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Fact check: Do women have less rights now?
Executive Summary
Women’s rights show a mixed picture: measurable gains in legal protections and representation coexist with documented rollbacks and stalled progress in political and economic parity. Recent reports note entrenched gaps—wage disparities, violence, and halted political empowerment—while other analyses highlight a global backlash driven by organized anti-gender movements and shifting social dynamics [1] [2] [3]. The net effect depends on which indicators and countries one examines: some nations edge toward parity, others are backsliding or stagnating, producing an overall pattern of uneven progress rather than uniform diminution of rights [4] [5].
1. Why it feels like rights are slipping: the rise of a global backlash
Multiple recent analyses document an active rollback and contestation of gender rights, with legislative and policy reversals, heightened attacks on activists, and growing influence of transnational anti-gender movements. The narrative emphasizes coordinated political efforts that challenge gender equality norms, linking this backlash to socio-political drivers such as male status threat and demographic concerns about declining birth rates [3]. These accounts are based on cross-national observations showing not isolated incidents but a pattern of organized pushback in both domestic policy arenas and multilateral institutions, suggesting that perceived losses in rights are not merely anecdotal but driven by identifiable political movements and structural anxieties that have intensified in the past several years [3].
2. Stalled global indicators: political empowerment at a standstill
Quantitative indices show limited improvement in political parity, with the Women's Power Index reporting a global average stuck at 29 out of 100 and only 28 countries beyond the halfway mark. The Global Gender Gap Report 2023 similarly documents stagnation in political empowerment and regression in women’s economic participation, underlining that progress has decelerated and in some metrics reversed [4] [1]. These data reflect measurable, cross-country stagnation rather than universal decline, but they are consequential: political underrepresentation constrains policy change, and a stalled trajectory in political empowerment correlates with weaker protections and slower response to issues like gender-based violence and economic inequality [4] [1].
3. Economic and safety realities: persistent gaps despite legal frameworks
Legal reforms and new indicators—such as those added to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2024 report—document that laws on paper have improved but economic gaps and safety concerns persist, including a persistent global earnings gap (women earning roughly 77 cents per dollar) and high prevalence of gender-based violence, with one in three women affected globally [2]. The World Bank’s refinement of metrics like Safety and Childcare provides a clearer view of implementation shortfalls: legal recognition does not automatically translate into effective economic empowerment or reduced violence, and the persistence of these gaps signals that rights in practice lag behind rights in statute [2] [5].
4. Evidence of progress and important legal milestones that complicate the narrative
Historical and recent legal milestones—ranging from family leave laws and violence prevention statutes to appointments of women to high offices—illustrate continued, meaningful advances in representation and rights in many contexts, demonstrating that the broader trend is not uniformly negative [6]. These milestones show durable institutional changes that have expanded women’s opportunities over decades, even as short-term backlashes create setbacks. The coexistence of progress and regression highlights that aggregate assessments depend on timeframe and metrics: decades-long gains can coexist with recent reversals in particular policies or countries, producing a complex mosaic rather than a single directional story [6].
5. What this means for assessing whether women “have less rights now”
The answer depends on the lens: rights are not universally reduced but the pace of progress has stalled and some jurisdictions have reversed or weakened protections, producing real losses for many women while others retain or gain rights [1] [3] [4]. Policy rollbacks, ongoing economic gaps, and widespread gender-based violence show substantive deficits in lived rights; yet legal reforms and representation gains in other places show advancement. Evaluations should therefore use disaggregated data—by country, by issue area (political, economic, safety), and over time—to capture this uneven landscape; simplistic answers mask the documented simultaneity of progress and backlash reflected in the sources [3] [2] [4].