Holding Ground, Gaining Ground

Experience has shown that it is crucial to practice constant vigilance to support women’s rights movements to gain ground and to hold ground if political circumstances, climate impact, pandemics, or conflict make gaining ground impossible.

The World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report stated that:

Amid multi-layered and compounding crises, including the rising cost of living, the ongoing [Covid-19] pandemic, the climate emergency, and large-scale conflict and displacement, the progress towards gender parity is stalling. As leaders tackle a growing series of economic and political shocks, the risk of reversal is intensifying. Not only are millions of women and girls losing out on access and opportunity at present, this halt in progress toward parity is a catastrophe for the future of our economies, societies, and communities.
Accelerating parity must be a core part of the public and private agenda. While more women have been moving into paid work over the last decades and increasingly into leadership positions in industry, there have been continued headwinds: societal expectations, employer policies, the legal environment, and the availability of care infrastructure.
This has continued to limit the educational opportunities women access and the career possibilities they can pursue. The economic and social consequences of the pandemic and geopolitical conflict have paused progress and worsened outcomes for women and girls around the world—and risk creating permanent scarring in the labor market. Conversely, the increasing representation of women in leadership in many industries, engagement in tertiary education overall, and rebound in professional and technical roles are encouraging and may provide a basis for future efforts. Collective, coordinated, and comprehensive action will be needed to create sustained improvements and halt the risks of reversals.

Crucially, this report observed that reaching full parity will take 132 years.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the gender gap was set to close within 100 years. In response, women’s funds are doubling down on their efforts to fund women’s and feminist movements for justice. In times of crisis, supporting these movements to continue functioning and organizing through and beyond the crisis is critical.

During the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Global Fund for Women worked with TEWA, the Nepal Women’s Fund, to get funds to a range of local women’s networks and movements in Nepal to respond to the emergency and reach the most vulnerable and isolated while also working to sustain momentum in women’s organizing by ensuring women had a voice in the new Constitution that was forming. To only focus on the emergency without representation in the new Constitution would have meant women’s rights would suffer a significant setback, with ramifications over decades.

In 2022, threats to women’s rights were manifest by a rollback on reproductive rights legislation in the United States, a cut in funding for women’s rights following far-right elections in Europe, a resurgence in violence against women globally, and the emergence of populist governments that demonstrate lack of respect for democratic institutions and rights-based principles. This context presents a challenge for women’s funds to face collectively and thoughtfully to protect the feminist gains of the past decades.

Over the last decade, we have witnessed autocracy replace democracy throughout the world, including in countries such as Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and Egypt. Gender equity and gender equality are the antidotes to autocracy because they strengthen democracy. This is why women leaders, feminism, women’s movements, and women’s rights are under attack when autocrats seize control.

Harvard political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks explain in their 2022 Foreign Affairs article entitled Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women: “It is not a coincidence that women’s equity is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter.”

Tomorrow we learn about: Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines