The 2025 session of the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) laid bare the increasingly precarious state of efforts to advance gender equality. With Saudi Arabia chairing proceedings and the host, the USA, leading a global regression under the second Trump administration, the 30-year review of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – the 1995 plan that remains the most progressive international blueprint for women’s rights – was marked by unprecedented tension. Negotiations on the meeting’s outcome document revealed a broad and coordinated assault on gender rights across continents and at every level of governance, from local to global.

This concerted attack on gender equality comes from a powerful alliance of states and non-state forces working systematically to dismantle decades of hard-won progress. From the USA’s dramatic policy reversals to Hungary’s aggressive anti-gender campaigns, the pattern is unmistakable and deeply concerning.

Against this ominous backdrop, International Women’s Day 2025 witnessed impressive waves of strategic mobilisation across the globe. Women and their allies took to the streets to reject gender-based violence, discrimination and rape culture, defend reproductive rights, demand economic justice and labour rights, challenge authoritarian governance and express solidarity with LGBTQI+ people and oppressed communities worldwide, particularly people besieged in Palestine.

What united these diverse actions across continents was a refusal to surrender ground. As states that have historically championed women’s rights retreat from international leadership positions and anti-rights forces grow more coordinated and powerful, feminist movements are evolving to meet these unprecedented challenges – by building broader coalitions, embracing truly intersectional approaches and developing hybrid organising strategies that effectively combine online activism with street presence.

The engines of global regression

The most powerful global drivers of regression aren’t the theocracies enforcing gender apartheid in places such as Afghanistan and Iran, but rather former champions of gender equality that have dramatically changed course. The USA, once a leading advocate for women’s rights on the international stage, is now a key force behind regression.

The Trump administration’s swift actions have included reinstating and significantly expanding the global gag rule, which cuts off vital funding to organisations that provide abortion services and counselling or advocate for abortion rights worldwide, and freezing USAID funding for development programmes with gender equality components. Domestically, it has dismantled federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. At the UN, it now actively opposes established language on gender equality and has scaled back UN commitments to expanding women’s role in peacebuilding missions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, the reinstated global gag rule will deny an estimated 11.7 million women access to contraception, potentially causing 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,300 preventable maternal deaths.

This dramatic policy shift from a global power has emboldened similar retreats across the world. In Europe, the Netherlands has explicitly shifted its development policy to prioritise ‘Dutch interests’ in the areas of trade, security and migration instead of gender equality commitments. Hungary and Poland have grown increasingly assertive in opposing reproductive rights and gender equality policies in European Union discussions.

Meanwhile, the rise of well-funded, highly coordinated anti-gender movements has accelerated, creating an increasingly hostile environment for women’s and LGBTQI+ rights activists. These movements have orchestrated campaigns based on the premise that feminism has ‘gone too far’, aiming to restrict bodily autonomy, roll back protections against gender-based violence and undermine gender equality policies in education and employment – all while cynically co-opting human rights language to advance their regressive agendas.

Mobilisation against regression

On 8 March, International Women’s Day, women and allies worldwide took to the streets to confront this intensifying global backlash.

Protests reflected both urgent defensive actions to protect rights and demands to keep advancing gender justice against the odds. They often took an intersectional approach, recognising how gender discrimination intertwines with multiple systems of oppression. Organisers centred the voices and needs of women experiencing multiple forms of exclusion, including women of colour, Indigenous women, transgender women, disabled women, poor and working-class women and migrant women. They demanded reproductive justice that acknowledges race and class barriers to healthcare access, labour protections for migrant and domestic workers, climate policies that recognise Indigenous women’s relationship to land, migration policy reforms sensitive to gendered violence, disability-inclusive healthcare and economic policies that address the gender and racial dimensions of poverty.

Events were held in countries on all continents, with participation at its strongest in the Americas and Europe, where people gathered in multiple cities in every country where civic space conditions make protest possible.

