Gender equality remains a challenge
As indicated by the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls, despite some progress, no country has achieved gender equality and women and girls continue to face discrimination in all areas of their lives, often starting within their families and communities.
Already in 2018, based on what it had been able to observe and document during its first six years of activity, the Working Group had warned about the resurgence of a very conservative and retrograde discourse in international forums and at the national level, accompanied by attempts to reinstate policies and laws harmful to women and girls, particularly in the spheres of family life and bodily autonomy.
Now, in 2024, in its latest report, the Working Group notes with great concern that the backlash against the human rights of women and girls is intensifying and has reached extreme proportions in some countries. Women and girls are suffering a backlash aimed at limiting the equal enjoyment of their rights, and action to realize substantive equality cannot be delayed.
Regressive movements jeopardize the human rights of women and girls and the progress made in promoting gender equality in all regions of the world.
To this end, in 2023, the report “Progress on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Gender Overview 2023”, produced by UN Women and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, warned that, at the halfway point to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world is failing to achieve gender equality, making it an increasingly distant goal.
Active resistance to gender equality has been identified as one of the key factors behind the slow progress and, in some cases, the setbacks observed in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, with none of the indicators for Goal 5, on gender equality, allowing it to be assigned the category “target achieved or on track” at the global level.
If current trends continue, more than 340 million women and girls will still live in extreme poverty by 2030, while about one in four will experience moderate or severe food insecurity. The increasing vulnerability brought about by human-induced climate change is likely to worsen this picture, with 236 million more women and girls experiencing food insecurity under a worst-case climate scenario.
The gender gap in power and leadership remains entrenched and, at the current rate of progress, the next generation of women will still have to spend an average of 2.3 hours more per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men.
No country is close to achieving the eradication of intimate partner violence, and the proportion of women in managerial positions in the workplace will remain below parity even after 2050. While reasonable progress has been made in girls’ education, completion rates remain below the universal mark.
In its report, the Working Group reports that the responses received by States reveal an increase in anti-rights movements and attacks on the equal rights of women and girls and the persistence of political violence against women. Some countries encounter obstacles in passing, regulating and disseminating laws that promote gender equality. Even when progressive provisions are introduced in a country’s constitution or laws to promote the rights of women and girls, such as the prohibition of harmful practices, in many cases their implementation presents difficulties, as women’s and girls’ issues continue to be sidelined or minimized and the social transformation needed to redress gender inequalities is often met with strong resistance. In some cases, such resistance has encouraged attempts to abolish existing safeguards, including the prohibition of harmful practices.
This makes it all the more necessary to come together to combat the backlash against gender equality, pushing for a commitment to substantive gender equality and coordinated action by States.
