Policy & Practice: How do we protect progress and keep advancing women’s rights?

In the September issue of our Policy & Practice briefing, we share the latest insights from Equality Now and our partners’ expert teams worldwide. 

Around the world, women’s rights advocates continue to secure legal progress and defend hard-won protections, even as coordinated anti-rights movements seek to roll them back. From legal systems and political institutions to digital platforms and multilateral spaces, these movements are finding new ways to challenge gender equality.

So how do we protect the progress already made while continuing to advance the rights of women and girls?

Progress is not only possible, it’s happening

UN Women’s 2026 Gender Snapshot found that, at the current pace, gender equality is still 171 years away. While these figures can be discouraging, our latest research shows that, even in an era that can sometimes feel defined by backlash, progress is not only possible; it’s happening.

To mark 31 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, we released Words & Deeds: Strategically defending the rights of all women and girls in an era of backlash. The research tracks recent progress and regression in legal equality, while examining the strategies being used to undermine women’s rights.

Since our last update in March this year, legal advances include:

• Mauritius criminalising marital rape
• Colombia becoming the first Latin American country to adopt legislation specifically prohibiting female genital mutilation (FGM)
• New protections for survivors in Brazil
• Canada ratifying the Belém do Pará Convention, a regional treaty to end violence against women

Progress is also under threat

These advances are taking place alongside growing challenges to women’s and girls’ rights.

Hard-won legal protections are being challenged, including through attempts to weaken or reverse protections relating to child marriage and other rights. Civil society organisations and human rights defenders are facing restrictions that make it harder to organise, advocate and hold governments accountable. And international and regional institutions that have played a critical role in setting standards and advancing accountability for women’s rights are themselves coming under pressure. But recent examples also demonstrate what can happen when advocates act collectively to defend progress.

At the UN Commission on the Status of Women, coordinated advocacy helped defend established international standards on gender equality. In The Gambia, sustained mobilisation helped preserve the legal ban on FGM for now when it faced an attempted repeal. And in Latvia, public pressure and coordinated advocacy helped prevent withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

Together, these examples offer practical lessons for anticipating threats, protecting existing gains and continuing to advance legal equality.

What do we need to do now?

Progress is possible, but protecting and advancing women’s and girls’ rights requires sustained action.

Our research identifies four areas for action:

1. Challenging disinformation and reclaiming public narratives
2. Using international mechanisms to strengthen accountability
3. Investing in research and early warning systems to anticipate emerging threats
4. Ensuring feminist movements have the resources and support they need to keep driving change

These strategies matter not only when responding to attempts to change laws. The backlash against women’s rights is also evolving in digital spaces.

The escalation of misogyny online

Online misogyny is increasingly amplified through digital platforms, exposing women and girls to technology-facilitated gender-based violence while providing an entry point into wider extremist ideologies.

Our new factsheet, How online misogyny escalates into tech-facilitated gender-based violence and extremism, explores how the manosphere, algorithms and emerging technologies spread harmful narratives, and what governments and technology companies can do to make digital spaces safer for women and girls.

The rapid development of AI raises related questions about how digital systems can be designed and governed in ways that protect rights. Safety, dignity and interoperability by design, a thematic paper from the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights, offers a feminist framework for global AI governance focused on preventing foreseeable harms, protecting autonomy and human rights and strengthening accountability.

Keeping legal equality moving forward

Our work on nationality laws offers another reminder that progress and regression can happen simultaneously.

Towards gender equal nationality laws: Law reform and momentum since 2023 – Progress, regress and ones to watch tracks recent legal developments and provides resources to support the reform of discriminatory nationality laws by 2030.

Across these different areas, one lesson remains consistent: backlash does not make regression inevitable. Progress can be defended when threats are recognised early, evidence is put into action, and advocates work collectively to protect hard-won rights and keep legal reform moving forward.

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