<![CDATA[Women’s economic participation remains uneven across regions despite sustained progress in gender equality in education and health, signaling persistent structural constraints. This study aims to synthesize the literature on women’s economic participation in rural and urban contexts within the framework of regional economic development, with explicit relevance to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on gender equality and SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth. The main problem addressed is the lack of integrative perspectives that account for spatial differentiation and structural mechanisms shaping women’s economic engagement. The study applies a Systematic Literature Review combined with bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed publications from 2016 to 2025, resulting in a final sample of 181 selected articles. Keyword co-occurrence and bibliometric mapping were used to identify dominant themes and conceptual patterns. The findings show a clear spatial divide: rural-focused studies emphasize household-based livelihoods, informal economic activities, and social norms, while urban-focused studies center on formal labor markets, education, and wage dynamics. The analysis also reveals limited integration between economic, health, and unpaid care work dimensions. Beyond mapping publication patterns and thematic clusters, this review's principal conceptual contribution is the integration of the glass-ceiling and grass-ceiling perspectives into a single spatially differentiated analytical framework, demonstrating that rural and urban women's economic participation are governed by structurally distinct mechanisms rather than a uniform set of barriers, an insight that has not been systematically articulated in prior single-context reviews. In conclusion, women’s economic participation constitutes a structurally embedded and spatially differentiated economic process. Strengthening it requires context-specific and regionally grounded policy interventions, which are essential for advancing the simultaneous achievement of SDG 5 and SDG 8.]]>
