Three decades after the Beijing Platform for Action, the groundbreaking UN declaration that affirmed that women’s rights are human rights, the global movement for gender equality and women’s empowerment is under strain. Adopted in 1995 and signed by 189 governments, the ambitious framework spurred a generation of legal reforms, gains in political representation, and consolidation of norms around gender equality. Today, however, that momentum is faltering. Although some countries continue to make steady progress, a UN report released in March 2025 found that one in four countries is experiencing a backlash against gender equality. Around the world, 270 million women lack access to modern contraception, one in three women experiences gender-based violence, and women are systematically underrepresented in countries’ political and economic leadership.

It is tempting to blame the current impasse on specific leaders. U.S. President Donald Trump and his cabinet are openly hostile to domestic and international gender equality commitments, dismissing efforts to promote gender equity as “woke” overreach. Hungarian President Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin have all built their strongman images by dismissing feminism as radical and corrosive.

Yet these leaders’ hostility toward gender equality is only one symptom of a broader shift. The core assumptions that powered the global women’s movement after the end of the Cold War—that the world was becoming more democratic, more multilateral, and more liberal—no longer hold. Democratic erosion, from El Salvador to Thailand, is shrinking the political space for women to organize. Multilateral institutions that once served as engines for advocacy face funding shortfalls and diminished global relevance as conservative actors promoting national sovereignty and traditional gender norms gain power.

The strategies that were successful 30 years ago are no longer sufficient. Faced with a prolonged democratic recession, gridlocked international institutions, and a surge in conservative countermobilization, proponents of gender equality and their governmental supporters need a new template for action. Multilateral forums will remain an important arena for advancing progress and protecting existing achievements. But rather than being solely technical and elite-driven, reformers committed to the women’s rights agenda must expand their efforts, focusing on more collaboration at the local level, investing in initiatives that include men and boys, and connecting messaging about women’s empowerment to family well-being, community resilience, and economic stability.

The post–Cold War period brought rapid breakthroughs in women’s rights. Countries across the world adopted new gender quotas to boost women’s political representation, passed laws against gender-based violence and discrimination, and reformed their constitutions to enshrine equality guarantees. This surge in activity built on decades of activism and coalition building. But it was also enabled by three important features of the post–Cold War order.

First, advocates and organizations benefited from a wave of democratic expansion. Across Africa, eastern Europe, and Latin America, authoritarian regimes were losing their grip, creating new channels for women to organize. Women’s groups whose operations had been subject to strict state control gave way to more politically autonomous networks. From El Salvador to South Africa, women took advantage of political transitions and constitutional negotiations to press for more rights and inclusion. And they were successful.

The end of bipolar great-power competition also allowed multilateral institutions to play a more decisive role in global governance. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the United Nations had emerged as an important forum for building norms around gender equality through landmark women’s conferences and multilateral agreements such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. These efforts intensified after the end of the Cold War, when UN gatherings on topics ranging from human rights, in Vienna, in 1993; population, in Cairo, in 1994; women, in Beijing, in 1995; and social development, in Copenhagen, in 1995, rapidly expanded international commitments to advancing gender equality.........

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