Three decades after the Beijing Platform for Action, the groundbreaking UN declaration that affirmed that women’s rights are human rights, the global movement for gender equality and women’s empowerment is under strain. Adopted in 1995 and signed by 189 governments, the ambitious framework spurred a generation of legal reforms, gains in political representation, and consolidation of norms around gender equality. Today, however, that momentum is faltering. Although some countries continue to make steady progress, a UN report released in March 2025 found that one in four countries is experiencing a backlash against gender equality. Around the world, 270 million women lack access to modern contraception, one in three women experiences gender-based violence, and women are systematically underrepresented in countries’ political and economic leadership.
It is tempting to blame the current impasse on specific leaders. U.S. President Donald Trump and his cabinet are openly hostile to domestic and international gender equality commitments, dismissing efforts to promote gender equity as “woke” overreach. Hungarian President Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin have all built their strongman images by dismissing feminism as radical and corrosive.
Yet these leaders’ hostility toward gender equality is only one symptom of a broader shift. The core assumptions that powered the global women’s movement after the end of the Cold War—that the world was becoming more democratic, more multilateral, and more liberal—no longer hold. Democratic erosion, from El Salvador to Thailand, is shrinking the political space for women to organize. Multilateral institutions that once served as engines for advocacy face funding shortfalls and diminished global relevance as conservative actors promoting national sovereignty and traditional gender norms gain power.
The strategies that were successful 30 years ago are no longer sufficient. Faced with a prolonged democratic recession, gridlocked international institutions, and a surge in conservative countermobilization, proponents of gender equality and their governmental supporters need a new template for action. Multilateral forums will remain an important arena for advancing progress and protecting existing achievements. But rather than being solely technical and elite-driven, reformers committed to the women’s rights agenda must expand their efforts, focusing on more collaboration at the local level, investing in initiatives that include men and boys, and connecting messaging about women’s empowerment to family well-being, community resilience, and economic stability.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The post–Cold War period brought rapid breakthroughs in women’s rights. Countries across the world adopted new gender quotas to boost women’s political representation, passed laws against gender-based violence and discrimination, and reformed their constitutions to enshrine equality guarantees. This surge in activity built on decades of activism and coalition building. But it was also enabled by three important features of the post–Cold War order.
First, advocates and organizations benefited from a wave of democratic expansion. Across Africa, eastern Europe, and Latin America, authoritarian regimes were losing their grip, creating new channels for women to organize. Women’s groups whose operations had been subject to strict state control gave way to more politically autonomous networks. From El Salvador to South Africa, women took advantage of political transitions and constitutional negotiations to press for more rights and inclusion. And they were successful.
Gender equality activists face not only entrenched resistance but also well-resourced countercampaigns.
The end of bipolar great-power competition also allowed multilateral institutions to play a more decisive role in global governance. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the United Nations had emerged as an important forum for building norms around gender equality through landmark women’s conferences and multilateral agreements such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. These efforts intensified after the end of the Cold War, when UN gatherings on topics ranging from human rights, in Vienna, in 1993; population, in Cairo, in 1994; women, in Beijing, in 1995; and social development, in Copenhagen, in 1995, rapidly expanded international commitments to advancing gender equality. The European Union, the UN Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank, and other multilateral bodies all began integrating gender more systematically into their work, driven by new research and policy thinking that framed gender equality not only as normatively desirable but also as a catalyst for economic growth, good governance, and democratic consolidation. Gender equality advocates, connected through frequent transnational gatherings, used these expanded international frameworks to press for domestic reforms, often invoking universal human rights. In 1996, for example, feminist activists in Nicaragua used the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women, which their government had ratified, to pressure Managua to pass a domestic violence law.
Gender norms also appeared to be liberalizing across different regions. Women entered higher education and the workforce in greater numbers. As women’s organizations multiplied and advocates won important legal and political victories, feminist ideas gained greater legitimacy and visibility in public discourse. Particularly in the Western world, the end of the Cold War further reinforced the belief that liberal values, including individual rights and equality, had triumphed.
This is not to say that there was no pushback. Conservative religious movements had already begun organizing more systematically and gaining greater political influence in India, Iran, the United States, and across parts of Africa. In much of the global South, women’s rights activists still confronted entrenched religious and traditional institutions that enforced patriarchal norms. Some women’s groups in developing countries also objected to what they saw as a Western-influenced feminist agenda, arguing that its emphasis on individual rights overlooked structural economic inequalities and communal identities. Still, the overall trajectory, underpinned by new forms of regional and transnational solidarity, seemed favorable.
