional and global markets, creating opportunities for women’s professional advancement and stronger outcomes for gender equality and inclusivity.

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The services sector — particularly digitally delivered, high-skill services — offers growing opportunities for women to access higher-value employment, entrepreneurship pathways, and participation in regional and global markets. At the same time, persistent barriers remain, including unequal access to education and skills development, constrained access to finance, regulatory obstacles, and broader structural constraints that limit women’s entry and advancement.  The APEC region as a whole has only made slow progress in narrowing the gender gap for the economic participation and opportunity index for women, which still shows the APEC region at below 70 percent of parity, having improved only seven percentage points since monitoring began in 2006. This work carried out by the APEC Group on Services and the Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy aims to be an important contributor to better understand the reasons behind these economic disparities and to recommend measures that can be taken by APEC economic to help reduce them.

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This site is divided into four main sections.​ These can be navigated to via the hover boxes below. This site is intended to be a resource for policymakers with interests in women and trade in services, researchers/academics and their students in the field, and businesspeople seeking a deeper appreciation of policy debates and how they might affect their enterprises and operations.

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