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Protesters chant at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza during the No Backlash to Women's Rights rally in New York City, U.S., March 12, 2025.
Protesters chant at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza during the No Backlash to Women's Rights rally in New York City, U.S., March 12, 2025. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Gathering to mark a historic anniversary in the fight for women’s equality, world leaders and activists find little to celebrate and a great deal to worry about. But a new generation of leaders and activists are ready to fight.
Postby Linda Robinson
March 14, 2025 5:20 pm (EST)
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Protesters chant at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza during the No Backlash to Women's Rights rally in New York City, U.S., March 12, 2025.
Protesters chant at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza during the No Backlash to Women's Rights rally in New York City, U.S., March 12, 2025. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
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Blog posts represent the views of CFR fellows and staff and not those of CFR, which takes no institutional positions.
Thousands of political leaders and activists gathered in New York this week for the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women. The event also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing conference, where some thirty thousand delegates and civil society activists met to debate and endorse an ambitious twelve-point declaration and platform of action. The 1995 conference was the fourth of a series of world conferences on women, and the last such conference to be held. The landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action laid out twelve areas needing urgent attention—including poverty, education, health, violence, and political representation—and ushered in an unprecedented wave of reforms and progress toward gender equality.
In the 1995 Beijing gathering, drenching rain and mud did not dampen the attendees’ enthusiasm, who cheered Hillary Clinton’s famous speech declaring that “women’s rights are human rights.” But this year, the sunny spring weather did little to lift delegates’ spirits. The mood was captured in a fiery address given by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a town hall with civil society activists. “The poison of patriarchy is back, and it is back with a vengeance, slamming the brakes on action, tearing up progress, and mutating into new and dangerous forms,” he said. “The masters of misogyny are gaining strength.”
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Guterres’s speech was backed by reams of data. The UN Women’s summary report prepared for this year’s gathering, “Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing,” noted areas of progress but many areas of decline. Despite advances in some countries, women still enjoy only 64 percent of the legal rights afforded to men. One in four countries reported experiencing a backlash against women’s rights in the past year. One in three women still suffer from violence, and conflict-related sexual violence has increased 50 percent since 2022. By the UN’s calculation, without more action, if there is no acceleration, it will take 137 years to lift all women out of poverty.
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Women’s health is a source of great angst. The UN report notes that while maternal mortality declined by one-third between 2000 and 2015, it has plateaued since then. (In the US, the rollback of abortion rights has cascading effects on women’s health and the availability of health care.) The UN declaration approved this week does not include a single mention of sexual and reproductive health rights, in contrast to the 1995 Beijing Declaration, which pledged to enhance women’s sexual and reproductive health and education. The 1995 document addressed the issue more than fifty times, including the importance of family planning, noting in paragraph 17 that: “The explicit recognition and reaffirmation of the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment.”
Delegates from the Pacific islands voiced outrage at this year’s omission of sexual and reproductive health rights. “This is a major omission, especially given the current conditions in several (Pacific) states and the wider pushback and regression on women’s human rights,” Fiji-based DIVA for Equality representative Viva Tatawaqa said. “We will not let everyone ignore this omission, whatever reason was given for the trade-off.” Women in the Pacific islands suffer among the world’s most severe health-related problems, including “extreme rates of gender-based violence, low contraceptive use (below 50 percent in the region), lack of confidentiality in health services, and hyperendemic levels of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).”
The United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, the UN’s sexual health and reproductive agency, has been reeling since February when its major donor, the U.S. government, cut off $377 million in congressionally approved funding. The UNFPA said, “This decision will have devastating impacts on women and girls and the health and aid workers who serve them in the world’s worst humanitarian crises.” Its efforts are focused on millions of women and girls in Afghanistan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Haiti, Mali, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine, where it provides critical maternal healthcare, protection from violence, rape treatment, emergency delivery of babies, and works to end harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation. The administration also reinstated a prohibition known as the “global gag rule,” which bars foreign recipients of U.S. aid from providing or discussing abortions.
The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts in foreign assistance have terminated most programs aimed at women and gender equality. In executive orders on his first day in office, President Donald Trump disbanded the White House Gender Policy Council, and 83 percent of USAID contracts have been canceled. Even before this drastic cutback, only 4 percent of all countries’ bilateral aid programs were specifically aimed at gender equality, despite a large body of research demonstrating that countries’ wealth improves with these investments. Most recently, the World Bank published a study last year stating that global GDP would double in a decade if advances in women’s safety and childcare were made.
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Despite years of participation, the U.S. government chose not to be a member of this year’s 69th Commission on the Status of Women. It did attend the monthlong deliberations and, by several accounts, worked to remove and alter language in the final declaration. Jonathan Shrier, acting U.S. representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, explained the U.S. position through its support for the Geneva Consensus, a group opposed to reproductive rights. The United States would not endorse this year’s UN declaration, he said, because the U.S. “is committed to defending women’s safety through the protection of their health. In rejoining the Geneva Consensus Declaration, we have shown our commitment to women’s health, the protection of life at all stages, and the defense of the family as the fundamental unit of society. We invite cooperation within the UN system to realize these goals.” The U.S. mission also sponsored a side event titled “The Gender Ideology Assault on Women and the Family” to make its case that it is “defending women, children, and families from ideological extremism.”
The U.S. administration issued a lengthier statement at the opening of the CSW to explain why it chose not to be a member of CSW this year and why it did not endorse the declaration. “While we are not a CSW member this year, we engaged in negotiations because the United States strongly supports protecting women and girls, defending their rights, and promoting their empowerment,” the statement said. We “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
The United States also objected to the UN Declaration’s call to address online gender-based violence, which affects 53 percent of women, according to the UN report. The U.S. statement called such efforts censorship: “With regard to paragraph 15(j), we note that in recent years governments have censored speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech. Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” governments infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of Americans. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
It is not yet clear what U.S. policies may be forthcoming to support women’s safety and empowerment. However, First Lady Melania Trump held a public roundtable on A.I and deepfakes in support of bipartisan efforts to curb deepfakes that target girls and women. She posted on her X feed: “I am here with you today with a common goal – to protect our youth from online harm. The widespread presence of abusive behavior in the digital domain affects the daily lives of our children, families, and communities.” Given that 95 percent of deepfake porn targets women, and the growing awareness of its harmful impact on women, that window of policy attention may expand as it has done in other countries. The UN report noted that 38 percent of states took steps in 2024 to address violence against women in public life, more than double the proportion in 2019.une
The rest of the world gets a vote. In the dozens of side and parallel events, women leaders and activists made amply clear that they are ready to fight for their rights. One of the most dramatic moments of the week occurred when Nigerian Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan took the floor in the UN chambers to describe how she had been suspended from Nigeria’s parliament for filing a sexual harassment charge against the Senate leader. The Senate suspended Akpoti-Uduaghan from office, halted her pay and security, and has not initiated an investigation into the charges. She is one of four women in the 109-member body, and Nigeria has one of the lowest rates of women’s parliamentary representation in Africa.
The speaker of Tanzania’s parliament, Tulia Ackson, who also serves as president of the global Inter-Parliamentary Union, said, “The glacial pace of progress in women’s parliamentary representation, even after a year of significant elections, is alarming. The global disparity highlights a systemic failure to advance gender equality in politics in some parts of the world. It’s high time for decisive action to shatter these barriers and ensure women’s voices are equally represented in politics worldwide. The health of our democracies depends on it.”
The Commission on the Status of Women continues next week. Many sessions are open to attendees who register in advance, and many are livestreamed. The full schedule is here.
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