Across the USA, the wide range of demands from protesters reflected the broad spectrum of human rights threats under the current administration. In several Latin American countries, the demand to stop femicides took centre stage in marches and rallies. In Uruguay, the fightback against global regression was to the fore, in a well-attended march under the motto ‘feminist struggle against fascist advances’. In the Philippines, women prioritised economic demands.

Across the board, marchers connected domestic gender equality issues with international solidarity, highlighting dire situations in Afghanistan, Iran and Palestine. In Lahore, Pakistan, the protest focused on solidarity with Gazan women.

In Poland, which has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, feminist activists marked the day by inaugurating a centre where women can access medication abortion, strategically located directly across from parliament.

In Turkey, where autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared 2025 as the ‘Year of the Family’ and authorities banned the Women’s Day march in central Istanbul, thousands of protesters marched in defiance of both the ban and the government’s attempt to limit women’s roles to marriage and motherhood. As has become disturbingly commonplace, police detained hundreds of protesters following the Feminist Night March, despite the fact that it was entirely peaceful.

Global-level struggles

While street demonstrations marked International Women’s Day, feminist advocacy played out simultaneously in global institutions. At the CSW, tensions ran high as states negotiated the political declaration to reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Civil society emphasised coalition-building among organisations representing women of colour, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, LGBTQI+ people, migrant women and women from conflict zones. The NGO CSW Forum featured dedicated spaces where these intersecting identities were recognised, with policy recommendations directly addressing how climate change, economic austerity, digital transformation and democratic backsliding affect women differently depending on their social positioning. Through strategic networking and solidarity actions, civil society organisations successfully resisted attempts to fragment women’s movements along single-issue lines.

The influence of the Trump administration was however evident in repeated attempts to roll back established language on gender equality, sexual and reproductive rights and development commitments. While the US delegation ultimately didn’t torpedo the final declaration, it sent strong signals of opposition to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and support for conservative gender definitions.

The global-level struggle extends beyond policy debates to questions of the leadership of international institutions. As the UN approaches its 80th anniversary, it has never been led by a woman – a stark reflection of persistent barriers to women’s leadership, even in the system tasked with promoting women’s rights worldwide. This institutional gender imbalance mirrors broader patterns within the UN system, where women remain significantly underrepresented in high-level positions and as speakers at major forums, despite universal human rights being one of the UN’s three pillars. There’s nothing truly universal about human rights when half of humanity is denied full access to them.

The process to select the next UN Secretary-General, which will take place next year, has become a focal point for advocates pushing to break the eight-decade male monopoly at the top. Building on earlier campaigns that resulted in increased transparency in the selection process, civil society is mobilising the 1 for 8 billion advocacy campaign, calling for states to nominate feminist women candidates and ensure a genuinely open, merit-based selection process.

Looking forward

The path forward requires both defensive strategies to protect rights against regression and proactive approaches to keep advancing gender justice, particularly where it’s most lacking. There’s a need to counter sophisticated disinformation campaigns that misrepresent feminist goals, strengthen legal frameworks that safeguard women’s rights and invest substantially in the next generation of feminist leadership. The growing presence of anti-rights groups in spaces that are supposed to advance gender justice also requires strategic responses.

Progressive voices in the international community now face a fundamental choice between retreating from commitments under pressure from powerful regressive forces or recommitting wholeheartedly to the vision of gender equality outlined in landmark documents such as the Beijing Platform for Action. Whether they choose to stand or concede ground will have far-reaching impacts.

This year’s International Women’s Day mobilisations showed the challenges facing the global women’s rights movement but also its resilience. In the face of a coordinated assault threatening decades of progress, mobilisations proved their unrelenting energy, determination, compassion and solidarity, across borders and across movements.

In these most challenging times, when they’re needed most urgently, women’s movements remain resolute. They’re sending a clear message: we won’t give up. Until equality is won, the struggle continues.

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