A Dynamical Regularity for the Evolution of Women's Status

Order parameters define universality classes in nonequilibrium physics. We take the Women's Political Empowerment Index (V-Dem 1789–2025, 191 countries) as an order parameter—negative (patriarchal) to positive (female-led)—and track its two-century evolution assumption-free. Once split into amplitude, phase, and external modulation, all trajectories collapse onto one Richards sigmoid (R-squared 0.97). This is a new universality class: a social quantity obeying a law read from data, not a borrowed model. Three falsifiable predictions follow for the second stage—damped decay, frequency acceleration, antisymmetric waveform—each conditional on the system continuing to obey the same equation of motion and not being disrupted by exogenous shocks.