What our 2025 research revealed about gender equality

Last year, we published 28 knowledge products in 14 languages on legal equality for women and girls. They spanned six regions, each with its own legal systems and political realities. Some focused on long-standing harmful practices, while others examined emerging forms of abuse shaped by technology.

What stayed with us was not just the scale of harm documented, but the consistency of the barriers that appeared across very different contexts.

Violence is intersectional, the law often isn’t

Across regions, violence against women was shaped by caste, disability, race, indigeneity, migration status and class. Women with disabilities faced distinct forms of sexual violence, compounded by legal systems that questioned their credibility or failed to provide procedural accommodations. In South Asia, caste-based hierarchies influenced who was believed and who gained access to justice. In Colombia, Afro-descendant and Indigenous women encountered discrimination at nearly every stage of the legal process.

What emerged clearly was this: violence is rarely experienced in a single dimension, yet legal frameworks often continue to address harm in narrow, siloed ways. When the law fails to reflect lived realities, it does not just fall short. It risks excluding those it is meant to protect.

Sexual violence is still treated as exceptional, not structural

Several publications examined rape laws, age of sexual consent frameworks, and evidentiary standards across regions. A comparative analysis of rape laws across 22 Arab States highlighted how inconsistencies in definitions, marital rape exemptions and evidentiary burdens continue to undermine accountability and survivor protection. Elsewhere, survivors were routinely required to meet high thresholds of proof while navigating stigma, retaliation and institutional inertia.

Across contexts, the message was consistent: when sexual violence is treated as an exception rather than a manifestation of structural inequality, justice remains conditional.

Technology has not only amplified old harms, but created new ones too

Research on technology-facilitated gender-based violence in India and Kenya shows how abuse moves fluidly across online and offline spaces, often reinforcing existing patterns of control and coercion. At the same time, emerging technologies have enabled new forms of harm, including deepfakes, non-consensual manipulated intimate content, coordinated harassment, and digital surveillance.

What stood out across the research was how existing legal frameworks continue to struggle to respond. Laws that treat digital abuse as peripheral, episodic or purely technical fail to capture its scale, persistence and impact, leaving many survivors traumatised without effective protection or remedy.

Silence or weakness in the law allows harm to persist

This was particularly evident in research on child marriage and female genital mutilation and cutting. Whether examining legal loopholes in the United States, medicalisation trends in South and Southeast Asia, or the experiences of migrant communities practising female genital mutilation in Egypt, the pattern repeated itself. Our research shows that where laws are ambiguous, fragmented or poorly enforced, harmful practices adapt rather than disappear.

Our global report on female genital mutilation and cutting made this urgency unmistakable. It called for an accelerated, coordinated response that treats the practice not as a cultural inevitability, but as a human rights violation demanding decisive legal, policy, and institutional action.

Progress exists. Regional initiatives, jurisprudential tools and legislative proposals show what is possible. But the gap between commitment and protection remains wide.

Gender inequality is embedded in the law

Across the body of research, attention extended beyond individual violations to the legal frameworks that shape women’s lives more broadly. Our proposed select draft articles on nationality laws, for example, highlight how gender-discriminatory legal frameworks continue to deny women equal citizenship, restrict their ability to pass nationality to their children and entrench dependency and insecurity long before violence ever occurs.

These forms of structural inequality shape who has access to rights, protection and justice in the first place. They determine legal status, economic security and freedom of movement, creating conditions that limit autonomy and heighten vulnerability across the life course.

The backlash is no longer abstract, but progress is still happening

Our five-yearly report, Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+30 Review Process, documents a clear global trend: backlash against women’s and girls’ rights is real, measurable and increasingly coordinated. Sex-discriminatory laws persist, and in some cases are being reinforced, despite long-standing commitments to gender equality.

Rights once considered secured are being challenged. Language is being diluted. Commitments are being reversed. In this context, legal equality is not simply unfinished work. It is actively being contested.

Yet this is not the full picture. In 2025, new legislation strengthened protections for women and girls, particularly around child marriage. Bolivia eliminated all exceptions to its child marriage law, setting 18 as the minimum age and extending protection to an estimated 2.2 million girls, while similar reforms in Grenada closed legal gaps that had long enabled the practice.

What stayed with us

Gender inequality is sustained not only by harmful practices, but by legal systems that fail to evolve, protect selectively, or retreat under pressure.

What also stayed with us was that progress is never accidental. Every gain reflects sustained advocacy, careful legal analysis and persistence, often in the face of resistance.

Whether you are a policymaker, duty bearer or legal professional, Equality Now’s knowledge products are designed to support your work on law reform and institutional change. Available through the Policy and Practice Centre, they include in-depth reports, policy briefs, legal analyses, toolkits and practical guidance, offering evidence-based insights tailored to the needs of decision-makers and practitioners.

If there is one takeaway we are left with from 2025, it is this: legal equality is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical necessity, and without it, gender justice remains partial and fragile.