Are Authoritarian Regimes Backtracking Women's Rights?

Politico

14-03-2025

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Happy Friday! New York City is abuzz this week, as women's rights leaders from all over the world gather at the United Nations. I'm thrilled to have chatted with some of the stars of the conference for this week's edition.
Women's rights are declining all over the world — and the global rise of authoritarian regimes may be to blame, according to a new report from the United Nations.
This week, the U.N. kicked off the 69th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women — its second biggest meeting after the opening of the General Assembly.
The aim of the commission: to address the barriers to gender equality that women face around the globe.
This year's CSW marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a policy blueprint for advancing women's rights, such as access to education and health services and protection against violence.
The March 6 report from U.N. Women released ahead of the conference found that progress on women's rights is on a downward trend around the world. In 2024, nearly a quarter of governments worldwide reported a backlash on women's rights.
'We are witnessing the mainstreaming of chauvinism and misogyny,' U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. 'As we see in every corner of the world, from pushback to rollback, women's rights are under attack.'
The report tracked data from member countries' five-year national-level reviews of progress and challenges, and 30-year reviews of reports from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and Western Asia. It found that around the world, there was a 'disturbing 50 percent increase in the number of women and girls living in conflict, and women's rights defenders confront daily harassment, personal attacks and even death.'
Laura Turquet, Deputy Chief of the Research and Data section at U.N. Women, tells Women Rule 'we've seen important progress, but it's not going fast enough and it's actually stalling.'
And the rise in authoritarian and populist governments across the world could be what is impeding progress, Turquet says. 'We've seen the rise of very authoritarian governments … a lot of countries are experiencing backsliding when it comes to free and fair elections, to freedom of the press, even the ability of women and civil society organizations to speak out and participate in policy.'
That democratic erosion, she says, 'has gone hand in hand with organized resistance to advances on women's rights.'
As Turquet sees it, increasing inequality, wage disparities and traumatic world events like the Covid-19 pandemic have created an environment enabling authoritarian governments to push for a return to tradition, particularly the idea of a traditional family. Authoritarian leaders often suggest that 'we need to kind of go back to an imagined past where things were simpler and easier, where men and women had more defined roles,' she says, and this push for the traditional family contributes to limiting women's rights.
'When you take a closer look at what the traditional family is … we're talking about a biological male husband who is married with a biological female wife and as many kids as they can possibly have,' Rosalyn Park, director of The Advocates for Human Rights' Women's Human Rights Program, says.
That idea 'really goes to the heart of attacking sexual reproductive rights, family planning, contraception, abortion, all those kinds of things, in the interests of preserving and maintaining the family unit.'
According to Park, this preservation of the family unit has played out in other countries. 'We've seen countries that decriminalized domestic violence, for example, like Russia, because they want to keep the family together at the expense of women's safety.'
'This also lets them push for a revival of stereotypical roles by positioning women first and foremost in the home as homemakers, caretakers … And then men remain as the breadwinners,' Park continues.
One example of the global regression of women's rights: the recent backlash against the Istanbul Convention, a European human rights treaty opposing violence against women and domestic violence. It was initially successful and signed by 34 countries in 2019, but in 2021, Turkey — whose largest city gave the treaty its name and who was the first to ratify it — withdrew from the agreement. Other countries like Poland have also considered withdrawing from it, citing concerns about the agreement promoting harmful gender ideology and threatening the traditional family.
Women's rights have 'become very caught up in this idea of gender ideology, this idea that gender is not about women and men and equality, but that it's … a radical agenda that is almost entirely about LGBT rights,' Turquet explains. As a result, she says, we are seeing 'a backlash on something as basic as protecting women from the violence that they are facing in their everyday lives.'
Similar concerns about gender ideology have popped up in the United States, as exemplified by one of President Donald Trump's first executive orders, 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.'
Trump's order argues that gender ideology 'replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.'
In closed-door meetings at CSW, the U.S. proposed weakening or removing provisions that encourage states and U.N. entities to expand the role of women in peacekeeping and diplomacy, according to a Devex report.
Meanwhile, at the CSW on Friday, Jonathan Shrier, acting U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, reinforced Trump's message.
'The United States government will no longer promote radical ideologies that replace women with men in spaces and opportunities designed for women, nor will it devastate families by indoctrinating our sons and daughters to begin wars with their own bodies or each other,' he said.
'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.'
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Aviva Aron-Dine will join the Brookings economic studies program as a senior fellow and director of the Hamilton Project. She most recently was acting assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department. (h/t POLITICO Playbook)
Hailey Miller is now director of government relations and public policy for the Digital Power Network, an affiliate of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. She was previously a vice president at 1607 Strategies and is an FTI Consulting and Ted Cruz alum. (h/t POLITICO Influence)
Rachel Millard is now director of corporate reputation and public affairs at EY (Americas). She previously was an SVP at Edelman Smithfield. (h/t POLITICO Playbook)