On 8 March, Gisèle Pelicot, a 73-year-old French rape survivor who’s become a global symbol of feminist resistance, joined tens of thousands of women making themselves seen and heard by marching through Paris. Pelicot waived her right to anonymity during the 2024 trial of her ex-husband and dozens of strangers who raped her while she was unconscious, turning a personal act of courage into a collective reckoning with sexual violence and impunity. Her presence at the head of one of over 150 marches held across France on International Women’s Day (IWD), and on banners in marches across Europe, crystallised the spirit of this year’s commemoration. Women are bearing witness to human rights violations, refusing silence and demanding accountability from states that often extend impunity to perpetrators instead of justice to survivors.

IWD 2026 took place in a context of profound regression in the fight for gender equality. At the current rate, it will take 286 years to ensure that all women and girls have equal legal protection, economic participation and bodily autonomy. In practice, women enjoy just 64 per cent of the legal rights of men worldwide, across all areas of life: business, family, mobility, money, property, retirement, safety and work. According to the World Bank, none of the world’s 190 economies has achieved equal economic participation for women. Inequality and violence are interlinked: every 10 minutes a woman or girl is killed by a family member or partner.

Conditions have deteriorated further over the past year. The Trump administration eliminated US$60 billion in foreign aid, withdrew the USA from United Nations (UN) Women and helped set in motion a proposal to merge UN Women with the UN Population Fund. Its January 2025 decision to terminate the US Agency for International Development immediately shut down clinics women and girls relied on, ended medication for HIV patients and eliminated contraceptive supplies.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defined Western civilisation as bound together by Christian faith, shared ancestry and cultural heritage, an ideological framing that treats women’s equality, reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights not as human rights but as impositions to be rejected. The Trump administration is using its financial and political leverage to assert that view, domestically and within multilateral institutions. At the latest UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting, it pushed hard to try to remove previously uncontroversial language about gender rights from the session’s outcomes.

With the Trump administration also pressuring allies to spend more on defence, governments that might otherwise have filled the gaps left by US withdrawal haven’t done so. Instead, the space is being filled by a coordinated and well-funded network of anti-rights organisations, increasingly embedded within state structures, offering reproductive health services that mislead people and restrict choice, while leading a judicial and legislative assault on women’s and LGBTQI+ people’s rights.

This is the context that made the 8 March mobilisations a deeply necessary global political response to the coordinated onslaught.

Latin America’s femicide epidemic

In Latin America, the femicide crisis remains a dominant theme of IWD mobilisations. Over 19,200 femicides were recorded across Latin America and the Caribbean in the last five years, and because many killings motivated by gender aren’t recognised as such, the true figure is likely higher.

Tens of thousands of women marched through Mexico City and across Mexico in what has become the biggest political protest in a country with an average of 10 femicides per day and an impunity rate of around 95 per cent. The march was fuelled by immediate grief as well as outrage at structural inequality: in the weeks before IWD, two 18-year-old female students were found dead after being reported missing in Morelos state, and a third young woman in Mexico state was found dead after taking a motorcycle taxi to a party. One of Mexico City’s main avenues turned into a sea of purple as protesters demanded an end to gender-based violence (GBV) and gender discrimination.

Brazil saw mobilisations against GBV in dozens of cities, fuelled by outrage at the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana in January. A record 1,568 femicides were reported in Brazil in 2025, a 4.7 per cent increase from the figure for 2024, which had previously been the record. Protesters marched under the slogan ‘stop killing us’, also demanding abortion rights and better working conditions.

In Argentina, organisers held the main protest on 9 March to align with a labour strike. The Buenos Aires march was organised by Ni Una Menos, the feminist collective founded in 2015 to protest against femicide and GBV, alongside the National Campaign for Legal, Safe and Free Abortion and union federations. It was framed as a protest against GBV, job insecurity and the dismantling of gender policies under far-right libertarian President Javier Milei’s government.

In Chile, half a million people, according to the organisers, gathered at Plaza Italia in Santiago under the slogan ‘not one step back, a hundred steps forward’. The rally was organised by the 8M Feminist Coordinator, a broad coalition of feminist and women’s organisations, and shaped by concern over the impending inauguration of far-right president-elect José Antonio Kast, scheduled for 11 March.

In Montevideo, Uruguay, thousands marched along 18 de Julio Avenue demanding justice for victims of femicide and rape, highlighting the multiple inequalities affecting Black women and reiterating calls for justice for those disappeared under dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.

In Bolivia, women marched calling for a life free of violence, justice for the 81 femicide victims recorded in 2025 and economic opportunities for the overwhelming majority of women who work in informal employment. In Paraguay, Articulación Feminista held a march to protest against GBV, labour conditions and low pensions. In Colombia, mobilisations coincided with a legislative election held on 8 March, while in Venezuela, the march demanded the liberation of women political prisoners, with feminist groups insisting that any democratic transition must include women as active political subjects. In Honduras, which consistently has the region’s highest femicide rates, feminist organisations took to the streets denouncing the violence that has seen men kill at least 40 women in the first months of 2026.

