The pushback against gender equality is one of the findings in a major report from UN Women, the UN agency for gender equality, on the progress made so far in advancing women’s rights worldwide.
This latest version of the study, which is updated every five years, comes at a time of great uncertainty, as several donors announce major funding cuts, leading to the disruption of essential services for women worldwide.
The report measures the extent to which the aims of a groundbreaking women’s rights accord adopted in Beijing in 1995. Around a quarter of countries surveyed note a backlash against feminism and gender equality.
However, it is not all bad news: there have been many encouraging signs of progress over the last thirty years, from legal protections for women, to services and support for survivors of domestic abuse and bans on gender-based discrimination in the workplace.
Ahead of the launch of the report, Laura Turquet, the deputy head of the research and data team at UN Women, and Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist activist based in Mexico City, spoke to UN News about the reasons for this renewed attack against feminism and what it means for the state of gender relations.
Laura Turquet: What we’re talking about is organised resistance to gains that have been made on gender equality, whether that’s preventing the implementation of existing commitments, rolling them back or stopping new laws and policies.
Examples include the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States [a US Supreme Court decision that protected the right to abortion] and the decision by several European countries to pull out of the Istanbul Convention [a treaty on gender-based violence]. And elsewhere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, we’ve seen a defunding of women’s ministries, or their mandates are changed from focusing on gender equality to a broader focus on families and children, which waters down their ability to drive policies forward.
Another element is the targeting of women’s rights defenders and activists, women in politics, journalists and trade unionists who dare put their heads above the parapet and speak out on gender equality.
Lydia Alpizar: There most common form of attack is harassment and defamation, including criminalization, building fabricated charges against women’s human rights defenders, or even arbitrarily detaining them, turning them into political prisoners.
It can also lead to more lethal forms of violence, such as disappearances and killings. In Mexico and Central America, we have documented 35,000 attacks on and 200 killings of women human rights defenders since 2012,
UN News: Is the situation in your region getting worse?
Lydia Alpizar: Yes. When we started, we didn’t have as many killings. Right now, we have an open dictatorship in Nicaragua where there are political prisoners including women, and there are other countries with women’s rights defenders in prison, including Mexico. There are other defenders that are in prison, such as Kenia Hernandez in Mexico, or others who are protecting nature in El Salvador.
We are definitely seeing an increase in attacks on feminists working on gender-based violence, political participation an access to sexual and reproductive health and rights: the highest levels of abuse take place during March, which is women’s month, when most marches and public demonstrations in support of women take place.
UN News: What are the reasons for the increased threats and violence?
Lydia Alpizar: One has to do with the way in which agendas for gender equality and women’s rights have been transforming the world.
We have definitely made progress across important areas that are included in the Beijing Declaration, in terms of legislation, policies and cultural transformation, really changing the way in which women are recognized in their public and private lives.
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More women are leading movements that are challenging the interest of very powerful actors, so there is a backlash.
Young DAFI scholars from the DAFI Women Power Club, a mentoring initiative in Burundi. All four are originally from DR Congo.
UN News: So, the pushback is a response to the progress that is being made?
Laura Turquet: I think that is true to a large extent, but it also goes hand in hand with a decline in the strength of democracies in general. Many countries are experiencing the erosion of key democratic institutions such as freedom of the press, free and fair elections, and the rights of women to speak in public.
They become a target of those who want to return to an imagined past where men and women had much more traditional roles.
It’s also linked to rising inequality. A few people at the top are doing extremely well whilst millions are being left behind. When people feel that they can’t access a decent job or a basic standard of living, they look for scapegoats, whether it’s migrants, LGBTQ people, or women who are speaking up.
UN News: Social media also seems to be connected, bringing formerly fringe ideas into the mainstream.
Lydia Alpizar: We have seen an increase of these kinds of narratives. Social media is a big platform for the dissemination of misogynistic and sexist ideas and women’s rights defenders are called bad mothers to stigmatize the work that they do and there is a trend of legitimizing violence against them.
Laura Turquet: There has a been a development of a “manosphere,” an online ecosystem where extreme and outdated ideas, particularly about violence against women, but also related to a very narrow kind of idea of masculinity.
But I also want to say that online spaces and social media have been a place where feminists can organize and link up with other kids of social movement. I think we just have to make sure that those spaces are safe and that we root out misogynist and violent online environments so that women are not targeted in that way.
UN News: On balance, is the world in a better place, when it comes to gender relations?
Lydia Alpizar: Yes, absolutely. In the countries where I work, gender relations have been transformed and the world is a different place for women and gender non-conforming people.
Ther is hope, but we’re concerned about the challenges we face right now.
Laura Turquet: There has been significant progress since 1995. The proportion of women in parliaments has doubled, violence against women is on the political agenda in a way that it wasn’t thirty years ago, and maternal mortality has declined by a third.
But there’s still so much to do. We need to make sure that 2025 is the year that we don’t back down, that we continue to fight for justice, and we continue to march forward for the rights of women and girls.