LOSING GROUND
Today, those enabling conditions have eroded. Democracy is no longer on the march. Instead, the world is more than a decade into a prolonged democratic recession, and the space for women to organize for political change is shrinking across all regions. Data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute show that the repression of civil society, media freedom, and free expression has increased in 41 countries since 2014.
Women’s rights activists are frequent targets in countries where democracy is eroding. In India, women peacefully protesting the government’s new citizenship law have been jailed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country’s primary counterterrorism law. Egyptian feminists have been subjected to protracted judicial proceedings after being accused of illegally receiving foreign funding. The Nicaraguan government, under the autocratic leadership of Daniel Ortega, has shut down dozens of women’s groups that have supported marginalized communities, labeling them as “foreign agents.” Autocratization is making it harder for women’s groups to build coalitions, influence policy, or secure resources without risking surveillance, harassment, and prosecution.
This closing of civic space is exacerbated by a subset of conservative autocrats and far-right populist leaders who have seized on gender equality, feminism, and LGBT rights as potent symbols of liberal overreach by unaccountable, globalist elites. Many autocrats once paid lip service to women’s rights to appear pro-democratic and attract Western donor support. But today, some illiberal leaders—such as Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Kais Saied in Tunisia—see gender as a useful wedge issue that allows them to position themselves as defenders of tradition against foreign or elite interests.
Focusing only on democracy to improve gender equality would be misguided.
Activists who once turned to international institutions for resources and political backing find this avenue increasingly fruitless. Most prominently, the Trump administration has denounced the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, halted all gender-related foreign assistance, and declared its intention to no longer fund several UN institutions. U.S. officials now even oppose references to the term “gender” in international negotiations. Facing a funding crunch, UN Women, alongside dozens of other UN offices, has been asked to develop a proposal to cut 20 percent of its staff. Rather than stepping up, other donor governments once seen as reliable supporters of women’s rights, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, are also cutting back their aid budgets.
At the same time, conservative governments and nongovernmental organizations are asserting themselves within these institutions, promoting national sovereignty, religious freedom, and socially conservative gender norms and challenging language related to gender. Governments that are resisting pressure from women’s organizations can now turn to alternative norm-building initiatives such as the 2020 Geneva Consensus Declaration, which asserts that decisions around abortion and reproductive health are the exclusive prerogative of national governments and not international treaties and bodies.
The assumption that activism and generational change would inevitably drive gender norms in a more liberal direction has proved flawed. The Gender Social Norms Index, published by the UNDP in 2023, indicated that the share of people holding biased gender norms—for example, that men make better political leaders than women—decreased by only two percent between 2014 and 2022, from 86.9 to 84.6 percent. Among younger generations, IPSOS survey data from 30 countries published in early 2025 show a growing gender divergence: young women are increasingly feminist, whereas young men are more likely to agree that gender equality efforts have gone too far.
Reinforcing this trend is an increasingly well-organized and well-funded transnational movement promoting traditional gender norms. What began as decentralized religious activism has evolved into coordinated campaigns shaping policy and public discourse, often through strategic messaging centered on protecting the family, parental rights, and religious freedom. Groups including CitizenGO, a conservative Catholic advocacy organization, operate across continents to oppose LGBTQ rights and the liberalization of abortion laws. These actors draw on existing social conservatism but have also mobilized broader public support by spotlighting highly contentious issues, particularly sexual minority and transgender rights, using them to weaken the entire policy and legal infrastructure focused on gender equality and casting progressive advocates as dogmatic and out of step with popular opinion. As a result, gender equality activists face not only entrenched resistance but also well-resourced countercampaigns.
ZEROING IN
What does this altered landscape mean for gender equality advocacy? Holding the line in multilateral negotiations remains essential to preventing the erosion of existing norms and mobilizing resources to mitigate the devastating impact of abrupt aid cuts on women and girls, particularly in conflict zones. But these efforts should be accompanied by issue-focused “coalitions of the willing”: smaller circles of governments, civil society groups, and private sector actors that collaborate to tackle specific hurdles to gender equality.