In El Salvador, feminist mobilisations denounced human rights violations under the ongoing state of emergency decreed by autocratic President Nayib Bukele. Protesters condemned deaths and psychological and physical abuse in prison, the detention of innocent people and the isolation of imprisoned relatives. In Ecuador’s Amazonian town of Puyo, Indigenous women protested against environmental degradation and oil and gas expansion, connecting their right to live free from interpersonal and state violence with their right to a habitable world.

War, impunity and feminist solidarity

The Israeli-US war on Iran shaped IWD marches around the world, with feminist movements connecting conflict to broader practices of patriarchal violence.

In dozens of US cities, IWD protesters carried signs condemning the rollback of reproductive rights protections and the immigration enforcement campaign that has created a climate of fear for immigrant and racialised women. US protesters also demanded accountability for the crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein’s circle of abusers. Women’s March organised a rally outside Zorro Ranch in Albuquerque, where Epstein allegedly trafficked and abused girls and young women, with relatives of survivors speaking alongside activists. In New York, protesters gathered outside Trump Tower under the banner ‘believe survivors’, connecting Trump’s documented links to Epstein and the ongoing congressional battle over the Epstein files to the broader demand for an end to impunity for powerful abusers. US feminist organisers drew a direct line between violence at home and militarism abroad.

Solidarity with women in conflict zones echoed across continents. In Spain, where the government refused to allow the USA to use its military bases for strikes on Iran, protesters called for an end to what they labelled an ‘imperialist war’. Berlin’s march, themed ‘feminist, in solidarity, unionised’, emphasised solidarity with women in conflict settings. Protesters linked domestic issues, such as violence and workplace equality, with international anti-imperialist demands, calling for an end to military expansion.

In Chile, leftist organisations focused their demands on opposition to the war. In Pakistan, the slogan of this year’s Aurat March was ‘working women: against war and oppression’. In Istanbul, Turkey, march organisers read out a political declaration in solidarity with war-affected women in the Middle East, expressing opposition to ‘Islamist dictatorial regimes’ while acknowledging that freedom cannot come out of military aggression.

Shrinking feminist space

IWD 2026 also laid bare a global pattern of shrinking space for feminist organising. Mobilisations faced an array of restrictions, including protest bans.

In Islamabad, Pakistan, police briefly detained several Aurat March activists who attempted to hold a rally in defiance of a government ban on public gatherings. Police dispersal and mass detentions have been a feature of feminist protests in Pakistan for years. In El Salvador, the state of emergency increased the risks of public protest, making many protesters wary of expressing demands that directly challenged the government.

In the many countries where civic space is closed, protest wasn’t possible. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime has erased women from public life, 8 March passed without public mobilisation. In China, the day was marked with state-led events emphasising women’s contribution to national development, but the government allowed no independent or critical mobilisation. In Russia, state-sponsored IWD celebrations emphasised efforts to increase military staffing, including the involvement of women in combat-related roles.

Looking forward

IWD 2026 took place against a backdrop of compounding crises. Feminist movements face both hostile governments and a well-resourced transnational infrastructure of anti-rights forces working at every level of governance, including within the multilateral institutions that are supposed to protect rights.

The path forward demands both defensive strategies to prevent further regression and proactive efforts to advance gender justice in courtrooms and legislatures, at the UN and in international aid priorities.

On the global front, 2026 offers an opportunity. UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s second term ends on 31 December. In November 2025, the presidents of the UN General Assembly and Security Council formally launched the selection process for the next secretary-general with a letter to states, noting that no woman has ever held the position and encouraging them to strongly consider nominating women candidates.

The Women in Multilateralism 2026 report found that in 2025, 46 per cent of chief executives across 62 multilateral organisations were women. This means there’s been a system-wide shift in global governance that the UN hasn’t reflected in its top job. To change this, the 1 for 8 Billion campaign is calling for a fair, open and inclusive process to appoint the next UN secretary-general, and for a feminist woman to get the job. Candidate hearings are due in April, and the Security Council’s straw polls begin in July.

The agenda for states that want to show they’re committed to women’s rights is clear. They need to maintain the commitment to equality that ultimately prevailed at the Commission on the Status of Women rather than retreating under pressure from the USA and other regressive states, fill the funding gaps created by US withdrawal rather than letting anti-rights organisations claim the space and nominate feminist women candidates to lead the UN.

IWD mobilisations showed that the forces driving regression aren’t going uncontested. Across the world, the feminist movement has once again demonstrated its determination and its growing fluency in connecting different forms of violence, including economic strife, femicide, military aggression and sexual abuse, as parts of the same structure of patriarchal domination. In the most hostile conditions in years, and on every front, it refuses to concede ground.

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