Women made up nearly a fifth of new driving licence holders in Azerbaijan in 2025, according to the State Statistics Committee. The share has climbed more than tenfold since 2008, even as the total number of men obtaining licences declined.
Azerbaijan’s State Statistics Committee reported in its statistical compilation “Women and Men in Azerbaijan – 2026” that 350,175 people obtained driving licences nationwide in 2025. Of these, 65,696 were women and 284,479 were men, meaning women accounted for 18.8% of new licence holders and men for 81.2%.
The picture looked different a year earlier. In 2024, of the 360,346 people who received licences, 57,153 were women and 303,193 were men, putting the share of women at just 15.9%. Over the year, the number of women licence holders rose by 8,543, or 14.9%, while the number of men fell by 18,714, or 6.2%. The overall number of licence holders dropped by 10,171, or 2.8%, even as women’s share rose by 2.9 percentage points.
How the shares have shifted over five years
According to the committee’s figures, the share of women among licence holders stood at 10.5% in 2021, 11.8% in 2022 and 12% in 2023. That means the figure rose by 8.3 percentage points between 2021 and 2025.
The gap is even starker over a longer timeframe. In 2008, only 6,187 women obtained driving licences, representing a 4.6% share. By 2025 that number had grown 10.6 times, to 65,696. The ratio of men to women has also shifted sharply: in 2008 men outnumbered women roughly 20.6 to 1, but by 2025 that ratio had narrowed to 4.3 to 1.
Men still outnumber women overall
The data show that in 2025, 218,783 more men than women obtained new licences. A year earlier, in 2024, that gap stood at 246,040, meaning the difference between the sexes narrowed by 27,257 over the year.
The State Statistics Committee noted that these figures reflect only the number of people who obtained licences in the given years and do not represent the overall gender breakdown of all drivers in the country.