One recent example is the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, a coalition of governments, tech companies, and civil society groups collaborating to combat technology-facilitated gender-based violence, such as the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images and deepfakes. Similar efforts could focus on expanding access to reproductive health care, improving childcare and eldercare systems, tackling young men’s online radicalization, and ensuring artificial intelligence tools are designed and deployed with attention to their different effects on women and men. Regional institutions could also serve as effective loci for such efforts, as could partnerships among major cities or subnational governments to share effective ideas for reform.
Funders and governments committed to advancing gender equality also need to act more strategically and with greater urgency to counter movements against gender equality. Given the importance of civic freedoms and political space to meaningful progress for women, strengthening democratic institutions will be an important element of this. Yet focusing only on democracy while neglecting specific initiatives to improve gender equality would be misguided.
For one, widespread democratic renewal appears unlikely in the short term. Many countries are stuck in the gray zone between liberal democracy and autocracy, and preventing concrete harms to women and girls in these hybrid contexts is paramount. Moreover, illiberal and antidemocratic actors intentionally use gender to polarize the public and delegitimize broader human rights and equality norms. This reality makes it all the more important for democratic policymakers and civil society actors to build broad-based support for gender equality measures as common-sense investments in welfare and prosperity while avoiding rhetoric that further reinforces cultural divides.
Between 2019 and 2023, organizations involved in antigender activism in Europe received over $1.1 billion.
In practice, building such support requires funding context-specific advocacy campaigns and legislative outreach alongside popular education, cultural production, and coalition building—including with constituencies such as conservative politicians, faith communities, and media influencers who may not agree with the most progressive stance on every issue related to gender. One of the downsides of the professionalization and internationalization of women’s organizations that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s is that many of these groups now have specialized policy expertise but lack popular and digital reach. They are also underresourced: according to data collected by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, the median annual budget for feminist and women’s rights organizations in 2023 was only $22,000, with most of that funding taking the form of short-term project grants lasting 18 months or less. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2023, over $1.1 billion in funding went to 276 organizations involved in antigender activism in Europe alone. To address this imbalance, supportive governments and private funders need to shift more resources toward creative, culturally resonant communication and on-the-ground organizing for gender equality. The 2018 referendum in Ireland that approved the legalization of abortion offers one example of what such campaigns might look like: advocates won by building alliances with doctors, midwives, and faith leaders; investing in grassroots outreach; and focusing their messaging on health and compassion.
An important priority should be to frame women’s rights and empowerment as central to strengthening families, communities, and societies. Over the past decade, some conservative actors have cast policies on sex education, reproductive rights, and protections against gender-based violence as threats to family values imposed by “radical feminists” or out-of-touch elites. The typical response from women’s rights advocates—countering with public statements citing scientific evidence or appealing to individual rights—often fails to resonate with broader publics for whom family, religion, and tradition are core reference points. Particularly in more socially conservative societies, campaigns that leverage women’s roles as caregivers and community leaders, highlighting the importance of gender equality to shared goals such as families’ economic security and children’s well-being, could help broaden support for practical reforms and depolarize public debates.
Finally, engaging men—especially young men—must be a core part of any strategy. Parts of the gender equality movement have hesitated to do so, fearing that addressing men’s concerns might inadvertently echo the narratives of the far right or the so-called manosphere. Yet ignoring men’s experiences of social isolation, the lack of positive male role models, and decreasing economic opportunities gives more space to extremist actors. Antifeminist content already saturates male-dominated online spaces, drowning out narratives that promote mutual care and respect. To address these challenges, governments and private funders should expand their support for initiatives targeting men and boys that focus on mental health, digital literacy, vocational training, and fatherhood, among others. Such investments would complement, rather than replace, programs serving women and girls. Coaching Boys Into Men, for instance, partners with high school sports coaches to engage young male athletes on healthy relationships and nonviolence, in coordination with local domestic or sexual violence prevention agencies. The goal of these efforts should be to counter negative messaging about masculinity with an affirmative sense of belonging, identity, and purpose—one that makes men stakeholders rather than enemies in the struggle for gender equality.
If organizations promoting gender equality and women’s rights fail to update their strategies to today’s global political environment, there is a real risk that many of the hard-won legal, social, and political gains for women will be slowly hollowed out. This may not happen in dramatic reversals but gradually, under the weight of attrition and neglect.
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